Practice for His Return

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Transcript:

This morning we’re going to continue our look at 1st John and we’re going to start in chapter 2 and look through to the beginning of chapter 3. I was reading an interview this week that was given back in the 1980s by the famous gymnast Mary Lou Retton. And I don’t know what all she won, but I know she’s got more gymnastics medals than I do.

And that’s not saying much, but very impressive, her skill and her craft. And she was explaining to the reporters how she had developed this skill over time. And what she told them, this is a quote from her, she said, I work at this seven days a week, two long, hard sessions a day, drilling myself, going over everything again and again, constantly.

And at night, sometimes I dream gymnastic dreams. I’ll be lying there quietly, sound asleep, and suddenly my whole body will give a great big jump and practically throw me out of bed. But see, what that means is that it’s working just the way it’s supposed to work. Here’s what it takes to be a complete gymnast. She said someone should be able to sneak up and drag you out at midnight and push you out on some strange floor, and you should be able to do your entire routine sound asleep in your pajamas without one mistake.

That’s the secret. It’s got to be a natural reaction. She said she had to work to the point where she had to practice to the point where it just became second nature for her to do these things.

And we’ve all heard the statement over the years, practice makes perfect. I mean, I know you all heard that. I’ve learned that’s not true.

See, I’ve learned some phrases that make more sense. When I was in high school, our drama teacher told us, practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. And what that meant was if we, I did musicals in high school and there was dancing involved.

Now I’m not built for dancing and y’all probably can’t even imagine what that looks like. And if you want to ever eat a meal again and have an appetite, don’t try to imagine what that looks like. But this philosophy of hers that perfect practice makes perfect, what that meant for us in concrete terms is if we’re doing a song and dance number, and somebody makes a mistake, you don’t wait until the end and say, this is what you need to do better next time.

Let’s work on it. Let’s take it from the top. Now, it means we stop right then.

We correct the mistake and start over, and we do it all the way through until we get perfect, or until we do it perfectly, and then we do it again perfectly, and we continue to practice it perfectly until we could do it perfectly. And for years, I would still wake up doing these bizarre dance moves in my brain. Fortunately, I didn’t do them in my sleep like she did, but I would still remember these steps, and there was no reason for it.

But perfect practice, I learned, makes perfect. I’ve been hearing lately on the radio the phrase, practice makes permanent. I love that.

I think that’s true, too. So I went to look it up because I couldn’t remember who I heard say it on the radio, and I went to look it up, and apparently it’s been attributed to so many people over the years that we don’t know who said it first, but I think it’s true. Practice makes permanent.

What you do, if you do it enough, if you practice it enough, it’s going to become second nature. It’s going to become part of your character, and that’s the move you’re going to go to. See, she had practiced, Mary Lou Retton had practiced these gymnastics moves and routines so much that if somebody woke her up in the middle of the night and flung her out on the floor, she was just going to do it by second nature.

I remember hearing the stories of Corrie Ten Boom and her family who hid Jews from the Nazis in their home in the Netherlands back during World War II. And one of the things that she and others like her had to do was they had to practice being woken up out of a dead sleep in the middle of the night, flashlights shining in their faces, being shaken awake, and people asking where the Jews, they had to practice lying until it became second nature where they could wake up in a dead sleep and say, what Jews? They had to practice at this until it became second nature.

And the Bible talks sort of about us preparing and the things that we’re supposed to do, the things that we are supposed to practice doing in preparation for Jesus coming. Because he is coming again. I talked about that a couple of months ago at the end of our series on basic Christian doctrines, we talked about his coming.

And I explained to you all these views of the end times and all these timelines that different people have and they disagree. Even Orthodox Christians disagree. Evangelicals disagree.

Some people say it’s going to happen in this order. Some people say it’s going to happen in this order. Some people say that part doesn’t even really come into play.

And there’s a lot of disagreement. But the one thing we agree on is that Jesus is coming again. And the Bible talks in the book of 1 John chapter 2 and in the beginning of chapter 3, about his appearing and says that there are certain things that we need to do in light of his appearing as we practice for his return.

