Staying in Fellowship with God

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This morning we’re going to be back in 1 John, in 1 John chapter 1 and spilling over into the beginning of 1 John chapter 2. There’s a phrase that I used to hear my grandfather say all the time when he was, as he would call it, piddling around in the garage. I don’t know that he always lived by it, but he said it all the time, and that was measure twice, cut once.

You know, you measure twice to make sure you didn’t make a mistake, because when you get ready to cut, you only want to cut once. And he would do woodworking stuff, and I can tell looking back on some of it, there were some instances where he cut two or three times. But I sort of learned from that.

As good as he was at eyeballing a lot of times, I’m not that good. And I’ll go out there and try to cut things as I try to build, you know, shelves or whatever I’ve got a wild hair to build that week. As I’m out there cutting wood, and I want to make sure it’s straight.

When I first started doing this, I’d take my yardstick or whatever, and I would measure off how long I wanted the cut to be, and then just cut across. And it would always be crooked. So I thought, no, I need something to help me check in a little better.

So I’d measure it on both sides of whatever I was doing. So I’d know where to start and I’d know where I was aiming for, where to end up. And it’d be better, but it’d still be crooked.

So I started, I learned to measure on both sides of the piece of wood. If I was cutting a straight line, measure at both, measure on both sides, and then take the yardstick and lay it across there and draw a line in pencil and follow that line. And that gave me the ability to stop and check in every inch or so, or less than that, to make sure I was on the right track, to make sure that saw blade was exactly where it needs to be.

Because when a project, when something you’re doing is important to you, it’s important to check in frequently and make sure you’re on the right track. When I cook, there are lots of times that if I know what I’m making and it’s not really following a recipe, some of you ladies cook that way. I don’t use a recipe.

I asked my mother for her meatloaf recipe. There’s not one. I just throw stuff in there.

Okay. There are some things I cook that way. But if there’s something I’ve had that somebody else has made and I want it to taste that way, or if it’s something out of a recipe book, I check in frequently.

I read the whole thing, and then each step I make sure, okay, that says teaspoon, tablespoon. Not knowing the difference between teaspoon and tablespoon can be disastrous. So I double check every line.

Check in and make sure I’m on the right track. Check in with the ingredients. Was that baking soda or baking powder?

Check in to make sure I’m grabbing the right thing. One time I was making a big batch of salsa, and I was in my grandmother’s kitchen because ours was being remodeled at the time, and I grabbed, because everything looked the same, without looking real closely, I grabbed what I thought was black pepper, and I ended up putting poultry seasoning in the salsa. It was not the best batch I’ve ever made, but it’s still better than some of the store-bought stuff.

But I check in frequently, every line. Is this the right measurement? Is this the right ingredient?

Is that the thing that this book says I’m supposed to be doing? I check in frequently to make sure I’m on the right track. I’m working on a car.

I get the Haynes manual. And I read the whole list of instructions, all the steps for the job I’m going to be doing. And then I start doing it and I stop and read carefully every time before I start the next step to make sure I’m still on the right track. We all do that.

If it’s a project that we really care about, if it’s something that is important to us, we check in frequently to make sure we’re on the right track. And as we look at 1 John this morning, that’s one of the things that John is writing to these people. You know, I told you last week that we’re studying these books, these letters that John wrote toward the end of his life, because when he wrote them, he was the last eyewitness to the life and to the ministry of Jesus, or at least the last prominent eyewitness.

There may have been somebody who watched from afar, but as far as history records, he was the last one who was there, certainly the last of the twelve, who was there with Jesus every day. So if anybody knew the truth about Jesus’ life, if anybody knew who he really was, if anybody knew who he claimed to be, and if anybody knew what he expected for us and from us, it would have been John. And he was the last of those people.

