Proof We Know Christ

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Transcript:

Well, this week I had to go into the city at one point to go after Charlie’s birth certificate. And I tell you what, if you want a fun way to kick off your weekend, spend Friday at the state health department where even despair goes to die. And if you want it to be even more fun, take a six-year-old along with you who will ask you a ton of questions and he’s antsy because it’s getting close to lunchtime.

I thought to myself at one point, I wonder if this is what hell waiting room is like. Anyway, we got the birth certificate, and one of the 10,000 questions Benjamin asked was, why do we need that? I said, well, in case Charlie ever wants to be president.

And he said, well, what if I want to be president? I said, we’ve already got yours. Calm down.

We’re good. We need to get the paperwork. We need to get his birth certificate.

It’s just good to have on hand. But one thing that they’re insistent on is they want proof of a relationship because it’s not an open record. They want to know that you have some relationship to the person that you are trying to get the record on.

And so I had to provide ID to prove that I was who I said I was because then they could look on the birth certificate and see, oh, he’s listed as the father. Okay, he can get it. There’s proof now of a relationship.

So it was only, you know, three short hours later. And it wasn’t quite that long. We were in and out in 45 minutes.

It just seemed to take forever. You know, not too long afterwards, we were leaving there with a birth certificate because we had to provide proof that there was a relationship. And one of the reasons we got the birth certificate was so that in a few weeks when we get the rest of the paperwork, we can go down to Durant and have his tribal paperwork done.

and you want to talk about proof of relationship, that’s where it really has to kick in. Because not only do I have to show proof that he’s my son, but I have to show proof that I’m my dad’s son, and I have to show proof that my dad is my grandpa’s son, and I have to show proof that my grandpa was my great because we have to have proof that there’s a relationship. And I’m sure there are other times in life where you have to show proof of a relationship in some form or fashion.

Sometimes you might take a child or a grandchild to the doctor. They want to know that you have authorization. There are all kinds of times we have to show evidence.

We have to show proof that there’s a relationship. And so it’s no wonder that John talks about the concept of proof of a relationship in 1 John 2. If you’ll turn there with me this morning, we’re going to look at 1 John 2 as we go through this series over the next few weeks of some of the final advice given by the final living eyewitness to the entire ministry of Jesus.

John was the last one of the apostles around, and so when he looked around and he’s the last of them and there’s a whole new generation of Christians who had never walked personally with Jesus Christ who were going to need guidance, John said, I’m it. And John wrote three letters that I think we can take a lot of encouragement and a lot of challenge and certainly a lot of information from as we try to serve him. And one of the things that he writes about is this concept of a proof of relationship.

We’re going to pick up this morning in verse 3, and it says, and hereby we do know that we know him if we keep his commandments. And one thing you’ll see throughout the book of 1 John consistently, is this idea of knowing. John has written these things because he did not want them, and he does not want us to be in doubt when it comes to the faith.

He said, by this you will know that you know him. He said, By this you’ll have proof that there’s a relationship here, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.

But whoso keepeth his word in him verily is the love of God perfected, or made complete. Hereby know we that we are in him. So he’s talking here about proof of being in Christ, proof of abiding in Christ, proof of this relationship.

Verse 6 says, He that saith he abideth in him, ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked. Brethren, okay, stop at verse 6 for now. He said, here’s the proof, here’s some of the proof, here’s some of the evidence that we know him.

And this is not just, oh, I know who he is. Oh, I know the mayor of Seminole. I met him once at a function.

I know who he is. I don’t really know him. He probably couldn’t pick me out of a lineup, and I probably wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a lineup either.

I don’t know him. I know Benjamin. I know Madeline.

I know many of you, maybe not as well as Benjamin or Madeline, because I’ve never had to bathe any of y’all, and look forward to not ever having to do that. But I know you. There’s a relationship there.

When he says, I know you, or I know him, he’s talking about a relationship. It’s not just, oh, I know who he is. It’s talking about, we know the difference.

