Series Finale And Big Theme

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Welcome to that online audience. I'm Stephen Feith, lead pastor. And for the last five months, that's kind of crazy to think about. For five months, we've been going in through 1 John, which has five chapters. It's a very short book of the Bible. It's in our New Testament toward the end of it. And for five months, we've looked at this pastor, John, who walked with Jesus and his notes to this church that has dealt with division, conflict, infighting. Today's the last week of the series. It all comes to an end here. We wrap it up and we put it behind us.

What Walking In The Light Means

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But if we were to summarize this idea that John keeps coming back to, which is to keep, he says, walk in the light. And that's a theme that keeps showing up. He walk in the light. If we were to summarize that into kind of the four areas that he says this is what it means to walk in the light, he would talk about confessing sin. Hey, you messed up, I messed up, we messed up. Let's confess it. Let's talk about it. That's just what we need to do. Talks about telling the truth, closely related to confessing your sins. But he says, let's tell the truth about us, about our relationships, about the world around us, and about Christ. And let's love one another. Let's love one another and let's do it really well. And here's what it means to love. And we spent a good portion of our conversations talking about all of the different ways that we can love each other and how love is nuanced, and how to remain faithful in Jesus. And these are the things that we've kind of talked about. So you can imagine if if John was starting a church and these were the first four things he says, as a church community, this is what the culture is going to be. Now,

Why Faith Gets Harder Sometimes

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you and I, we might expect, and I think that there is this expectation that the longer we follow Jesus, the longer you've been a Christian, the more church services you attend, the more devotions you do, the longer you stay praying, that these things will become easier. Confessing your sins, easier, loving other people easier, telling the truth, easier, remaining faithful, easier. But anyone who's been a Christian for, you know, let's call it longer than a couple of years, you know that's not true. There's ebbs and flows. And yeah, certainly some parts get better, some parts get harder. That happens. As we continue living out our faith, we also have experiences that challenge what we thought we knew about God, or what we thought we knew about ourselves and what it means to follow Jesus. This is really popular among people who grew up in or around the church. You went to one church growing up or one denomination, you heard the same thing growing up through adolescence, and then you went to college or you went out into the world and you got a job, and then all of a sudden you were like, whoa, there's a lot of different beliefs in the world. And not only are there a lot of different beliefs in the world, like even the people who believe in Jesus or are Christians or who grew up in and around the church, we have different ideas of how things go. And then we we continue on with our adult lives and we read something in the Bible or something's taught on a Sunday morning that challenges what you've been taught. You're like, well, I didn't understand that verse that way. Or I was always told that this verse meant that. And now you're not sure what to believe. Do I reject this or do I reject that? It's especially painful when we pray for someone that we love to get better when they're sick, when they're ill, when their body's ravaged by disease, but we pray, and despite that, their condition worsens. And we struggle to understand. Despite all we might know about scripture and God and church, we struggle to understand. We're like, God, why didn't you intervene? Why didn't you do something? Or if you're like me, you're just going through a regular week and you've just had enough. You lose your patience, you say something hurtful to someone, or you fall back into old habits that you thought you kicked a long time ago, things that you thought you'd overcome, and you wonder, you're like, man, I've been a Christian, I've been following Jesus for so long. I should be over this. And you start beating yourself up. It's oftentimes that these experiences leave us questioning whether something's wrong with our faith. Man, I've been a Christian for so long. I've been going to church. Is something wrong with the church that I go to? Something wrong with me? What's going on? But we can rest, be we can rest assured as we get to the end of this letter that even the community that John's writing to, John himself, they faced their own uncertainty. They were a generation removed from Jesus. I mean, if there was anybody who you would think would have this unshakable faith, it would be them, the very people who were just one generation removed from Jesus, and yet we see that they are also wrestling with these things. They needed reassurance that they hadn't missed God, that they weren't doing something wrong. And as John concludes his letter, he tells them what they can know as they go forward.