And so he writes 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John at the end of his life when he’s the last of these people, and Christianity has sort of exploded across the Roman Empire, and there are people who have never met an apostle, who are now trying to follow Jesus, had never met an apostle, let alone Jesus, and they’re now trying to follow him, and all that means, and John sits down with pen to paper, or quill to papyrus, whatever they had at the time, and sits down and says, what do I want these people to know before I go? As the last one who walked with Jesus, what is it important that they know? And last week, last Sunday morning, I shared with you how he talked about fellowship with God and how we’re created for fellowship with God and that that’s a source of joy to us and yet it’s unattainable because our sin separates us from God.

And we talked about how he illustrates here that fellowship with God is only possible. Fellowship with the Father is only possible through a relationship with the Son. And fellowship and relationship are not exactly the same thing.

And y’all know that. Some of you have siblings that sadly you have not talked to for a long time. Some of you may have children who have not talked to you for a long time.

Some of you just have relatives in general that there’s a relationship. Yeah, they’re my cousin, they’re my aunt, they’re my, you know, my whoever. There’s not much of a fellowship there.

And the way I always describe them is, I think it was Mark Lowry who said, I’ll cry at their funeral, but I don’t want to go on vacation with them. We all have those people in our lives, don’t we? There’s a relationship.

You can’t escape the fact that you’re related to them. There’s a relationship, but there’s not much fellowship. You have nothing in common.

There’s a difference between fellowship and relationship. And what he talked about at the beginning of this chapter and what he talked about that we’re going to read today is about having fellowship with God, but that requires a relationship. And And that sounds harsh to say, but it’s not that God looked at us and said, you’re rotten, you’re my enemy.

No, it’s that we looked at God as a human race and said, we want to be your enemy because we want to be rotten. See, we were the ones that fired the first shots in this war. And what we need to have the fellowship with God we were created to have is to have a relationship with Him.

We need to have a father-child relationship with God, and we only get that through the Son, Jesus Christ. And when we enter into that relationship with the Father through Jesus Christ, when we look at God and realize that what we’ve done all this time has been wrong, and that we’ve sinned against Him, and that we have wronged Him, and realize that the only way to be in a relationship is to admit that we’ve been wrong, and to ask God’s forgiveness because of what Jesus Christ did on the cross to enable us to be forgiven, then we enter into that relationship where He doesn’t just look at us and say, come on you can be the servants in my household. He’s willing to adopt us as his children. Which is incredible to me.

It’s like the story of the prodigal son. He just went back asking can I work in your household? And the father said my son who was dead is now alive again.

He wouldn’t hear of just bringing him back as a servant. He brought him back as a son. And that’s what God is willing to do for us.

He’s willing to adopt us as his children. But once we have that relationship it’s still possible even though the relationship is never broken. I believe in eternal security.

I believe the Bible teaches eternal security. Not because we’re good enough or not because we can just do whatever we want, but because God changes us from the inside out, because we are sealed by the Holy Spirit, and because we are held by the power of Jesus Christ until the day of redemption. It’s not about me being good enough or me doing what I want.

It’s God changing my want to and God holding me close to himself in spite of my sin. The relationship is always there. Just like my child is always going to be my child.

Now the fellowship may not always be what it’s supposed to be. And I can assure you when Charlie was screaming at 3 o’clock in the morning, there was not wonderful fellowship. Here’s mama.

I’m going back to sleep. When the older ones look me right in the eye and watch to make sure I’m watching as they do what I’ve told them not to do a thousand times as though they’re daring me to say something and challenge accepted by the way. The fellowship is not what it ought to be but there’s still the relationship.

Once you are bought by the blood of Jesus Christ, once you are adopted into the family of God There is always a relationship, but fellowship is a little harder to maintain. Fellowship is harder to maintain because sin gets in the way. And we will at times have to adjust, we will at times have to check in, and I submit to you not just once in a while, we will frequently need to check in when it comes to fellowship and make sure we’re on the right track.

If you’re married to somebody, men, if you called your wife once a week and just told her what you wanted from her, is there much fellowship there? No, and she’s probably not going to put up with it. There’s not much of a relationship there.

