Sermon 1
Sermon by James Cooke at
Fellowship
& Forgiveness
There was once a man who on his way to work every day,
walked past a clockmaker’s shop. Every
day, he would stop outside the shop and synchronize his watch with the clock in
the shop window. After some time the
clockmaker began to notice what the man was doing, so one day he struck up a
conversation with him and asked what kind of work he did. The man timidly confessed that he worked as
the timekeeper at the nearby factory and because his watch didn’t work very well
he needed to adjust it every day. It was
his job to ring the bell at
This is an illustration of what
happens so often to our system of beliefs and our views of what is right and
wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. We
are like chameleons – we change our beliefs and our standards to blend in with
those around us. The trouble is, what if
we make modifications in these areas to fit in with others - - and they’re
wrong? This is exactly the problem that
led John to write this letter that we are looking at for the next few
weeks. It was written to some Christian
congregations living in western
The word fellowship is a key word to look out for in the letter as this series of sermons develops over the next few weeks. John is passionate that his readers re-discover what true fellowship with God is really like, and following from that they will also discover how they can enjoy a close fellowship with each other. That’s why it’s appropriate that many of our church homegroups are also studying this letter together, because one of the great reasons for having homegroups is to help build up supportive fellowship in the life of this church. In the introduction to the study material they are using it says this, Have you ever wondered if God really loves you? If you are confident that He does, have you wondered why He loves you? Do you ever struggle with sin and wish you had greater power to resist and overcome it? Have you ever longed to experience God’s forgiveness and love on a more profound level? Do you want to deepen your love for people and discover how to receive their love more freely? I hope that answers to these questions will emerge over the next few weeks.
To begin with, though, in the opening part of his letter John is concerned to show us two things, that we have a faith to stand by and that we have a faith to live by. The first 4 verses are known as the prologue and have quite a strong resonance with the prologue to John’s gospel which we had read to us earlier. We know from the gospel that the Word is a description of the Lord Jesus. Words are how we express ourselves and God has expressed himself or revealed himself in Jesus. But here in 1 John the word of life is describes as “it” not “he” perhaps because John is wanting to point more to the written word, the message about Jesus Christ. In fact I suspect we are at liberty to include both meanings because you really can’t separate Jesus from the message about him. John really wants his readers, and us of course as well, to realise that the Christian faith is factual and historical. And to help him get the message across, he mentions that he and the other apostles had heard, seen and touched Christ while he had been physically with them. There is something very powerful about an eyewitness account. Here’s what a tsunami survivor said the day after Boxing Day.
We just watched it, and I was taking photographs of it. Then came this massive wall of water. What did I do? I just sat
and watched it. I just watched it as it came in - it took maybe four seconds
from the point when I was aware of it to the point when it hit the hotel. Those four seconds were like a lifetime.
There was nothing I could do. I could only watch, and it was coming in, and it
hit the crags, and I saw those people on the crags just being flung into the
air like confetti, just blown out of the water. Then this thing hit the hotel -
I was on the first floor of the building in the restaurant - and it was like a
bomb hit it. I heard windows just bursting, not breaking, but bursting. Then I watched it go - I watched it take so
much away. I saw so much life terminating, that I was seriously wondering what
was more difficult - whether to live watching death, or just to die.
9 times that man spoke about watching or seeing and the words just spilled out giving a breathless excitement to what he said. That’s how we should read these first 4 verses, words tumbling over each other. Even John’s grammar goes out the window - no verb in the original till half way through verse 3. He’s passionate in telling us about Jesus, that he really did exist. A baby with dirty nappies, an adolescent with sexual drives, a man weary and in pain, and finally a dying man, dying for men and women. Because the Christian faith is historical, it can be checked out, verified. That is one of the strengths of what we believe, why we can argue the case that it’s true. We are often called to believe simply, but we are never asked simply to believe.