There’s a difference in emphasis. We use the same word, but we know the difference. oh I know that guy I know my son you understand the difference and when he says how do we know that we know him he’s talking about the latter how do we know that there’s been a relationship that we know him experientially that we have a good grasp on who he is and know him intimately he says well the first evidence is obedience that you’re obeying him that you’re walking the way he walked that you’re following his example he said right there is is evidence of this relationship proof of that relationship.

Then he goes on in verse 7. Brethren, I write no new commandment unto you, but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which ye have heard from the beginning.

Again, a new commandment I write unto you, which thing is true in him and in you, because the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth. And if you’re paying close attention and not zoning me out, you may pick up on what I picked up on as I read through this and go, wait a minute. He says in verse 6, I’m not, I’m sorry, verse 7, I’m not writing a new commandment to you.

And then in verse 8, he says, and again, a new commandment I write to you. And this is one of those things that I think would show up on the internet where people like to make their gotcha lists of, see, there are contradictions in the Bible. That’s not a contradiction.

Unless you think John was so forgetful that he forgets what he wrote in the last, in the last sentence. Okay, let’s think through this for a minute. Is it possible he’s saying something else?

Is John the most forgetful person on the planet, or is he saying something else? He’s saying something else. And when you begin to look at the Greek wording and you look at some other translations, they clarify a little bit what he’s trying to say.

He says, I’m not telling you anything new. He said, the commandments I’m giving you are the same commandments God’s given you all along. To tell you to obey God is nothing new.

But then you go to verse 8 and he says, and yet everything is new. It’s not that the commandment itself is new, but it’s like a new commandment because Jesus has changed everything. Jesus has utterly and completely and finally changed our relationship to God.

The relationship to God that is described in the Old Testament is different from the relationship to God that is described in the New Testament. In the Old Testament, they weren’t saved by the sacrifices and the rituals. They were saved by faith, but they only had shadows of what was to come.

They didn’t see clearly the Redeemer who was to come. And those rituals and those sacrifices were a picture of Jesus Christ. So in the Old Testament, they stood distant from God, waiting to be redeemed. And now the Bible says that we can come boldly to the throne of grace, that we might obtain mercy.

And it’s not that suddenly we’ve improved, and so now we have the right to just kick down the door and go into God’s throne room. It’s that we can go boldly before the throne of grace because Jesus has torn down the veil of separation between us and God the Father. And through Jesus, not through our own goodness, but through Jesus, we now have access to God.

And not only that, but Jesus changes us from the inside out. Jesus left us with his Holy Spirit to where now we have a different capacity to obey God. In the Old Testament, they were concerned primarily, the people were concerned primarily with the outward display of righteousness and whether or not we’re outwardly doing the right things.

Am I following the right laws? Am I washing my hands correctly? Have I done everything just so?

And in the New Testament, Jesus said the whole point of that was the condition of the heart. And he told them they missed really the whole point of it because God was telling them even in the days of Samuel and David that man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart. Well, with Jesus, he transforms us.

He changes us from the inside out to where obedience to God should now be a desire and not an obligation. And something we do out of a sense of gratitude toward God and not out of a fear of retaliation. You see, when Jesus shed his blood on the cross and when he said, it is finished, and he gave up his life, he died, and the earth shook and the graves were open and that veil in the temple that separated man from the Holy of Holies was torn in two, the whole relationship to God changed.

And so John here says, I’m not writing you any new commandment. It’s the same thing you’ve been hearing from the beginning. Obey God, obey God, obey God.

And then he goes on in verse 8 to say, and yet a new commandment I do write you. The concept is nothing new, but the circumstances are so different now that it’s almost like a whole new commandment. It’s almost like a whole new ballgame.

So don’t think that that’s a contradiction here. John, again, would have to be the most forgetful person on the planet to say, I’m not writing you anything new. Oh, by the way, here’s the new thing I’m writing you.

No, he’s making a point. And it’s something I think in the Greek they would have understood better than we do in the English translation. He’s making the point that the expectation for us is the same as it always has been.