If you treated her like dirt all year and then once a year said, I’m sorry, probably not going to be much fellowship there. fellowship requires that we’re going to check in frequently and make sure we’re on the right track that we are as close to God as we need to be and and can I let you in on a little secret we can always be closer to God and we always need to be closer to God part of that is growing in sanctification and part and a lot of that is the work of God growing us and strengthening us and maturing us and drawing him drawing us closer to himself but there’s an element in there where where we need to make sure we’re not holding God at arm’s length because I just want to embrace the lifestyle of sin and I don’t care what God says.

By the way, there’s a lot in the Bible that would say not that you’ve lost your salvation, but that if that’s your attitude, you might want to check your salvation and see if it was real in the first place because God will change our hearts and our want-tos. So we’re going to look at 1 John 1 starting in verse 5 this morning. And he’s talking about this fellowship and the need to check in and make sure we stay in close fellowship with the Father.

He said, this then is the message which you have heard of him, excuse me, which we have heard of him, and declare unto you that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. He said, so this is what you heard and understood, that God is perfectly holy. And we hear that word and we think sinless perfection, and that’s true.

God is sinlessly perfect. God has never done anything wrong. God cannot do anything wrong.

Contrary to what we were overly simplistically taught when we were children, there are some things God cannot do. God cannot sin. God cannot lie.

God must be true to his own nature of holiness. There is sinless perfection in the person of God, but holiness also means that he’s just entirely separate from us. Do you ever see those people?

You know who I’m talking about. Those people that you just think they’ve got everything together. They live such a different life from me.

They always look like they just stepped out of a magazine and they never seem to have any problems. Do you know any of these people? Everything they touch turns to gold. And sometimes we just feel like they’re just of a higher nature than we are.

That’s unattainable. Well, let me break it to you. They’re not.

A lot of that is a facade. They are people just like we are and cut from the same cloth. God actually is of a higher nature.

God is of a different and unattainable nature. Completely different from us. And that’s the reason why he is sinlessly perfect.

But it says, In him is light and no darkness at all. If we say, verse 6, If we say that we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth. Think of this.

What he’s saying is if we claim to have fellowship with God, if we say, oh yeah, God and I are like this, we’re very close, and yet we walk in darkness, he said, you’re lying. You’re lying. Those two things cannot happen.

Those two things do not fit together. Oil and water here. Now that doesn’t mean that we won’t occasionally sin.

That doesn’t mean that we won’t sin every day. But there’s a difference between sinning and feeling bad about it, feeling that guilt that, as I start to describe that feeling, I remember what it feels like from probably yesterday, where I have disappointed God and I hate it and I hate myself for it. There’s a difference between sinning and saying, I shouldn’t have done that, God forgive me, I hate this, and saying, yeah, I don’t care what’s God going to do about it.

There’s a difference. That attitude of saying, yeah, I like my sin and I don’t care who it bothers. I don’t care if it bothers him.

That’s the difference. That’s what he’s talking about, this lifestyle of sin. And he says, if you claim to have fellowship with God, and you walk in that darkness, he doesn’t say stumble into the darkness.

He says you walk in that darkness. He says you’re lying. And do not the truth.

Other translations say, and you do not practice the truth. You’re not going to accidentally live for God. It’s something you’ve got to practice.

it’s something you’ve got to work at says in verse 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 Christ his son cleanseth us from all sin and you might think of this as if I walk in the light as he is in the light he’s saying I’ve got to be sinlessly perfect I’ve got to be holy no read the rest of the passage and it becomes readily apparent that that can’t be what walking in the light means he says, if you walk in the light, as he’s in the light, you have fellowship with him and one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. Well, if you’re walking in the light and that means you’re sinlessly perfect, then what sin is he cleansing you from? Walking in the light doesn’t mean we’re perfect.

It means we’re following after the light of Jesus Christ, and that is the target we’re shooting for. And I think so many times as Christians, whether it comes down to our behavior or what we do in ministry as a church or any number of things, I feel like a lot of times instead of aiming at a target and releasing the arrow and seeing whether we’re on target or not, I feel like a lot of times what we do is we shoot the arrow and then go paint the target around it. The target here is to be more like Jesus Christ. Will we ever be just like Jesus Christ?

