The Great Things of God
0 Amens
· The first portion of this sermon is a summary of 1 John thus far.
· Sovereign King makes it quite clear that we want to do two things: we want to create a community that is glorifying to God and we want to engage our community to the glory of God. Everything we do falls into one of those directives.
· What I have enjoyed about our study of I John is that the book does a great job showing us what our creating should look like and also describes how our engaging should be described.
· For example, a few weeks ago, John gave us a list of attributes that define the family of God and I think they go a long way towards describing our creating and engaging. In both we should be…
o Humble: A believer will be characterized as being humble understanding that they are a sinner.
o Repentant: Recognizing that sin means that the child of God will live a consistent life of confessing that sin to God.
o Obedient: That confession and repentance will cause them to walk in the light or live a consistently growing life of obedience.
o Honest: Walking in humility, confession, and obedience, will cause them to be honest about that sin never pretending to be perfect.
o Fellowship: Each individual believer then will be part of the fellowship of other believers in a community designed by God before the foundations of the world.
· I think a community that is built to look that way and loves their community in the same would be as attractive as a glass of water in the midst of a desert.
· Building on those characteristics, John also has been developing a few themes to encourage us in our attempts at being humble, repentant, obedient, and honest. When we see those characteristics as too difficult for us or beyond our grasp he reminds us that…
o A child of God will be in Jesus and Jesus will be in them.
o A child of God will be in the word of God and the word of God will be in them.
o However, the child of God will be in the world, but the world will not and should be in the child of God.
· So John encourages the church to abide in Jesus so that when ultimately, He does appear, we stand gloriously before Him and do not have to shrink in fear
· Knowing Jesus as the righteous one of God leads us all in practicing righteous because we are born of Him. The definition of one who believes in Jesus is that they persevere until the end with Christ and His community by the preserving grace of the Holy Spirit.
· Having said that, we return to I John this week to find that wants to make it clear that these qualities and characteristics are definites and absolutes. They are not just the hopes but guarantees from God to His children. They are the DNA that proves we are God’s children.
· Along those lines, as we consider what it looks like for US to be God’s children.
· You know, since arriving in Garner to plant Sovereign King Church, I have had what I will call a holy despair. Let me explain that because “holy” and “despair” seem to be contradictory. You see, I don’t want when it is all said and done, for Sovereign King to launch and have everything we need (buildings, youth ministries, great music, etc), and God not do something great among us. It is quite possible for us to have a great building, an incredible ministry to all ages and stages of life and have rocking, professional level music, and we never come close to sniffing great things for God.
· When I look into the coming year, I see a bunch of those things becoming reality. This will be the year Sovereign King will become financially self-sufficient, and we will begin looking towards greater platforms for ministry. More than likely, we will not finish 2009 in the same building that we are in now. I imagine we will build on the efforts of Children’s Church and the events we did this past summer, and our children’s/youth activities will flourish and become much more consistent. And the temptation of our hearts when all of those things happen is to think that we have arrived, God has blessed us, and the central struggle is over.
· Do not, and I repeat, do not give in that type of thinking. If we have those things, and I pray we do, that does not mean that God is doing great things with us. And I pray and plead to God and to you for great things. We are in dangerous territory because at least in our culture, those very good things (financially stability, good facilities, great music) can actually be enemies of great things because we see them, we grow complacent, and lose our desire for the great things of God.
· This week, as we return to the book of I John, I want us to ask, “What do the great things of God look like?” Let’s find out.
I John 3:1-10 - See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. 3 And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.
· John here speaks of two things that should have a great and radical impact on the life of any one that has faith in Jesus Christ.
o We should live in a constant awe and thankfulness that God has made us His children. Prior to faith in Christ, we were God’s enemies, yet through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we are made into God’s children.
o Our living should cause those that do not yet know Christ to be confused around those do know Him.
· Now does that mean that we live such lives that the world runs away from us when they see us? Will they observe our lives and quickly reject us as freaks? Well, they will only do that if we live pompous arrogant judgmental lives, but that won’t be the case if we living to imitate our Savior, Jesus.
· Our lives should be so transformed by knowing Jesus and being made children of God that it should cause a radical transformation that leaves the world scratching their head, yet undeniably drawn to us. We should in every way mimic our lovely savior Jesus who was not understood while walking this dusty path, but people could not help running to Him to see who He was and what He was about.
· As children of God, you should reflect that same family resemblance in your life.
o Let me give you an earthly example of what I’m talking about.