As we try to take the things that we’re supposed to do in eternity that God is going to transform us to be able to do more perfectly in eternity, we should go ahead and start practicing them now. We might as well practice the things that God calls us to do now because that’s going to be our nature in eternity. And so we pick up where we left off last week at verse 27, and he’s just finished up talking about the false teachers, the ones who were going to try to lead them astray.

And if you’ll recall last week, I talked to you about these false ideas that surrounded people and the concern of can my faith withstand this? And the idea being that God’s word tells us that if we really are in Christ, then we’re not going to fall away. Talks about some people who just appeared to be in Christ had fallen away, but those who really are in Christ, we’re going to stay with him.

And so he completes this warning and moves on in verse 27. He says, But the anointing which you have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you, but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him. Now this anointing he’s talking about is the presence of the Holy Spirit.

God has put his Holy Spirit to dwell within every believer. And in this day and age, what happens is the Holy Spirit comes in and dwells you at the moment of conversion. Now we see some different things happen in the book of Acts because the Holy Spirit hadn’t really shown up until the day of Pentecost. But since then, we’re taught that we are sealed from the moment of conversion by the Holy Spirit unto the day of redemption.

He’s given to us at the moment of conversion. So it’s not something that later on you’re having to ask God, would you please just give me the Holy Spirit now? No, at the moment that you trusted Christ as your Savior, that you really believed, you were born again by the Holy Spirit of God, and He came to take up residence in your heart.

And He dwells within you now. A lot of times in the Bible, oil is used as being symbolic of the Holy Spirit as well, and they would anoint people with oil. Well, He’s here talking about an anointing of the Holy Spirit that God has poured out His Holy Spirit, and He’s covered you with it.

He’s saturated you with His Holy Spirit. And he says, this anointing that you’ve received from him still abides in you. It stays there.

And he says, and ye need not that any man teach you. So I might as well go home, right? We need to understand what he’s saying here.

You need not that any man should teach you. That would be really, if we were just to take that at face value, it would be a really weird statement for him to make as he’s writing a letter to teach these people. There’s a balance to be found.

I don’t want you to go so far in saying, I need to be taught, that you just totally check your brain at the door and you close your Bible and you just listen to me. Don’t ever do that. And if I can tell you this, don’t ever trust any man who tells you to do that.

We should not just let other people interpret the Bible for us. God gave you the Holy Spirit. God gave you a brain.

God’s given you the ability to learn how to read. We go and study His Word for us and He teaches us. But at the same time, God designed the church, God designed the body of Christ to have within it teachers who will help guide that process.

So can you study and understand the Bible on your own? Absolutely you can. But you know as well as I do that there are people who read it without really understanding what they’re supposed to be reading, without necessarily seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and they come up with bizarre ideas that put them out in left field and completely contradict other teachings of the Bible.

And God designed us to be together in the church to help avoid that. to help keep each other accountable to what God’s Word teaches so we don’t go off the deep end thinking we’re hearing the Spirit and it’s really our own ideas. So there’s a balance to be found there.

We do need teachers in the church. We do need to be taught. We do need to be fed.

But at the same time, we have a responsibility to feed ourselves through the power of the Holy Spirit studying His Word. What he’s talking about here when he says you don’t need any man to teach you is we go back to the passage we studied last week and we look at this in context, and he’s talked about these false teachers. And what they were doing was coming in with these new novel ideas.

Hey, I’ve got a teaching none of you have ever heard before. Totally new. Coming up next.

Stay tuned. And they come in and they teach them some new doctrine they’d never heard before. And they draw converts.

They draw people away after these wrong ideas. And what John is saying here is, you don’t need anybody to come and teach you some new thing that’s contrary to the word of God. You want the truth, you are capable of looking at God’s word and through the power of the Holy Spirit understanding what God’s word says.