No. Good, I’m glad somebody answered it. No, I just said earlier, He’s of a completely different nature than we are.

We will never be gone. But our goal is to be more like Him. We will never reach that.

We will stumble and fall along the way. But the goal is always to get up, ask Him to clean us up again, and keep pursuing that target of walking toward the light of being more like Jesus Christ. And he says, and if we’re doing that, then we have fellowship with him and each other. Because by the way, if we’re all trying to be more like Jesus Christ, we’re not going to be squabbling with each other so much, are we?

Because if I’m trying to be more like Jesus Christ, I’m not concerned about my petty concerns and what I want. And it’s easy to say that this morning when I don’t know of anybody squabbling with each other. But it’s still true even if we weren’t.

So we have fellowship with him and with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanses us from all sin. Because it’s important to note that in this passage he is writing to believers. Now it’s true that the blood of Christ will cleanse a non-believer when they believe.

It’s true that as it says in verse 9, that if a non-believer will confess his sins and repent, Jesus Christ will forgive him, will cleanse him from all unrighteousness. That is true, but in this passage he is writing these letters to believers. He’s writing to us saying, you’re going to try to walk toward the light, but you’re still going to sin.

You’re still going to mess up, but you know what? You keep pursuing that light and trust that the blood of Christ cleanses you from those sins when you stumble. Cleanses us from all sins.

What about the really big ones? All. All means all.

What about the little ones that are so small, I don’t feel like I even need to confess them. No, He says all. He cleanses us from all sin.

If we say, and here again, Lest we think he’s talking about us being sinlessly perfect. Here again he says, If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. It’s easy to look at that and look at the world and say, See, everybody’s a sinner and that’s true.

All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. It’s true to look at the world and say, You can’t claim to be sinless because God says otherwise. You do need a Savior.

You do need Jesus because you do have sin. but he’s also writing to us. In this passage, he is predominantly writing to believers and saying, hey, believer.

Hey, person who’s been a believer for 25 years and thinks, well, I don’t do anything really that bad. He says, if you say you have no sin, and I raise my hand because I’m in that camp. I’ve been a believer for 26 years now.

By far the vast majority of my life. And I think, well, I haven’t done this, I haven’t done that, I haven’t gotten in any really big trouble. But he looks at people like that, he looks at the believers and says, if you say you have no sin, you deceive yourself.

And that’s true. Because yeah, I haven’t gotten in any really big trouble, but I get myself in lots of really little trouble every day. There’s still sin there.

And if I said otherwise, if I told you that I was sinless this morning, I would be lying to you. And more importantly, if I convince myself that I’m just perfect, I’m deceiving myself. And that’s true of all of us.

We forget sometimes, after we’ve been believers for a long time, that we still have that sin nature. And we still need to make sure that our fellowship with God is where it needs to be. Because the sin will inhibit the fellowship.

And so after calling us out in verse 8 and saying, by the way, you have sinned and don’t say you don’t, he tells us in verse 9, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And again, I quote this verse and have quoted this verse many times in an evangelistic context of trying to tell a non-believer that you have sinned and God will forgive your sin through Jesus Christ. But don’t forget, he’s writing to believers here. That is true of a non-believer.

But he’s writing it for us and saying, you will continue to sin. But, if you will confess that sin, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Through the blood of Jesus Christ that he talks about in verse 7.

And if we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. So he jumps back and forth between these points of sin and forgiveness, and sin and reconciliation, and sin, and he goes back to it again and says, and by the way, it’s not just that you’re deceiving yourself. If you say that you have no sin, you’re calling God a liar.

It’s one of those classic, my word against his word situations. You know whose word you ought to take if it’s my word against God’s word? His.

Don’t listen to me. because I’m full of sin and he says so. People will lie to you.

