- Text: I John 2:12-17, KJV
- Series: Letters from the Last Apostle (2017), No. 4
- Date: Sunday morning, July 23, 2017
- Venue: Trinity Baptist Church — Seminole, Oklahoma
- Audio Download: https://archive.org/download/rejoicingintruthpodcast_202011/2017-s06-n04z-your-hearts-not-big-enough-for-two.mp3
Listen Online:
Transcript:
I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. I’m sure some of you, if not most of you, can relate to the feeling that we’re surrounded every day by things and people wanting our attention. Sometimes just screaming out for our attention.
Some of you, your phones are going to go off during church today. Some of you, your phones are going to buzz. Hopefully you’ve remembered to turn them off.
I have to check mine. But some of you, your phones are going to buzz. There’s going to be somebody in the world that wants your attention.
Mine goes off constantly during church. And I always think everybody who knows me well enough to have my number knows where I’m going to be at this time. And sometimes I’ll glance at it.
And I think that is not an emergency that could have waited. But the world out there wants your attention. You’re watching TV.
You’re watching the news. And suddenly, a car salesman or a furniture salesman comes on and tries to deafen you. Don’t they?
Anybody else notice that the commercials are just screaming for your attention? Drives me crazy. They want your attention because they just have to sell you something.
Your lawns and gardens need your attention or they will get overgrown quickly. There’s always something to do. I know mine doesn’t stop growing.
Jim, the churchyard, doesn’t stop growing ever, does it? Except maybe winter. But all through the spring and summer, it doesn’t stop growing.
We’ve got dishes and housework that pile up and they require our attention. Children, grandchildren, they require our attention. Sometimes they wake up screaming in the middle of the night and need to eat or think they need to eat and demand attention, which is why I’m kind of tired this morning.
We’ve got deadlines. We’ve got doctor visits. We’ve got bills.
We’ve got unfinished projects. We are literally surrounded by things demanding just a little sliver of our attention. They want just a little bit of our attention.
The problem is that this is not only true in the physical world. It goes on in the world that we can see, but it goes on in the world that we can’t see either. It goes on in the spiritual world as well.
Satan wants just a little bit of your attention. Just a little bit. He just wants you to pay attention to this temptation or that temptation.
But once he has that attention, he’ll do anything he can. Well, he’ll do anything he can in the first place to get a little bit of your attention. and once he’s got it, he’ll do anything he can to get just a little more attention and just a little more attention and just a little more attention, always a little more attention in hopes that he can ultimately steal all of your attention and steal all of your affection from God where your attention and affection belong.
And it’d be nice if we could just turn this off and say, nah, not going to do it. But we have this sinful human nature that makes us vulnerable to it. I mean, Satan knows exactly what kind of lures to use.
It’s like with fishing. I still have not figured out what lures to use for which fish. I just use whichever lures I feel like I want to use that day.
My sister married a man who knows fishing, and now she can outfish all of us. She gave me for Father’s Day some fishing lures, and she says, Brother, this is what I catch catfish with all the time. Well, thank you for showing me up.
but I tried them out and she’s right well I still haven’t caught anything I don’t know but she knows just what like where were you when I went fishing when we were growing up she never had an interest but now she knows just what lures to use well Satan is like my sister and you can tell her I said that later I didn’t say my sister’s like Satan I said Satan’s like my sister knows just what lures to use to catch us. We have this sinful human nature that makes us vulnerable. That he dangles just the thing that’s going to get a little bit of our attention.
We’re vulnerable. And John, the apostle John, was worried about this vulnerability among early Christians. And the advice that he gave them, as he wrote to them and he encouraged them to hold the line, as he encouraged them to not give into temptation as he encouraged them to not give a bit of their attention to this sin.
The words that he wrote to them ring true for us as well. If you would join me in 1 John chapter 2 this morning, we’re going to look at what he said to them about this idea of these sins that want to grab our attention and not just a little sliver. Satan’s never going to be satisfied with just a little sliver of our attention.