You don’t need somebody to bring in some new interpretation that’s going to tickle your ears. That’s the point of this here. That when somebody comes in and says, hey I’ve got some new idea that totally turns the truth on its head and you’ve never seen it like this before.

He says you don’t need that because you have understood, you can understand, and you will continue to be able to understand under the power of the Holy Spirit. In the part that we looked at last week, in verse 21, he says, I have not written unto you because you know not the truth, but because you do know it, and that no lie is of the truth. So he’s writing to them, reassuring them that, hey, you can understand the truth with the Holy Spirit’s help.

And just because these guys come in with some new idea, it means nothing. And so he says, you need not that any man should teach you, but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, this is the Holy Spirit. And Jesus promised that when he left, the Holy Spirit would come, and he said the Spirit will guide you into all truth.

The Spirit will teach you and guide you into all truth. So again here, John is talking about the Holy Spirit just as Jesus did. He’ll teach you of all things and is truth and is no lie.

The Holy Spirit will never deceive you. Now there may be times that we are deceived or people are deceived because we think we’re hearing the Holy Spirit and what we’re really hearing are our own ideas, but the Holy Spirit will never lead us astray. It is truth and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.

He says, go back to what you’ve already heard. Go back to the simplicity of the pure gospel, the truth that was presented to you, that you believed once for all. Go back to that and stay there.

You don’t need anybody to bring you in any new doctrine. And he says in verse 28, and now little children abide in him. This word abide we find throughout this passage and really throughout 1 John.

This word abide, we know in English it It means the same as to dwell, to stay there. I went and looked. I thought there’s got to be some deep, really meaningful spiritual meaning to this.

So I went and looked at the Greek word. And I can’t remember what the Greek word was. But I looked at the definition of it.

And it means to stay there, to dwell there. Just like in English. I was looking for some deeper spiritual meaning.

But it’s just like in English. We’re called to abide in Christ. which means to go there and stay there. To go there and stay there, to set up our camp there.

And he said, just like you’ve been taught, go to Jesus and stay there. Don’t put your faith in all these other ideas. Don’t put your faith in every doctrine and every crazy new idea and fad that comes your way.

Go back to the truth of Jesus Christ and stay there. And now, little children, abide in him. He says it again.

That when he shall appear, we may have confidence and not be ashamed before him at his coming. He says, abide in him, stay with him, so that when he returns, you can meet him confidently. That because you’ve stayed with him and you’ve been faithful and you’ve put your trust in him and you’ve rested in him, that when he appears, you have nothing to be ashamed of.

That you’re not looking back on your life and saying, well, I wish I’d done this differently. I think we all have those moments, but I’m talking about the overall general trajectory of your life. Have you messed up?

Yes. Will you continue to mess up? Yes.

But overall, have you stuck with Jesus Christ? And not just stuck with Him like, I believe in this, I agree with Him, but have you rested there? Have you rested your full weight in Jesus Christ?

Have you stayed there? He says if you’ll do that, when Jesus appears, when Jesus comes, you’ll be able to look back on this and have no regret because it’s been a life that has been spent in His service on things that last. When He shall appear, we may have confidence and not be ashamed before Him at His coming. There will be those who have trusted Christ as their Savior, but have far too many times allowed the cares of this world or the pursuits of this world to lead them to lose focus.

Well, I think because they put their faith in Jesus Christ, they’ll be saved, but they’re going to look back and say, I wish I’d spent more time serving him. Sort of like those people who are on their deathbed. You’ve always heard nobody sitting on their deathbed looks back and says, I wish I’d spent more time at work.

It’s usually, I wish I’d spent more time with my family. Lots of people love their family, but get to the end of their life and regret all the time that they could have spent with their family. And they’re going to be, we run the risk if we’re not careful and believing in Jesus, putting our trust in Jesus, but folks, putting our focus elsewhere and not simply abiding in Jesus Christ to where we’re part of His family, we’re His, but we get to the end of life and we’re saved by Him, but He shows up and we look back with regret and say, I wish I’d spent that time focused on Him and things that matter.