People will confuse you. People will deceive you. God cannot lie to you and will not.

So John says, it’s our word against his. We make him a liar. Not literally that he’s a liar, but that’s the implication because God says we have sin.

If we say we don’t, we’re calling him a liar and we know that’s not true. So he says in chapter 2 verse 1, My little children, these things write unto you that ye sin not. He’s not saying here, and will not say through the remainder of the passage, or through the remainder of the book, that we ever get to the point where we don’t sin.

What he’s talking about is a continual, ongoing lifestyle of unrepentant sin. There’s a verse that the exact wording of is escaping me now, that I believe is in chapter 5, that I’ve looked at before, and people look at it and say, well, there you go. You see, as a Christian, you’re not supposed to sin ever.

And you go and look at the, and we’ll talk about this in a few weeks, I’m sure, but you look at the Greek grammar of it, and it’s talking about an ongoing action. And what he’s saying here is, I write these things to you so that you don’t fall into sin. So that hopefully we can prevent some of this.

So that when you do stumble, you don’t fall down and stay down. He said, I’m writing these things unto you to encourage you to shoot for the target. I’m writing these things to encourage you to check in and make sure you’re on the right track.

He says, and if any man sin. And I’ve looked at that word and. It’s chi in the Greek.

It can mean and. It can also mean any number of conjunctions there. Personally, I think the word but makes the most sense.

I’m not saying and is wrong, but I’m saying the way we use English now, the word but makes more sense. I’m writing these things to you so that hopefully you will not be burdened down with so much sin. He says, and or but, if any man sin.

But if you do, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. I’m hoping that we get to the point where we sin less. And we look like Jesus Christ more.

So that we will have that close fellowship with the Father. I’m hoping that the sin will taper off that it will stop he said but when you do when you inevitably fall when you inevitably fail we do have an advocate with the father we have somebody standing constantly at the right hand of the father or seated at the right hand of God the father saying forgive them. Now it’s already been paid for.

They belong to you. Forgive them. Advocating for us and advocating for grace is Jesus Christ the righteous.

See, you and I will never be righteous like Jesus Christ, but thank God He is righteous and His righteousness is accounted to us. God counts it in our account. And He is the propitiation.

That is sort of the essence of fancy church words right there. Propitiation. It means He’s the sacrifice.

He’s the substitute. He’s the one who stood in our place. He is the propitiation for our sins.

And not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world. So we have standing or seated at the right hand of the Father. We have the very one who was the propitiation.

The very one who was the sacrificial substitute. the very one who went to the cross and took the responsibility for our sins on himself and was punished for us and died in our place, we have him whose righteousness is infinite and is counted to our account. We have him next to God the Father advocating on our behalf and calling for grace because of what he did.

And John here says there are going to be times that you fall. And that falling messes up the fellowship. But there’s always a way back.

Some things I want to share with you out of this passage as we come to a close this morning, or come closer, we’re not quite there yet. This passage teaches that God’s nature is absolute sinless perfection, as we’ve talked about already. It says in verse 5 that He is light.

God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. God is absolutely sinless and His standard for us, for us to be one with Him in fellowship, is for us to be sinlessly perfect. And a lifestyle of unconfessed sin is incompatible with close fellowship with God.

A lifestyle of unconfessed sin. When you do something wrong, or when you think something wrong. And again, I want to make very clear this morning that I’m speaking to believers primarily.

This passage is speaking to believers. If you’re somebody who’s never trusted Christ as your Savior, there are still some things in here for you. But a lot of these points are primarily for believers.

If you’re somebody who’s trusted in Christ as your Savior, when you do something wrong, when you think something wrong, when you have a wrong attitude, and you come back, and you confess that, and you repent of it, and you ask God to forgive it, and you ask God to help you to do better the next time, I look at it as like a broken bone. I don’t know that this is true, but I’ve heard it so many times, I just assume it is, that when you break a bone and it knits back together, that it comes back stronger than it was in the first place. That does not do long-term damage to the fellowship between you and God.