Obedience to God. And yet Jesus has completely changed the circumstances, where we can now obey God out of a heart of thankfulness and out of a changed life, rather than just focus on these externals. He says again, verse 8, again a new commandment, I write unto you which thing is true in him and in you, because the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth.

Verse 9 says, he that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now. He’s talking about walking in darkness. He says in verse 8 how the light has come and has changed everything.

The true light shineth. The light of Jesus Christ shines in our hearts. And then he goes on in verse 9 to say, He that says he’s in the light, the one who says he walks in the light of Jesus Christ and hates his brother is in darkness.

Wait a minute, if I’m in darkness, that means I’m not in the light of Jesus Christ. Because you can’t really be half in the dark and half in the light. Go into a dark room and try to rig a light bulb where you say, I only want it to light half the room. Well, you either need to just get used to the room being light, or you need to build a second room.

You need to split it now. He says, if you say you’re in the light, and yet you hate your brother, you walk in darkness. So there’s no proof there of a relationship with Jesus Christ if we hate our brother.

Verse 10, He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him. But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in the darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness had blinded his eyes.

And folks, one of the things that this passage tells us, one of the things that this passage shows us, is that if we have been saved by Jesus Christ, if we’ve come to the realization that our sins have separated us from God, and that we need a Savior, if we come to the point of realizing that Jesus is the only one who could save us, because of what he did on the cross, and that he paid for our sins, and that he paid for them in full, and that he paid for them once for all, If we come to that realization and we believe that He died for us, and we put our faith in Him, and we ask Him to forgive us because of what He did on the cross, if we’ve come to that point and we’ve been born again and God has transformed us from the inside out through faith, then that saving work of Jesus Christ is going to be evident in our lives. There should be some evidence.

I’ve seen people get saved out of rough lifestyles. And you know what? Everything doesn’t always change overnight.

There’s a noticeable change in people, but there still may be some language that I wouldn’t use. There may still be some habits that I wouldn’t engage in, but there’s going to be some evidence. There’s going to be some evidence of the saving work of Jesus Christ. Something in them that’s different.

You know what? Let’s be fair here. I’ve seen people get saved out of a churchy background, and still there’s some things I wouldn’t say, and some things I wouldn’t do that don’t change immediately.

But the work of God should be evident in them. And I’ve told you before, last month when Benjamin made a profession of faith, I wanted to tread very lightly. Because I wanted to make sure I’m not giving him false assurance, make sure he understands and all that.

And I would ask him the questions without trying to give him. . .

I would try not to ask leading questions where I’m giving him the answers where he’ll answer what he thinks I want to hear. I just want to see what his answer is. And he kept giving the right answers, and I thought, okay, preacher’s kid, he’s heard this.

Maybe he’s just memorizing the right answers. And I kept thinking, well, I can only take somebody at their word. I can only take somebody at their word.

But the Bible also says by their fruit you will know them. And there are people in our world who claim to be Christians, and I know the world likes to say, well, who are you to judge their relationship with Christ? I’m not judging anybody’s relationship with Christ, but the Bible says by their fruit you will know them, and I see no fruit.

And it makes me question whether they really are or not. When I really became convinced that, okay, I think what has happened with Benjamin is genuine, is when I started to see a change in his heart and in his attitude. Almost immediately.

Now, he didn’t become perfect overnight. And I’m still waiting for it to happen. He hasn’t become perfect yet.

Yeah, good luck, right? He won’t. And I know that because his daddy hasn’t.

I’m still waiting for me to be perfect, too. But you know what? I saw a change.

I saw a definite change in the boy. And I got saved at an early age. I got saved at the age of five.

I didn’t have time to get in too much trouble. I didn’t come from a rough background. And yet I know there was a change in my heart.

And I look over the years, and I’m still not where I should be, but I look over the years and I see the change that God has made in me. I see the change that God has made in just the last year. I see the big change God has made just over the last ten years.