He says in verse 29, if you know that He is righteous, if you know that, and they should have known that, that He is righteous, Jesus Christ, God the Father, God the Holy Spirit, they are all incapable of sinning, all incapable of lying, all incapable of deceit. They are righteous. If you know that He’s righteous, He says if you understand that, then you know that everyone that doeth righteousness is born of Him.

Now that doesn’t mean that we get to be His by good works, and it doesn’t mean that if we sin that we’re no longer His. But it means I can look within myself, And I know my heart. I know my sin nature.

I know my rotten attitude sometimes. And when I really look at myself, and when I’m really honest about what I find there, I see that where there is righteousness, where there is goodness, where there is any good thing, it’s because Jesus Christ put it there. That I have no righteousness of my own to offer God.

If there is any righteousness in me, it’s because Jesus Christ put it there. And it’s because I’ve been born of God. It’s not because Jared’s wonderful.

Y’all may think it because you see me at church, You see me with a smile on my face. You might think it a little less if you see me at Walmart trying to figure out what in the world I’m looking for and getting frustrated. But you basically see me put together.

You don’t see what’s in my heart. I know me. And if there’s any righteousness there, it’s the righteousness that Jesus Christ took and put in my account because I was in the red.

And any ability that I have to do righteousness, I’m not talking about just good things. Lots of people who don’t know Jesus do kind things. But righteousness means doing good things for the right reasons with a pure motive.

Okay, that the whole package is correct. And if there’s any capacity in me to do that, it’s because I’ve been born of God and not because I’m wonderful. So he says you’re going to look at that and you’re going to see people who do righteousness.

And you should understand that that comes from being born of God. And he goes in chapter 3, verse 1, almost as an aside. Almost as though John gets carried away at the thought and has to interject it in there.

And he says, Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God. He goes from talking about being born of Him and doing righteousness, and all of a sudden he says, And look! Look and be amazed at the kind of love that God has bestowed.

Not just handed us a little bit here, but He’s lavished it all over us. The kind of love that God pours out all over us that we should be called the sons of God. We don’t deserve that.

I haven’t done a thing in my life to deserve to be the child of God. That’s a pretty high bar. We’re talking about God’s standard being absolute sinless perfection and I haven’t gotten anywhere near it and neither have you.

It’s not because we’re good, but it’s because God is loving. And God takes this love because His nature is love and He pours it all over us and He bestows that love on us enough that we can be His children. And John is just blown away by this and says, Behold, as we might say today, check it out.

Think about it, how much God loves us, that he lets us be his children. Therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. He says when that change takes place, don’t be surprised, and this is right in line with what Jesus said in the Gospels, don’t be surprised when the world looks at you and doesn’t understand, because it didn’t understand him either.

And when God comes in and changes us and begins to transform us to be more and more every day, like him, it’s not going to understand us either. And there are going to be people who knew you when, And they remember what you used to do. They remember how you used to live.

They remember what you used to get up to. And they look at you and say, I don’t understand. It’s like I don’t even know you anymore.

And they can’t get out of their minds who you used to be. You know what? They may not want to be around you anymore.

You may not be as much fun to them anymore. Something’s changed. You’re just different than you used to be.

And they don’t understand. Which because God is making us more like Jesus Christ, who the world didn’t understand either. And he said, beloved, we are now the sons of God.

It would be incredible enough if God’s adoption plan for us said, you’re going to be saved and you’re going to be my children in heaven. But it’s not even something we have to wait on. He said, we are now the sons of God.

It doesn’t, none of this means that we become just like God is. God is of an entirely different nature. I can take my dog and I can dress it up in people clothes.

Not that I do that. Might have dressed him up as a bumblebee for Halloween a couple times, but he’s still mad at me about that. I could dress him up in people clothes.

And I’ve seen where people, I’ve seen on YouTube where people can teach their dogs how to, they almost sound like they talk. This dog kind of growls, I love you. They say it and the dog says it back.