I’m not saying we should sin. I will never tell you, hey, go ahead and sin, it’s alright.

but when we confess it when we are keeping track and checking in so frequently that as soon as we do something wrong we feel that sense of guilt that I have disappointed my father yet again and we come back to him and we deal with it then the fellowship doesn’t stay broken what you’re doing is you’re repairing the fellowship and while that sin is not okay there’s no sin that we do that is okay or that God will say is okay or that I as someone who teaches and preaches God’s word will ever say is okay God knows that we have that sin nature and that we’re going to sin and that’s built into this that it’s already been forgiven and that God stands willing to forgive and to restore the relationship it says that he will the Bible says that he will choose to remember our sins no more It’s not that God forgets. He just says, I’m putting that aside. That’s not even a factor here anymore.

The bigger problem is when we fall into the mud and stay down because we like it. It’s one thing to trip and fall into the mud and stand up and say, I can’t believe I just fell like that and ask God to clean us up. It’s another thing entirely to fall down in the mud and wallow in it because we like it.

Or to go looking for the mud. And that lifestyle, we all at times I think do this. Where we think, ah, it’s not a big deal. And we keep holding hands with that sin and skipping on down the road.

What we don’t realize is because we’re not checking in on that fellowship with God, we’re getting further and further and further from where we need to be. Because sin will always drag us further from Him. And He tells us that we cannot walk in darkness and say that we have fellowship with God and be telling the truth.

If we continue in that lifestyle of darkness, of unconfessed sin, of looking at God and saying, yeah, I know you say this is wrong, but I really don’t care. If that’s our attitude, we cannot be telling the truth when we say God and I are like this. he told us Jesus told us if you love me keep my commandments and the sad truth is that even as believers we’re incapable of ridding ourselves of sin don’t you wish that there was a button that you could push that would say no more sin and I’m not talking about forgiveness of sins yes God through the blood of Jesus Christ looks at us and says no more sin I see the righteousness of Christ in them in terms of our eternal destination.

But don’t you wish you could push a button and say, I won’t sin anymore. And it just makes you perfect. I wish there was that button.

I wish there was a switch on the back of our heads that we could do that. It’s not there. And despite your best efforts, and we should make our best efforts to live holy lives, but despite our best efforts, we will never rid ourselves of sin.

He’s writing to believers again and says, you say you have no sin, you deceive yourself. We never get to that point where we stop sinning. Which, as I said, is a problem because that sin, if we let it fester and we let it go and we ignore it and we don’t check in with God and if we don’t try to get back to that straight line of fellowship where we’re supposed to be, then that sin will inevitably pull us way off course.

So the answer then is to check in frequently with God and realize that Jesus Christ cleanses us of sin when we ask Him. Now for the purpose of the relationship, your sin has already been forgiven when you trust Jesus Christ as your Savior. He forgave at past, present, and future.

There’s nothing you could do that God would wake up in the morning and say, wow, didn’t see that coming. God saw your sin. Jesus saw your sin on the cross and He died for it.

and it’s forgiven for the purpose of the relationship. But it has to be dealt with in terms of fellowship. You’ve got to come back together and be reconciled.

And the blood of Jesus cleanses us. When we ask Him, all He says we have to do is confess it and He cleanses us from that sin. Now, if you don’t confess it, it doesn’t mean you’re going to hell.

If you truly have been born again and say you do something wrong and you haven’t had time to confess and you get hit by a truck, it doesn’t mean you’re going to hell. But it means during our time on earth, the fellowship is not what it’s supposed to be if we have unconfessed sin. Folks, confession fosters closer fellowship with the Father.

As my pastor used to say growing up, keeping a short list of accounts with God. In other words, don’t wait until you’ve solved the whole board check and make sure it was straight. You draw that line and then you check it constantly and hug that line to make sure that you’re where you need to be.

And if you realize you start getting off by a millimeter or so, you go back to that line. You get back to where you need to be. When you’re working on a r

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