I was obnoxious. I was the Bible thumper that people like to make fun of, and no love behind it or very little love behind it. Man, God has softened my heart.

I see changes. It’s not necessarily going to be everything is fixed overnight, because the process of sanctification that we’ve talked about before, the Bible describes as something ongoing, where God continually shapes us and molds us into what we need to be. But don’t let that be an excuse to say, well, I’m still just being sanctified.

If nothing has changed. If nothing has changed in your heart and life, because the saving work of Jesus Christ that takes place in our hearts, there will be some evidence of the relationship. There will be some evidence of a change that takes place in our hearts if it was genuine that we came to Christ and we were saved by His grace through faith.

There will be some evidence, some proof of the relationship. And He outlines very clearly, I think. I mean, I know some passages of the Bible are hard.

This is not one of them. He outlines very clearly what at least two of those evidences are. There are more that the Bible talks about, but the two he talks about here are very simple.

And he points out in verses 7 and 8, we cannot follow Jesus without being different as a result. Because he said, yes, you had this commandment from the beginning, it’s nothing new. What is expected from you is obedience toward God.

But then in verse 8, he goes on and talks about the change that Jesus has made in us, the light shining in our hearts that enables us to do what we’ve known we were supposed to do all along. Do you realize that the commands that God gives us are impossible to follow? There are probably churches across this country this morning, hundreds of them, where you could walk in and get a message about, well, just try harder and be better.

Well, we should try harder and we should be better, but the problem is we can’t. The stuff God has told us to do, we cannot do perfectly. We cannot meet his standards because we’re just a bunch of stinking sinners.

I know I am I know every day I let him down I know every day I read stuff in the Bible and go yeah I’m not doing that right I cannot love people perfectly I cannot love people the way God loves people but you know what he works in my heart and he loves people through me I’m still working on learning to love people the way he does and hopefully I’m better than I used to be but when it really shines through and when love is really shown and really demonstrated it’s because he enabled me it’s because he loved people through me I can’t always resist temptation. I’m weak. I know this because I’ve been there when I’ve eaten.

And I can’t even say no to food. Can’t even say no to the fifth piece of pie sometimes. You know what?

There are times though that I flee temptation. Like the Bible tells us. By the way, the Bible doesn’t tell you to, at least not as much as we’re led to believe, oh, fight temptation.

No, the Bible says get out of there. The Bible says run. Because we’re not strong enough.

I’m not strong enough to do the right thing all the time. But God enables me to do the right thing. God enables me to obey Him.

And so there’s this change that Jesus makes in our hearts. And as a result of that, we cannot follow Jesus without obeying His commands. This is the first of the two evidences.

We cannot follow Jesus without obeying His commands. He says, if we claim to belong to Him, if we claim to know Him, don’t forget what that word know means. It means that we have a relationship with Him.

We know Him intimately. There’s a fellowship there. There’s a relationship there.

He says if we say that we know Him, and yet we’re not obeying Him, John says this, not me, so get mad at Him. And by the way, John, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, so you can be mad at God, really, he says we’re liars. He says we’re liars.

Now does that mean that if you go out later today and you do something wrong, that you’re not saved? That’s not what that means. If you as somebody who’s put your trust in Jesus Christ, go out and commit a sin later today, and you will, that’s called the sin nature.

It’s just something that we all have. It doesn’t mean that you’re not saved. It means, as we talked about last week, that you need to come back and deal with God and get back on the right track, confess it, and have the fellowship restored, but the relationship is still there.

But as I told you about this last week, there’s a passage, I think, in 1 John 5 that we’ll get to in a few weeks, where he says that those who belong to God don’t sin. And as I explained to you, if we took that just at face value, it would be a contradiction with what a lot of the rest of the Bible teaches. And so you look at the Greek and what it says, and they have different verb tenses than we do, but it’s talking about an ongoing activity.

It’s talking about a lifestyle of sin. It’s not saying believers will never sin. It’s saying that if we, okay, we all trip and fall in the mud at times.