My dog acts like people or thinks he’s people. We can make a dog look and act more like a person, but it’s still never going to be a person. You understand what I’m saying?

and God can conform us to be more like Jesus Christ, but it doesn’t ever mean we become gods. So when it says we are the sons of God, it doesn’t mean that we share His nature. It means He’s adopted us into the family.

Beloved, verse 2, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. He said we don’t fully grasp, we don’t fully see yet what we’re going to be, but we know when He shall appear, we shall be like Him. for we shall see him as he is.

Now we will still be human, which is not the same as God, but he’s going to give us a totally different nature. He’s going to give us a redeemed nature. We’re going to be what he created us to be in the first place.

And these fallen bodies that decay, we’re not going to have to worry about those again. He’s going to give us a new glorified body. This nature that we have, where God has taken us in this old sin nature, and we still have it, and he’s put this new nature in us, and what we see so many times is the new nature and the old nature fighting against each other.

And the Bible says, get rid of the old man. Stop feeding the old man. Stop feeding the flesh.

Feed the spirit. Feed the new man. When there’s two dogs in a fight, the one that’s going to win is the one you feed.

And so he says, feed the spirit. Walk after the spirit. We’re not going to have to worry about that flesh anymore.

We’re not going to have to worry about that old man inside of us anymore. God is going to change us and make us new. And what John is saying here is that when Jesus appears, All these things that we’ve been promised that we have not seen yet, well, we’re going to experience them.

And it’s going to be different. And he says we don’t completely understand what we’re going to be then. We don’t completely understand the transformation that Jesus is going to make in us.

But we know that what he started and what we just have a tiny glimpse of, one day we’re going to see fully. And we shall be like him and we shall see him as he is. And he says in verse 3, every man that hath this hope in him purifies himself even as he is pure.

Now that doesn’t mean the man purifies himself even as the man is pure, because we’re not. That means we purify ourselves even as he is pure. That means we look to his example and we try to follow it.

Now what does this have to do with practice? What does all this have to do with practicing? Folks, God has called us to be his and he’s even now preparing us for eternity.

And as I’ve already talked about, he imparts his righteousness to us. He takes the righteousness out of Jesus’ account, which by the way, he could take out enough righteousness to fill all of our accounts and Jesus’ account wouldn’t drop at all. He’s got infinite righteousness in his account.

It just keeps going up. But he takes his righteousness and puts it in our account. And God looks at us and he sees righteousness and it’s not ours, it’s his, but he sees the righteousness and he judges us on Jesus’ merits, not on our own when it comes to our eternal destination.

God loves us and adopts us as His children. I mean, that’s incredible to me. Every time I think about that, I’m blown away.

It’s just like the prodigal son. And I know I use this example all the time. But he thought it would be kind enough if his father just took him back as one of the servants and the father said, No, no, you’re not a servant.

My son who was dead is alive again. He didn’t deserve to be his father’s son. He didn’t even really deserve to be one of the servants.

We don’t deserve to be in the father’s household as one of the servants. But he says, come on in and be one of my children. God loves us and adopts us as his children and as I said already it’s not something that we wait for God says we are his children now already you are the sons and believers in Jesus Christ you are the sons and daughters of God walking on the face of this earth beloved we are now the sons of God and he plans to thoroughly transform us in eternity and this world is preparation for the next so where practice comes in is the truth that we all need to understand that this earthly life is practice for eternal life.

This earthly life is practice for eternal life. This is the dress rehearsal. A lot of times we treat it like it’s the big show, like it’s opening night. It’s not.

This is the dress rehearsal. The world that we see here and now, the life that we’re walking now is not the most important thing. It is the practice for the one that comes next. I see in this passage two ways that we practice for eternal life.

There are surely more, but as he talks about what we need to do Jesus coming, before his appearing. First is that we practice by abiding in Jesus Christ. We prepare ourselves by abiding in Jesus Christ. If you think about it, what we’re going to do for eternity, and I don’t know what heaven looks like exactly. The Bible gives us some clues.