He eventually wants to take it all and push God right out of the equation. And we have to work every day as believers, and I’m speaking primarily to believers this morning, people who put their faith and their trust in Jesus Christ for salvation. We have to fight this fight every day with the power of the Holy Spirit to avoid giving into this because we are vulnerable by nature.
John starts out in verse 13. He says, I write unto you fathers because you have known him that is from the beginning. I write unto you, young men, because ye have overcome the wicked one.
I write unto you, little children, because you have known the Father. I have written unto you fathers, because you have known him that is from the beginning. I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one.
Now this is just a little aside where he’s explaining why he’s writing. And you may notice in there as you’re reading or following along that some of these things he repeats. And there’s something there to do with the fact of saying, I write to you, meaning I’m writing now, and in the other verse saying, I have already written to you.
But the point is he’s writing to these three different groups of Christian people, and I think most of the commentators are right when they identify these as people at various stages of development in the Christian life. There are the little children, those who’ve just come to faith, those who are new in the faith. He writes to the young men, those who are kind of experienced, They’re not baby Christians, but they’re not mature yet.
They’re somewhere in the middle. And then he writes to the fathers, meaning those who are mature in the faith. So it has nothing to do, I think, with your physical age.
It has nothing to do with your gender. It’s talking about where you are in the faith. And he writes to these three groups of people.
He tells the little children, he tells those who are new in the faith, that their sins have been forgiven for Jesus’ sake, because of what Jesus did, their sins are forgiven. He tells them that in verse 12. And he tells them in verse 14, he reminds them that they have a relationship with the Father.
As new Christians, they need that reassurance. Yes, you’re new here. Don’t give in to the lie of Satan that no, God couldn’t really forgive you.
Don’t give in to the lie of Satan that you can’t really know God. You can’t really have a relationship with the Father after all you’ve done. He writes to reassure these new believers, yes, your sins are forgiven.
And yes, you do have a relationship with the Father through Jesus Christ. He writes to the young men and he tells them, look, you’ve already overcome Satan. And he tells them that in verses 13 and 14 and he tells them in verse 14 that they’ve been able to overcome Satan because of the power of the word of God within them that has strengthened them. It’s the word of God that gives them strength.
And for us, it’s the word of God that gives us strength. We are not strong enough to overcome Satan and his temptations on our own. We need God to provide the strength.
And one of the ways he does that is through his word. that when we are in his word and we study his word and we put his word in us that when those temptations come that that word flashes through our minds and reminds us what’s true and what’s false and the Holy Spirit uses that word and he writes this to the to the to the young men young in the faith I should say not brand new but young think about when you were most likely to make really bad decisions for your life. It was in adolescence, wasn’t it?
Most of us. Or are you still making really bad decisions? Hope not.
But when we have just enough knowledge to be dangerous, but not really enough knowledge to know better, or to be wise about how we employ that knowledge, we tend to make bad decisions when we’re adolescent. I made worse decisions. I’m not knocking anybody.
I made worse decisions at 17 than I make now at 31. That’s just the way life is. I make worse decisions at 31 than probably I will make at 51.
You get wiser as you get older. So he writes to these young people who’ve come out of the first stage of their faith where it’s all brand new, it’s all shiny and everything, and suddenly there’s a little maturity in Christ, but now we’ve gotten back into real life. We’ve come out of that bubble where it’s no longer new, and we’re having to carry our Christianity into real life, and there’s temptations, and he says, hey, you’ve already overcome the world.
This fight that we have every day, oh, can I overcome this sin? Can I overcome this temptation? He said it’s already happened.
Now, as I’ve said repeatedly through this series in 1 John, he’s not saying that we will never sin again. But he’s saying we don’t have to sin. We’re no longer slaves to sin.
That sin has been overcome, and it can be overcome. In any given moment, we can make the choice to follow God and be obedient because he’s empowered us and he’s already overcome the world. And he writes to the fathers.