Yes, our faith is factual and historical, but John wants us
to realise that our faith is also personal and experimental, that we can trust
God and find that he’s there within us to help and strengthen us. Look at verse
3. We proclaim to you what we have
seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and
with his son Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete. I wonder if you can see what John is saying? He’s celebrating
the glorious fact that God has not just broken into history; he has also broken
into our lives. Christ came to make the
relationship real between ourselves and God, and with each other. That is what
the word 'fellowship' is all about. It is a word which in the common currency
of the day meant being a shareholder in a business, being committed to a common
concern. In this case it’s the Gospel. When someone commits their lives to the
Lord Jesus Christ they become part of God's family, knowing God as Father
through trusting in the Son. It’s as if
they become shareholders in the family business - sharing not wealth, of
course, but the Gospel. And that kind of
fellowship of living together, serving together, even suffering together,
brings the kind of joy John talks about.
So we
have a faith to stand by, one that is factual and historical, but also personal
and experimental. And that brings me to
my second point, we also have a faith to live by. Look at verse 5: This is the
message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there
is no darkness at all. In this letter
they are 2 great statements about what God is like. One is comfortable and one is
uncomfortable. If I tell you that the
second, which comes in chapter 4, is God is love
then I think you’ll know how I assess the statement God is light. Let me explain. When I was about 9 years old a boy at school
was given a magnifying glass, possibly by his grandmother, thinking no doubt
that he would use it to help him see the watermarks on the stamps in the
collection. But – I’m sure you’ve
guessed - he decided to use it on a sunny day to burn paper and torture
ants. The comforting sunlight when focused
down into a single beam of light, suddenly becomes
dangerously uncomfortable. And that’s
what God is like – in him is no darkness at all. He is 100% morally pure and we all fall way
short of his perfection. If we were even
faintly aware of how sinful we are we would tremble to face up to God, even
though he loves us more than we can ever understand. And that’s what these false teachers were
trying to running away from. They made 3
claims about sin. Look at verses 6. They claimed to have fellowship with God even
though they walked in darkness; and verse 8, they claimed to be
without sin and again in verse 10, they claimed that they had not sinned. It was as if they were telling the ordinary
Christian people in those 1st century churches to grow up because,
they said, God isn’t interested what you do in the boardroom (your business
practice) or in the bedroom (your sexual practice). It was clever really. If you want to convince yourself that you
really aren’t bad, you redefine sin so that it isn’t serious.
From time to time you still get movements
within the church which claim that, as a result of some sort of second
blessing, then you have the victory and you will never fall into sin again. The
Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon met
someone who made a claim like this. He
was a perfect Christian, he said, 'So Spurgeon kicked him on the shin' and the
profanity which came out of his mouth as a result put an end to that idea.
Whether it is sinless perfection or attaining a higher level of spirituality
there are movements making such offers around today.
John, of course, is realistic enough to know that we do sin as Christians, sometimes terribly. We can fall into temptations which grieve us and scar us. When this happens, the truth that God is light is a painful one and not comforting at all. But John must have been aware of this when he wrote his letter. Look at v 7: But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. And again, v. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. There is a beautiful balance here between the wrong of condoning sin and the wrong of despairing about sin. John is saying that God's ultimate desire is to rid you and me from sin, but if we do sin then don't let that drive you away from Jesus, instead let it drive you back to Jesus. And why? Because he alone has the power to purify us from all sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. There don't seem to be any exceptions there, are there? The true God is one who stoops down to meet us in the mess we sometimes make for ourselves, and then lifts us out of the mess. We can see this at the beginning of chapter 2. If anybody does sin we have one who speaks to the Father in our defence – Jesus Christ the righteous One. And he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins. This verse, perhaps more than any in the passage we’ve been looking at today sums up the faith we are to stand by. It also points us towards the faith we are to live by. My hope as I close is that this letter of 1 John will make all of us more aware of the holiness of the God who is light, and draw us all closer to the God who is love.
Let us pray.