Assurance Of Eternal Life

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And so if you'd like to follow along, we're going to first John, we're going to chapter five, and I'm going to read from verse 13. John goes, These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life. I've written these things to you who believe, so that you may know you have eternal life. We know that these people they already believed in Jesus, and John isn't testing their faith or putting pressure on what they believe. He says outright, as I leave this letter to you and in your hands, the reason that I have written the why behind it is so that you know you have eternal life. Last week he talked about eternal life too. But this is the why. I write so that you know, you have assurance, you don't need to worry, you don't need to overthink it, you don't need to double guess yourself. Now, that means a lot when faith doesn't feel certain. When we are in those kind of those unknown spaces and places, our understanding, and we know this, is incomplete, and our feelings change. But John doesn't say that you get eternal life based on the strength of your feelings. Oh, you're a really passionate follower of Jesus, you're good, or you're better than the person who somehow has less passion. It's not about the confidence of what you know. Oh, you have a PhD in theology, you can really be assured. But those people who haven't even been to Sunday school that they can't be, that's not at all what John's saying. He says, your assurance is in what Jesus has done, not what you have done.

Deconstruction As Unlearning And Relearning

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And if I can sidebar for a second, this makes me think of deconstruction. And that's kind of a buzzword within Christianity right now. And some of us at Madison Church, we have. We've reconsidered things that we've believed for years. We might know people whose children or friends are going through this process of deconstruction. And sometimes we treat the word like it's something to be ashamed of or something to hide, don't let anyone know. It's almost like we have this kind of thinking that, oh, if I deconstruct, my faith wasn't strong. And that's not necessarily true. And just because you're deconstructing doesn't mean you have to abandon your faith in Jesus. I think that there's also that kind of unfair tie-in that's like, oh, if I deconstruct, if I ask hard questions, if I have doubts, if I'm dealing with uncertainty, that that leads me undoubtedly down a road where I'm going to lose my faith. And that's not true at all. And yet I think there's like this flip side or where we correct on the wrong side, we overcorrect, right? And that's where we see deconstruction as like this intellectual destination. Aha, I arrived, I got to the point where I'm comfortable deconstructing. I think deconstructing, and actually a word that I like better is unlearning and relearning. I think that that has a connotation, and I'm talking a lot about connotation, but like I think when we talk about relearning or unlearning, learning is still forefront. What are we doing? We're learning, we're growing. Sometimes I think deconstruction, well, that is the goal. It's to tear something down, not necessarily build it back up, right? I mean, there's and not in that word alone. Do you have any kind of lead-in or implication that you're going to rebuild something? But unlearning and relearning is a regular part of our faith. I quoted C.S. Lewis a few weeks ago in his book, A Grief Observed, where he's walking through grief about his wife passing away, and his wife had an illness. It was not great. It was a kind of a bad thing, it was degenerative, and she passes away. And throughout all this, C. S. Lewis is like, I have good faith. I mean, God, I was an atheist and now I'm not. And I'm praying. And why do I have to watch the woman that I love suffer? And then she dies, and he's struggling with it. And throughout all of this, he says, I have come to realize my ideas of God aren't divine, that they need to be shattered time and time again. And that was something that I wanted all of us. I'm Madison Church, I want us to all regularly do, individually. What are these things about God that you think you can't touch? Let's examine it. Let's break it down. Let's see what remains. Jesus promises, He says, if you seek the truth, you will find me. So as long as our goal is to find the truth, we need not worry about what we're tearing down on learning. Our confidence in Jesus doesn't have anything to do with figuring everything out. Our confidence comes from what he did. The Jesus, that John said, I've seen him, I've heard him, I've touched him. We can acknowledge here today that we don't understand things and still trust in Jesus to take care of our minds, bodies, and spirit. And that confidence should change, ought to change the boldness in which we come before God. Now

Prayer And God’s Will Tension

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moving down to verses 14 and 15, John says, This is the confidence which we have before him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the request which we have asked for him. I skipped a line, sorry about that. Now John makes a tremendous promise, which I think we need to look at. He says that when we come to God before prayer and we seek his will, God hears us, and that we know we have whatever we asked for in him. Which can make it sound like as long as I'm seeking God's will and I pray, whatever I ask for is going to be answered. And by your experience alone, you know that is not true. Okay? By your already lived experience, you know that's not true. So let me say it flatly and plainly. Praying according to God's will isn't a technique for discovering a secret answer to getting God to answer the prayers you want answered. As we come to know the God revealed in Jesus, his character and purposes increasingly shape our desires and our requests. We ask for things like healing, forgiveness, reconciliation, and life, because those are the things that reflect God's love. We can think of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane before he dies. He says, God, I really don't want to do this. Father, take this cup away from me. But not my will. That is the kind of faith and prayer that John is talking about, where we can come to God earnestly and honestly and say, God, these are the things I want, these are the things I don't want. But at the end of it all, what I want most is your will done in my life.