He writes to those who are mature in the faith. And he says, you know the eternal God. He writes to these people who’ve been established.
They’ve been in the faith for many years. They’ve grown in Christ. And he says, you know the eternal God. He talks about the one who was from the beginning.
And he’s reminding them that everything they would have known of the Old Testament, that the God who was there, the God who parted the Red Sea, the God who provided the sacrifice for Abraham, the God who helped David kill or enabled David to kill Goliath, the God who kept Daniel safe in the lion’s den, the God who delivered Jonah from the belly of the well after putting him there in the first place, the God who did all these things is the same God that they were walking with now. So as they’ve gotten up there in years of the faith and they’ve learned more about who God is and they have more knowledge under their belts of who God is, as we get older we get tired, don’t we? Y’all are looking at me like you don’t even know yet.
I have a new baby at home. I know what tired means. As we get older, we get tired.
There’s a reason we have children in our 30s, 20s and 30s, and not our 50s and 60s usually. God did that for a reason. The same thing is true in our faith.
That I’ve seen people get saved and they’re very excited and they’re bouncing off the walls and then older Christians say, oh, they’ll calm down eventually. They’ll get over it. And that bugs me.
I don’t want to get over it. We shouldn’t get over it. But we do.
We slow down. I’ve been walking with Jesus now for 20, 25 years, and it’s just life. And I think it’s to renew our sense of awe.
Hey, the God who did all these things that you know about is the same God that you have a relationship with. And so he’s writing to all these different believers at their different stages of life and reminding them and reassuring them about the relationship that they have with God and their ability to be obedient to him. So he goes from this explanation of why he’s writing, and he moves into verse 15 and issues them a challenge.
Because John knows that Satan is going to come along dangling all these things that are going to try to get their attention and pull it away from God. And he tells them, verse 15, Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
Now this may be a little bit confusing, because the word love is the same word used many times in the Bible. Notably, I compared this against the Greek words in John 3. 16, and the words love and the word world, the words for love and world are the same.
So he’s telling us God so loved the world, agape meaning love, meaning God’s kind of unconditional sacrificial love, the world, the cosmos, he’s talking about the physical, that Greek word meant the physical world, but it really was indicating the people in it. God so loved the people of the world that he sent his only begotten son. And then in the same, the same writer is telling us that we are not supposed to love the world.
But it’s all about context. If we were really crabby Christians, really cranky Christians, we could look at this and take it out of context and say, see, I’m not supposed to like my neighbors. That’s not what he’s saying.
When he’s talking about world, he goes on and he’s talking about sin and he’s talking about wickedness. It’s the world system. Folks, we are supposed to love our neighbors.
He told us that. Jesus told us that. That was the second greatest commandment.
Love your neighbor as yourself. We’re supposed to love our neighbors. We’re supposed to love those around us.
What he’s talking about not loving is this world system, the wickedness of this world, not being attached to the things of this world and not putting them in a place that is reserved only for God, that we are not supposed to choose the temporary amusements of the world and chase those temporary amusements at the expense of our loyalty to God. He says, don’t love the world or the things that are in the world. If any man loved the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
Yes, we’re supposed to love the people around us. But what he’s saying is that if we have an excessive attachment to this world and the things of this world, if we love the things of this world, if we love wickedness, if we love temptation, if we love even good things in this world more than we love God, then the love of the Father is not in us. And we can claim all day to be serving Him and to love Him, but He says it’s not true.
John has this way about Him where He’s not afraid to say, you may say this, you may think this, but here’s the evidence and you’re a liar. I’m not telling you that. That’s what John said, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
You might think, well, the preacher got up there and called me a liar. No, no. I read these things all the time, and I have to ask myself, am I exhibiting the things that John talks about? Am I saying one thing and living another, and doing what John says will make me a liar.
I ask myself those questions all the time. And sometimes I don’t like the answer. And sometimes it shows me something I need to fix.