Believers will want to get up and ask God to clean us back off and keep going on down the road. If we trip and we fall into the mud and we decide to stay down there and wallow in it for a while because we like it, that’s when we need to question, is the relationship genuine? Because there should be a change of the desires of the heart.

And that’s what he’s talking about here, too, when he talks about disobedience. Have I disobeyed Jesus since I got saved? You bet.

Have I disobeyed Jesus this morning? You bet. and usually it’s through my stinking attitude.

I told you last week, for me, not doing anything wrong is the easy part. It’s what goes on in here that’s the hard part. It’s this selfish heart I’ve got.

But if there’s a lifestyle of saying, Jesus, I don’t care what you say. I don’t care what you want me to do. And that’s our lifestyle.

That’s the way we live on a daily basis. And yet we’re saying we follow him, then John says you’re a liar. If I get up every morning and say, I don’t care what Jesus wants.

I don’t care how he says I’m supposed to live my life. I don’t care what this book says about X, Y, or Z, whatever I want to do. But yeah, I’m a follower of Jesus Christ. And John says you’re a liar.

John says I would be lying. If on the other hand, I get up every morning and say, I want to follow Jesus today. And throughout the day, I fall short of that goal. But I confess my sin to him.

And I keep trying. That’s evidence of a relationship. Because God knows we can’t follow his commandments perfectly.

But what God is looking for is a heart of obedience that is sensitive to what he calls us to do. God knows we will never be perfect. God is looking for us to have a heart and a desire toward obedience.

If we don’t have that, we can’t say we follow Jesus. We’ll end up, if we’re really following Jesus, if there’s really a relationship, it’s going to show up in evidence as we follow his example, as it points out in verse 6, that we will walk as he walked. We’re going to be following his example.

Verse 5 says that the love of God is perfected in us. Well, that means we’ll see the love of God come to fruition. We’ll see fruit in our lives that’s the love of God doing its work, changing us and molding us into who we need to be.

But folks, the bottom line there is obedience is evidence that we belong to him. And if there’s no obedience, if there’s no lifestyle of obedience, imperfect as it may be, if there’s no lifestyle of obedience, we need to check and see if there really is a relationship. Now the next evidence that he talks about is loving others.

We cannot follow Jesus without loving others. We cannot hate our brother and claim to love Jesus, claim to follow Jesus. Verses 9 through 11 make that very clear.

He that saith he is in the light and hateth his brother is in darkness even until now. He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him. But he that hateth his brother is in darkness and walketh in the darkness and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.

Are we ever going to get mad at each other? Probably. If we spend enough time together, we’re going to get mad at each other.

It’s just the way things are. You may get mad at me. You probably will get mad at me at some point.

I may get mad at you. Even if we’re not mad, we may get offended sometimes. You may get offended with each other, and then we need to deal with that, and we need to forgive each other.

We need to ask forgiveness and extend forgiveness, and we need to move on. But what we see a lot of times is human nature says, no, I was wronged, whether it was a real wrong or whether it was a perceived wrong. I was wronged, and I want to be mad.

And even in churches, I see people holding on to the silliest little things. I’m mad at so-and-so, and they would never say I hate. There’s a definite attitude of hatred in the heart.

And these are for the people that are supposed to be closest to us. These are our brothers and sisters in Christ, and we can’t even love each other. And John says there’s a problem.

John says you want evidence of the relationship, but you love each other. By this will all men know that you’re my disciple indeed, if you have love for the brethren, Jesus said. If you love one another.

Folks, we’re called on to love the lost and dying world outside these four walls. How can we love people? How can we love people who reject our Jesus if we can’t even love each other?

And it’s easy for me to say that this morning again because I don’t know of any circumstances like that going on. Now there may be some of you who are sideways with each other and you’re just really good at covering it up and I don’t know. But I don’t know of anything like that going on.

But if we were fighting and squabbling all the time and hated each other how could we love the world outside? You see, what I find is I get mad. I get mad over petty stuff.