· My father is now 74 years old. He is an amazing renaissance man.
o A piano prodigy, he attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.
o Marrying my mother soon after, he lived in Washington DC for a period of time where he learned the arts design and art eventually working for Gallidet University.
o Somewhere along the way, he got the acting bug, so he packed the family up and moved to Hollywood working under the screen name “Gordon Duncan” and befriending the likes of Mae West and others.
o Sensing a call to ministry, he returned home, opened a flower shop with my mother, began seminary, and volunteered as a prison minister.
o He soon became a published author working with the likes of mystery writer Margaret Maron and he eventually ghost wrote the memoir of one of NC’s oldest bootleggers.
o Pastoring 4 churches while running the flower shop, he squeezed in time to create his own piano teaching method, raise 5 children who all claim Christ as their own, and he and my mother have been married now for 53 years.
· I look at this brief resume of my dad’s and see that in it, there are many qualities that he handed down to me and many others by which I fall short.
o As a kid, I had a love for reading and writing. Music was ingrained in me from day one. I had a penchant for starting new things and taking on ambitious tasks.
o This also made me a strange kid growing up in school as I didn’t fit into a lot of the molds that were being pressed out in that day. I neither one most popular nor desired to either.
o Folks saw my dad as a bit of an eccentric but recognized his talent in so many areas. They saw those things in shadow in me.
· That picture is a lot like what John is saying. By claiming Christ, we are to be like our Father in heaven. We are blessed to be His children and our lives are to be constantly conformed into an image that is like God’s. Because of that, the world is not going to get us. Our agenda is different, or at least it should be.
· This does not mean that we should be purposefully obtuse to the rest of the world. It does not mean that we get to be self-righteous or judgmental to the world. No, being the child of God means that we should be humble. We of all people should recognize that we do not deserve the graces of being a child of God.
· But it does mean that our hearts and lives are striving for a different purpose that stream of this world. With Christ, your desire is to glorify and imitate Him and to love and serve others. We imitate our love of God best by loving others with the same kind of intensity that we love ourselves.
· This tension filled life should cause us once again to hope for the return of our Savior. We should live with the hope of seeing our conformity to God’s image realized in an ultimate sense. C.S. Lewis put it this way, “If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did the most for this present world were precisely those who thought most of the next.
· This ongoing hope of a returning victorious Savior is as John says in verse 3 purifying. If you live in the hope of a returning Savior,
o That hope will purify you.
o Your worries over this world will lessen.
o You will have greater faith in what God will do because you will live with a present realization of what He has already done. (Repeat)
o Essentially, hope will return to you and transform you and motivate you.
· Not living with this understanding that we are the children of God set apart from this world with a future hope of Christ’s resurrection will cause some adverse effects in you life of course. The opposite of all those things will occur. In fact, we will indulge in the sinfulness of this world and live without hope. Look at verse 4.
4 Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. 5 You know that he appeared to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. 6 No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him.
· Now that word “lawlessness” is interesting. It is the Greek word (anomia) which means any activity bereft of God's guidance and in violation of his law and scripture.
· Everyone who makes it a regular, habitual and ongoing lifestyle of practicing those things that are bereft of God’s guidance does not know Jesus and does not abide in Him.
· That lifestyles is antithetical to Jesus who came to take away sin and such living.
· When we read that our hearts either do one of three things:
o We automatically begin to justify ourselves thinking of all the good we do and the bad we don’t.
o We automatically begin to condemn ourselves thinking of all the bad we do and the good we don’t.
o We don’t care either way.
· Knowing who we are though is defined by our abiding in Jesus which can be confusing language. We first hear language like that in John 15:4 “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.”
· Abiding in Jesus is continually recognizing and living in the connectedness of being God’s child. It is saying, “I cannot live in this world as God has called me to without trusting that the hope and source of all my strength and even my obedience comes from Jesus. It is Christ in me that does these things.”
· Now let me give all of you an encouragement because this kind of life is not easy to live. Continually growing in abiding and obedience and hope is not something many of us do well. Let me make this clear about you here at Sovereign King.
o You matter; we love you. We won’t give up on you even if you fail. And for those of you that think you don’t need to hear that, we really love you because you need to hear it more than anyone else in this room.
· We will either be lulled into thinking we are super godly standing above the rest of the world and we can be lulled into thinking that hard work of obedience doesn’t matter. Verse 7 doesn’t give us that option.
7 Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous. 8 Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.