And he tells them why they can’t love the world or shouldn’t love the world. He says in verse 16, For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. All the sins sort of fall into one of these three categories.
The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. And he said, those things are not compatible with a love for the Father. And he says in verse 17, And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.
So it’s a challenge from John to look at our love for God and look at the love we might have for the world and say, okay, there’s not room in our hearts for both of these. There’s not room in our hearts for both of these. Jesus said we could not serve two masters.
We’ll end up loving one and hating the other. There’s not room in our hearts to be loyal to God and to the things of this world. And so the whole point of this passage is to tell us that we cannot love God and the sinful pursuits of this world.
Say, wait a minute, I sin sometimes. You say I don’t love God, that’s not what I’m saying. But do you love your sin?
Do you sin and then say, oh, that was fun, I can’t wait to do it again. Or do you sin and say, what is wrong with me? Why would I do that?
God, what is wrong with me? Help me not to do that anymore. After you say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing or have the wrong attitude of the heart, do you love it or do you love God and want to serve Him?
Now, there’s no question we’re going to fall short of that trying to serve God. There’s no question that we’re going to fall short of God’s standard of absolute perfection. But how do we feel about the falling short?
Do we love God more or do we love the sin more? We cannot love God in the sinful pursuits of this world. And here’s maybe a more forceful way of saying that.
Lusting after the world keeps us from loving God. Lusting after the world keeps us from loving God. You’ve only got so much affection and attention to give, and if you start handing it out to the things of the world, pretty soon you’re going to have nothing left to give God.
You know what? God doesn’t deserve our leftovers anyway. God deserves all the attention and affection we could ever give Him, and then some.
But there’s not room in our hearts for both. Lusting after the world will keep us from loving God. Just to reiterate this, there’s not room in our hearts for two occupants.
You can think of it as a single occupancy apartment. There’s not room for two in our hearts. He says in verse 15, Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.
If a man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. These are mutually exclusive. He said, if you love the world, then the love of the Father is not in you.
And you can claim that the love of the Father is in you, but as soon as the love of the world moves in, it’s going to push the love of the Father out. And folks, by the same token, when we get right with God and we love the Father, pushes the love of the world out. You see, they’re not going to both, you know, ride halfway on the seat.
They’re not going to both live halfway in the room. It’s one or the other. There’s not room for two.
If I were to, by the way, I’m not doing this. This is just for example. But if I were to go home today and tell Charla, gee, I think I’d like to marry this second lady.
Do you think she’s going to stick around for that? Or is she going to say it’s either me or you? It’s either me or her.
She’d say it’s either me or her. And that’s the way it should be. If you were to go into battle and try to listen to two different commanders and try to do what two different sets of orders from two different commanders, wouldn’t work, would it?
You’re going to end up having to listen to one or the other. See, it sounds so harsh and so narrow-minded when Christians say, oh, it has to be one or the other. There’s one way.
It has to be this way. We sound so narrow-minded to the world, even though it’s God who said it, not us. It sounds so narrow-minded when we say it’s Christ or the world, and that Jesus is the only way.
There’s so many things that we say that the world says it’s so narrow-minded and it’s so arrogant when we simply repeat what God said, but we all the time deal with things that are either or and can’t be both. Go into the Chinese restaurant and you order with your meal. Benjamin and I like that restaurant down by his old school. You go in there and with your meal, you get a choice of two different kinds of soup.
They’ll bring you the hot and sour or the egg drop. Well, can I have both? No, it’s either or.
And we accept that, don’t we? Well, we’ll bring you the egg roll or the wontons. Can I have both?
It’s either or. Folks, I don’t know why it’s so hard when it comes to God, when his word says it’s either or. There’s only room for one, and lusting after the world keeps us from loving God.
And worldly lust, part of the problem with it is that worldly lust always tries to put someone or something else on God’s throne. Satan’s not going to be satisfied with saying, well, I just want you to like this sin and enjoy this one sin. No, he wants to take over.
He doesn’t want part of your heart. He wants to take over. And by the way, God says the same thing.