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Help me do that.

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And that creates an honest difficulty, though. You see, because Jesus prayed, I'd I'd I really not like to do this, but your will be done, and Jesus dies the next day. We pray for healing, like C.S. Lewis does, as you have done, for a loved one who is sick, who is dying, and then they die.

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God, wasn't it your will that they would be alive? Or is it not your will?

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We pray for reconciliation. We have a fight with someone, there's a conflict, someone that we deeply love, and now there's separation and there's space, and we say, God, I'm praying for it. God, I know you want us to be unified, I know you want reconciliation and restoration, but this other person keeps rejecting me. Why don't you answer the prayer and change their mind? Don't assume today that God wanted those outcomes. Don't assume that because the person passed away that God wanted that. I can tell you in other messages, that's not the case. God is the God of life. But we have to acknowledge that within creation, we live in creation. We are participants in and live in creation, and that God's will is not the only will being done. So when we pray, we we need to consider that that people make real choices that we can't control. And that God doesn't just come in and overrule or hijack that. And it's not just you and me, but we know that there are spiritual powers and forces at work all around us, also competing against God's will. John himself says the world lies under the power of the evil one, referring to Satan. Jesus taught us to pray for God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Why? Because God's will isn't being done on earth as it is in heaven. It's a ridiculous thing to tell people to pray for if the will was already being done. So as we start off the Lord's Prayer, Father in Heaven, hallowed be in thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, it's an acknowledgement that I live in a creation in which that's not already happening.

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Now, I want to acknowledge that's not going to take away your grief from the loved ones that you've lost.

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It's not going to make you feel okay about those prayers that went unanswered. You're not like, oh, that was the information I was missing, and now I feel so much better. And yet it doesn't remove the strength of John's promise that God grants the request according to his will. This is the tension as believers we live in. It's like a both and situation. We seek God's will, and yet sometimes, as a matter of fact, I would I would say oftentimes, God's will isn't what's happening. But we shouldn't try to explain away John's assurance either. Prayer isn't merely learning to accept whatever happens. God hears his people and he acts. There are numerous examples throughout the Old Testament and New Testament in which God says, I'm going to do this or I'm going to do that, and people pray, and God says, Okay, we can go that way. Or we can try this. No, you can't control every outcome, but we can confidently participate in what God is doing. And John immediately gives us an example of such prayer. Reading

Interceding For Others Caught In Sin

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in verse 16. If anyone sees his brother or sister committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask God, or shall ask, and God will for him give life to those who commit sin, not leading to death. There is sin leading to death. I'm not saying that he should ask about that. All unrighteousness is sin, and there is sin not leading to death. John says, for example, when you pray, and I'm going to break this down for you because it's interesting. But John imagines a believer seeing another Christian caught in sin, and he says, the first thing they do is pray for them. You see someone doing something they shouldn't do, or you know it's harmful for them, or harmful for the people around them. John says, before you go and say anything or do anything, pray for them. And John has been uncompromising about sin throughout his whole letter. He's confronted the sin of dishonesty, of hatred, of disobedience, and yet he doesn't tell the community merely to just identify another person's failure, get really good at looking at other people's sin. That's not what he says. He calls them instead to intercede, to pray on their behalf, and says that God will give life in a response to such prayer when the sin doesn't lead to death. That's love and action. When we see someone else struggling with thoughts, with actions, with words, you you can't force. None of us in the room can force another person to change or to repent or to pick up faith. But we also are not helpless spectators. We can seek their restoration before God. We can ask God to do something. But the part I suspect that you're thinking about still is John's differentiation in sin. Christians have understood this in different ways. Some take it as a physical death under divine judgment, others see it as a distinction between particularly serious sins. Where I have fallen, and where I think most scholarship, and I should be careful when I say that, a lot of scholarship has fallen, is you might remember Jesus saying something about blasphemy the Holy Spirit as being the unforgivable sin. And then all of us in the room are like, have I done that already? Like, do I should I just be sleeping in on Sundays? Like, is it over for me already? I think that this is the explanation. I think John is unpacking it. We all sin. John acknowledged that. He says, Don't say you're without sin because that's a lie. We've all sinned. And yet he tells us to pray for it and pray about it and says, You have eternal life. So we know that we can have eternal life. We can pray for the sin and still be sinful and working on it. But he says there's a sin that leads to death. And I think when you couple that with what Jesus talks about, blasphemy of the Holy Spirit being an unforgivable sin and scholarship, this is rejecting Christ until the end. Your whole life. From the moment you're born to the moment you die, a flat out rejection of Christ. This is the one sin that can't be undone. It's the rejection. We talked about free will. You don't get free will in this whole life, and then the minute you die, God says, okay, now you don't have a choice. What would be the purpose of this life? Just put me to the end, God, and I can avoid all this pain and suffering. So what John is talking about here is like you're all sin, you all mess up. But there is this one. That is when we reject Jesus unto death. This is the one that can't be undone. Remember the people John described in chapter two, they left the community, they rejected the apostolic testimony about the Son. And immediately before our passage, John says, Whoever has the Son has life. It's important for us to recognize life and death aren't just physical categories, Not just physical categories. We are spiritual beings as well, created in the image of God. 100% physical, 100% spiritual. We shouldn't confuse doubt with rejection, though. And we shouldn't recurring struggle with a settled refusal to repent, leaving a particular church with abandoning Jesus. What I'm saying is I don't want us to walk away and be like anyone who disagrees with me or thinks about Christianity differently or goes to a different church than me, they're committing the sin that leads to death. Not saying that at all. But John does give us a warning. Not permission to just go around and being hateful or calling people out who disagree with us. But he says, pray for them and be aware that there are some sins that will go away on this earth. There are some sins that will be forgiven on the next, and that there are some, or one rather, that will not be.