· Now verse 7 can be confusing because Romans 3 lets us not that none are righteous and do good, no not one. So, what does it mean that those that practice righteousness are righteous as he is righteous.
· Well, our practicing righteousness, our obedience and efforts towards godliness come from and is motivated by our knowledge that we have been made the Children of God. Our obedience is not an earning of that sonship.
· But it is simple, being made a child of God means you will grow in Godliness. It is a central description of who you are. Those who lifestyles are not marked by a continual growing in obedience are likewise children of the devil.
· You see when I read that I see a call to radical godliness and it is a radical godliness that is necessary for the task at hand. Each of us should live our lives with an everpresent recognition that God has called us to a central task and that task requires great and necessary godliness.
o Sovereign King will just be another church if we do not radically grow in an imitation of our Savior. We will have all the trappings of church but no substance.
o We will be like the folks in 2 Timothy 3 that are described as “5 having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power.” Timothy’s advice is to avoid such people.
o I guess if we look around and ask if God is doing great things, one of the ways determining that is whether people are drawn to us or whether people avoid us.
· So, let me ask you, are you preparing for God to do great things. Do you see the call of your life personally and as a part of Sovereign King requiring great godliness from you so you will be fit to the task.
· Do you think, “If I’m going to create a community that glorifies God and if I’m going to engage my community for the glory of God, then I am in desperate need of Godliness.”
· Do you think, “If I’m going to honor God at home, school, work, or community, then I am in desperate need of Godliness.”
· Do you think, “If I’m going to lead my family in Godliness, then I am in desperate need of Godliness.”
· This isn’t just mean trying to motivate you. This is what John would call us to. Look at verse 9
No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God's seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning because he has been born of God. 10 By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.
· If we claim Christ we will be transformed into Jesus’ likeness and we will not make it a practice to indulge our sinful desires. If you are born of God, you will be transformed and you will see Godliness grow where sinfulness once reigned. It will be a radical, grace filled Godliness.
· It will be evident how? Verse 10 says we will see it in how we love our brother. This is consistent with Jesus’ answer in Luke 10 when He was asked what was necessary for inheriting eternal life. Jesus said,
o “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”
· There is not one without the other. Loving God will be evidenced by loving your brother and your neighbor. Living that kind of lifestyle requires a radical holiness in which you must constantly be preparing for, yearning for, and praying for.
· I would say this is where we fall short in experiencing great things for God.
o We often attend church out of obligation and not a desire to worship.
o We give to the church as long as it doesn’t impinge on our standard of living.
o We want to be saved from the penalty of our sin but are not really interesting being saved from our day to day sin because we don’t really hate it.
o We love stories about people who do radical things for Christ but we aren’t interested in doing them ourselves because the cost is too great.
o We are kind to our neighbors, friends, and coworkers, but we never get around to even mentioning Jesus’ name.
o We gauge goodness by comparing ourselves to others instead of comparing ourselves to Christ.
o We make Jesus part of our lives instead of making our life part of Jesus.
o We love others but not as much as we love ourselves.
o We play it safe making our god control instead of risking it all and giving control to God.
o Instead of living by faith, we determine success by how well our lives ordered so that we don’t have to live by faith.
§ List an adaptation from Francis Chan’s “Crazy Love”
· These things are the enemy of the great things that God can and will do in us. We are called to a great godliness that will prepare us for action to love one another and love our community.
· If we aren’t preparing for Godliness, then we assume that God will do not great things among us, and He probably won’t.
· Godliness would be the exact opposite of everything I said above.
o We attend church not out of obligation but with a desire to worship.
o We give to the church and God’s work in such a way that we are forced to change our standard of living to accommodate it.
o We not only want to be saved from the penalty of our sin but we want to be saved from our day to day sin because we hate it.
o We love stories about people who do radical things for Christ because they encourage us to pay the cost necessary for us do things just like them.
o We are kind to our neighbors, friends, and coworkers, AND we get around to even mentioning Jesus’ name.
o We gauge goodness only by comparing ourselves to Christ and we consider everyone else as better than us.
o We give every part of our life to Jesus.
o We love others as much as we love ourselves.
o We risk it all by giving control of lives to God.
o We determine success in our lives not by how much we don’t need God but by how much have to live by faith.
· Let’s be radically transformed in the image of Christ this year and let’s pray with a holy despair that God would do great things among us. Let us despair that God might pass us by. Let us love each other and our community with a radical love that causes people to be uncontrollably attracted to this community but ultimately to Jesus Christ.
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