I don’t want part of your heart. I want to take over. But Satan’s sneaky about it.
He comes, God is open and says, I want all of your heart. I want all of your devotion. Satan comes in and says, how about this?
It’s like the drug dealer. It says, here, take a little bit. It’s free.
The next thing you know, you’re hooked. Worldly lust always tries to put someone or something else on the throne in your heart and make something else your God because Satan wants to push God out. He says in verse 16, for all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life is not of the father, but is of the world.
There are these three categories that all sin falls into. And I’ve said for years that you can trace all sin back to idolatry in one form or another. And I believe this passage bears that out.
Because there are these three categories of sin, and every sin fits into one or more of these categories. But we’ve got the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. And just to clarify what those mean, the lust of the flesh, we think of that meaning something sexual. And it can include that, but that’s not all it is.
It can include gluttony and just the urges that we have as human beings with the flesh, with the body. It’s the fixation on fulfilling physical desires. Some people have a sinful impulse to be drunk all the time.
That would be a lust of the flesh. I don’t have that one. As far as I know, it’s never shown up.
But boy, oh boy, sometimes I can’t stop eating. And when we cross the line into gluttony, that’s a lust of the flesh. That includes anything where we have physical impulses or desires and we say, you know what, I don’t care what God says, I want this.
And when we give into the lust of the flesh, we make pleasure an idol. I know we talk so much about idolatry, and here in the Western world, we’re prone to think, well, we don’t have idols because we don’t bow down to statues. Oh, don’t delude yourself into thinking we don’t have idols.
We just a lot of times have idols that aren’t obviously visible. With the lust of the flesh, we make pleasure an idol. And we begin to say, what I want and what feels good and what satisfies me is more important than God.
And at that moment, we’ve dethroned God in our hearts and we’ve put pleasure there. And it can be an idol. Then there’s the lust of the eyes.
That’s the preoccupation with accumulating material goods, where we make stuff an idol. You think there’s a problem with making stuff an idol in our country today? Oh my goodness.
And your mind probably flashes to the Wall Street types that would step on their grandmother to make a dollar. but I think most of us succumb to this at times. Do you ever see a commercial for something or see something at the store and you think boy I’d like to have that.
We all think that. I don’t think there’s anything sinful about saying I would like to have that but when you wake up in the morning thinking about it, when you go to sleep at night thinking about it, when all you can think about, when all your thoughts are consumed by I’ve got to get that or hold on to that after I’ve already got it. Stuff has become an idol.
Stuff can very easily become an idol. And especially when we start pursuing stuff with so much intensity that we no longer care what God is saying or what God says about it. And I’m not even saying we have to be dishonest for this to happen.
But just to the point where we’re so focused on the stuff that we forget God and what he said, then the stuff becomes an idol. And we’ve given in to the lust of the eyes. Then there’s the pride of life.
This is probably the hardest one for me to talk about. Because it’s an arrogance and boasting that leads us to put ourselves in God’s rightful place. That’s a hard thing for somebody like me to talk about who doesn’t like to be wrong.
I’m probably the only one in here who has a problem with that. Or I don’t like to feel like I’m talked down to. Or, well, I could go through a list, but I don’t want to because I’m talking about myself.
But folks, we all have times where we like to think we’re so important. And I have to remind myself all the time I’m not. Because if I don’t remind myself, I’ll start to think that I really am so important.
And we start to think, but I want. But I deserve this. I deserve to hold on to that bitterness.
Don’t you know what they did to me? See, now I’ve made myself an idol because God says not to hold on to the bitterness. God says to forgive.
And I say, but I don’t want to. I was wronged. Well, when I’ve said what’s important to me is more important than what’s important to God, then I’ve made self an idol.
These are all so subtle. Or they can start out so subtly and then lead us to places we never expected. So he says to watch out for these things because worldly lust will always try to take someone or something else and put it on God’s throne in your life.