You know, I’ve heard plenty of the stories about me driving in the car and now my children repeating what I say. I get mad. Of course, I get over it, but what’ll happen is I get mad somebody does something that they shouldn’t have done, and usually it has more to do with somebody doing something to a family member of mine than doing something or saying something to me.

I’ll get mad. I’ll get furious. And then the more I stew about it and the more I want to be mad, I feel the Holy Spirit tapping me on the shoulder.

What? And I start remembering scriptures that I’ve read about how I’m supposed to respond to things. Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted and forgiving others, even as Christ, even as God, I’m trying to remember the exact phrasing.

It’s funny, I never have trouble remembering it when I’m mad. Even as God, for Christ’s sake, forgave us, I believe is what it says in Ephesians. thanks Holy Spirit I don’t want to think about that at the moment and then I start hearing as far as it’s possible as much as it lies within you live at peace with all men okay I start hearing verses like that the Holy Spirit just starts nailing me with them and what I find is my heart starts to soften he’s not saying we’ll never be mad at each other but you know the difference between being mad at somebody and holding a grudge for years and years and being driven by blind hatred and fury toward them.

That has no place in a Christian’s heart. He says if we hate our brethren and yet we say we love Jesus, he says we’re lying. We’re lying to other people.

We’re lying to ourselves. It’s a love for others that is evidence of the relationship we have with Jesus. You cannot have the Spirit of God dwelling in your heart and be following Jesus who practiced love perfectly and not love other people.

Now you may have room to grow in how much you love them and demonstrate that love. There being that love in there is evidence of the relationship. We cannot follow Jesus without loving others.

And it’s something that he does inside of us, as I’ve said. It’s something where he changes the heart, where he makes us new, where he renews us to what he created us to be in the first place and begins molding us and shaping us. And there’s this renewal, this sanctification that goes on Folks, it’s this renewal where the Spirit of God enables us to obey God in a new way.

Where the Spirit of God enables us to love others in a new way. It’s this renewal that’s constantly going on that confirms the relationship that we say we have. It’s the proof.

Our renewal confirms our relationship. If you want to know today whether your relationship with Jesus Christ is genuine, look for the renewal. Look and see, has He made your heart new? Is He changing your heart?

Is he making you better than you used to be? It’s not about us and our efforts and our good works. It’s all the work of Jesus Christ when you get right down to it.

Not only in saving us, but in sanctifying us as well. I can’t save myself. I can’t do anything to save myself and rescue myself from hell.

I also can’t do anything to make myself a better person. It’s the work of Jesus Christ. You want to know, is it genuine? Look for the renewal. Our renewal confirms our relationship.

A life that has been transformed by Jesus Christ to obey God and love others is the best evidence we have that we have a relationship with him. Has he made you new? Is he still making you new today?

Our renewal confirms our relationship. And so this morning I would just leave you on this basis as he says, you want to know if you know him or are you obeying him? He says, do you want to know if you really know him or are you loving other people?

Well, then I’ve been asking myself the same question, and I would ask you the same question. Evaluate yourself, how ready you are to obey God and to love others. Are you obeying God out of a sense of obligation?

Are you obeying God infrequently and mostly saying, well, I don’t care what God says? Are you starting out with a desire to obey God, and yeah, you mess up sometimes, but you come back to Him and you deal with Him about it, and He forgives you, and you go on trying to obey Him. Which one of those characterizes your life?

Do you love others? I’m not saying do you love them perfectly the way God does. Again, we’re incapable.

But do you have a spirit of bitterness toward others, toward fellow believers, toward the world outside? Or do you sometimes get mad and get sideways with others, but you generally, you know you need to love them and you try to love them because Christ tells you to and you need His help. You can’t do it perfectly, but you need His help and with His help you try.

Which one of those do you fall into? I can’t tell you.

I can’t tell you where your heart is I wish I could it would be so much easier if I could do an x-ray scan of everybody in the room sa

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