Evil Is Real But Not Final

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Let's read verse 18, in which John closes with three statements here. We know that no one who has been born of God sins, but he who was born of God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him. John says those born of God do not sin, and he writes about protection from the evil one. We heard similar language either, and we've also talked about how there's differentiating language that seems to contradict itself. We read both of these things alongside John's admission that Christians do sin and Jesus is our advocate. That Jesus is our advocate. A person born of God doesn't treat sin. As though it makes no difference anymore. Those who follow Jesus know the seriousness of sin. We see it its destructive powers in our own lives. We see its powers in the lives of other people. We see it when we turn on the news, when we look at our newsfeeds, and we see all the violence and the hate and the name-calling in the world. That is sin. John places two realities side by side. We belong to God and the world lies under the power of the evil one. John doesn't deny that the world's broken, that the world is broken. He doesn't pretend that everything happens around us happens for a reason. You don't find that in this letter. It's not toxic positivity or blind optimism. Evil is real, but that doesn't mean that evil is equal to God or has the final word. And so as I wrap up, not just the message today, but our teaching series in John, five months, I hope that we are a community, small as we are, but I hope that we are a community becoming a people who can be honest about their struggles. I hope Madison Church is a place where people don't feel like they need to pretend about what they're going through. I hope we can be a community where questions are met with patience. People seeking to understand where someone is coming from and why they think that way, rather than suspicion, where we can disagree with each other without abandoning our commitment to love one another and a shared mission that we hold. But none of that simply happens because we read through 1 John and we did so very slowly over the course of five months. After

Keep Yourself From Idols

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everything John has written about truth, obedience, discernment, and love, he leaves readers with a warning not to exchange the true God for something else. He says, Keep yourself from idols.

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Keep yourself from idols.

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And that is the invitation for us as we wrap up and as we go into this prayer of examine to look at our own lives. What is shaping your understanding of God?

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Is it Facebook and Instagram and TikTok? A podcaster, an author? God Himself? What do you place your trust in today? Is it your career, finances, a relationship?

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We can ask ourselves, are our beliefs, our priorities, relationships increasingly reflecting the Jesus I've come to know through Scripture? Or have other things begun taking its place? I would encourage each of us to take this question, these questions seriously. And to identify one area of your life where your allegiance to Jesus needs a renewed attention, and consider what faithfulness might look like here. Maybe that means reconsidering a belief you've held for years, confessing something you've been hiding, praying for someone you've grown frustrated with, or choosing to love someone that you have found particularly difficult to love. We're not going to get everything right, not in this lifetime, but that doesn't mean we don't do anything. We can take a step. We can put in the work. We can continue to walk in this light together, trusting that God has given us what we need and allowing those things that He has given us to reshape our lives.