Lusting after the world will keep us from loving God. And it’s not worth it anyway because worldly lust will just try to substitute temporary junk for fellowship with the eternal God. I think if you asked any of us this morning, and I’m not going to ask you, But I think if any of us were asked this morning, we would honestly say that a relationship with God, fellowship with God, is more important than anything, especially something that’s just not going to last. I think we would answer that, and I think we would answer it honestly, and I think we really believe that, but our actions don’t always bear it out.
Because we get into the moment, and we start chasing stuff that doesn’t matter and doesn’t last. See, John says in verse 17 that the world passeth away and the lust thereof. All the stuff that we chase after, all the pleasure that we chase after, all the affirmation that we chase after, all these things that we put our lives into pursuing the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, they’re not going to last anyway. One day this whole world is going to be gone.
I don’t know what that looks like. I know we discussed last week in the five o’clock class talking about the book of Revelation. We talked about the new heaven and the new earth.
I don’t know how all that works, what the new earth is going to look like. But I do know there’s going to come a day when this old one is gone. And all the stuff is going to be gone.
All the stuff that we lusted after is going to be gone. I love my new truck. Some of y’all keep asking me how I like my new truck.
Just to answer, I love my new truck. I don’t think it’s risen to the level of idolatry yet, but I’m watching out for that. I love my new truck.
It wouldn’t make sense for me to love my new truck more than I love God. Because even though it’s shiny, inexplicably for how old it is, even though the air conditioner works great, even though the seats are like, I’ve never felt seats like this in a vehicle before. They cradle your spine.
It’s incredible. All this stuff that I love about my truck, even though it does all this, eventually that truck is going to be sitting in somebody’s salvage yard as a rusted out shell. And that for me is a metaphor for everything else in this world.
One day your money is going to be in somebody else’s pockets. One day for all my pride and pridefulness, most of the world’s never even going to remember who I was or that I ever existed. The food I chase after, I eat it and then it’s gone.
And I’m sad again. The stuff we chase after doesn’t last. He says this world passes away and the lust thereof, he says, that he that doeth the will of God abideth forever. It’s only through this relationship with God that things last. Now, don’t look at this and think, well, if I’m just obedient, then I’ll live forever.
You don’t get eternal life by following the rules and doing the right thing. Eternal life comes through a relationship with Jesus Christ, where we recognize our sin, where we ask God to forgive our sin because of what Jesus Christ did on the cross, realizing that only Jesus could pay for our sins and that he paid for them in full when he died on the cross. But as believers, it’s our obedience.
It’s the times that we served God, the times that we did his will. Those are the things that are of lasting importance. It’s our love and obedience for him that lasts.
And lusting after the world keeps us from loving God. It pushes that love aside. Now we’re getting close to being finished this morning, but I just want to tell you that as bleak a picture as this is, that you put a little bit of your attention on this stuff that Satan wants you to go after, and suddenly it tries to push the love and affection and obedience and attention that you have for God.
It tries to push that all the way out and tries to put an idol in its place. It doesn’t have to be that way. For you this morning, it doesn’t have to be that way because Jesus has already won the victory over this world and we have victory through Him.
That’s the whole thing He wrote about in verses 12 through 14 before He even gave them the challenge. He reminded them about who they were and the relationship that they had with God and how the victory had already been won. And I love especially what He writes to the young men for this purpose.
He says in verse 13, you have already overcome the wicked one. And he says in verse 14, because you are strong and the word of God abideth in you, and you have overcome the wicked one. He says the victory has already been won.
And not by our strength, but by the word of God. By the presence of God in our lives. We’re reminded by this, Romans chapter 6, if you ever look at Romans chapter 6, the whole thing just drips with this concept of victory over sin.
And just to give you a little glimpse of it, a couple of verses here, verses 12 and 13 of that chapter, Paul said, Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body. Yes, you do have a choice. You’re not a slave to sin.
He says that ye should obey, excuse me, Let not the sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lust thereof. Neither yield ye y