I don’t know everything that we’re going to do, but I know that everything that we do and everything that goes on is going to take place in the presence of Jesus Christ. And there’s rest, and there’s joy, and there’s peace eternal in the presence of Jesus Christ. And so we’re going to spend eternity abiding in Him and we might as well start now as believers. We might as well prepare ourselves by starting now to abide in Jesus Christ. And I told you that word abide means to stay there. To stay there.

I go a lot of places but I don’t abide at many. My mother used to get irritated at me because I wouldn’t stay in one place very long. We’d go to this family get together And I’d be on my way to the next thing after that.

I’ve always said a moving target’s harder to hit. And church members not here, but say, boy, you sure do run the streets a lot. And again, a moving target’s harder to hit.

But I just, and I can’t stay at home all day. Charla might never leave the house if I just leave her alone and let her stay there. She’s a homebody.

I’m not. I’ve got to be going and doing something. So I go lots of places, but I don’t abide many.

But there are sometimes those days where I’ve had two weeks straight of running, and I don’t have anything on the calendar that day, a rainy Saturday. Today would have been a great rainy Saturday if it was Saturday. And I’m at home, and I just don’t care to go anywhere.

And I’m just going to sit, and I’m just going to be, and I’m just going to enjoy being at home. That’s abiding. When we’re with Jesus Christ, and we don’t have one eye on Him and one eye on the clock saying, where can I go to next?

I’m getting bored. I’m getting tired of being here. If we just sit and rest in Jesus Christ, and that doesn’t mean that you have to just, I’m not talking physically, you understand.

I’m going to sit home and be boring today and just be with Jesus. You can abide with Jesus while you’re running all over the state. Abiding in Jesus is a spiritual rest. That I’m with him and I have no plans to go anywhere else.

I’m just going to stay here for as long as I can. And it means we’re not looking for the next new spiritual fad. We’re not looking for the new exciting teaching.

We know exactly who our Savior is, and we want nothing more than to simply be in His presence. And abiding in Jesus is something that either you can do it or you can’t. And if you’ve never trusted in Jesus Christ, you can’t abide in Him because you’ve never been in Him.

I hope someday to go to Paris, but I can’t abide in Paris because I’ve never been in Paris. You understand? It’d be really hard to abide there when I’ve never, the closest I’ve gotten is Quebec, and that’s still across the ocean.

I can’t abide there because I’ve never been there. And if you’ve never been in Jesus Christ, you can’t rest there in His presence because you’re not in His presence. But if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, it means you were designed for exactly that.

You were designed not for just an encounter every once in a while, an encounter once or twice a week with Jesus Christ when you go to church, maybe a passing encounter with Jesus Christ as you say a prayer at mealtime or on your way to bed, but you were designed to abide in Him. You were designed to find your joy and your purpose and your peace and find permanence in His presence. And folks, we’re going to spend eternity with Him doing just that.

Why not practice now to get ready? Why not put aside some of the other stress and searching and running from one thing to the next, trying to find our fulfillment? Why not just put that all aside and find our fulfillment by abiding in Jesus Christ?

If earthly life is practice for eternal life, then one thing we need to practice is abiding in Christ. Just simply setting up our camp and staying a while and saying, I have no plans to go anywhere else. Earthly life is practice for eternal life. And we also practice by imitating Christ. See, God is going to change us.

God is going to transform us into something else. Now you can practice this all you want. You can try as hard as you can to imitate Jesus Christ. And you will never be perfect.

You will never be sinless. We never entirely escape the old nasty sin nature in this life. That takes the transforming power of God when he makes all things new at the end of the end.

But what we can do now is start practicing. We can start trying to imitate Christ. See, we talked about what John said that he’s going to make us into something we haven’t even seen yet. We don’t know yet what we will be.

He talks about one day seeing him as he is and being like him. One day God will take care of that. You can’t practice so much at imitating Jesus Christ that you become exactly like him.

But folks, if we’re going to spend eternity being like Jesus, we might as well practice while we’re here. Knowing that we’re goin