A Test of Our Transformation

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But sometimes the changes that God wants to make in us are spiritual. And in those cases, it can be hard to know for sure that the changes happen. But we can know, and that’s what we’re going to look at in the passage we’re going to read this morning. You know, it’s sort of like here lately, there have been a lot of days where I have had to, at the end of the day, talk myself into leaving the office and going home.

And no, it’s not because I don’t want to go home to my family. it’s because I’ll walk to those glass doors and say, my goodness, it just looks hot out there. I said that to my son.

He said, how can it look hot? Boy, you’ve lived in Oklahoma for 10 years. You tell me how it looks hot.

Sometimes you can look out there and you can see the humidity, right? And see the heat. That’s not always the case, though.

You can’t tell just by looking at it whether it’s 70 degrees or 80 degrees. You can’t tell by looking at it necessarily unless it’s just a big, nasty cold front comes rolling through. You can’t tell necessarily by looking that it’s dropped from 95 to 85 degrees, right?

It can kind of look the same. That’s why we invented thermometers. We realized that when the heat goes up, mercury will expand, and we can see this invisible change through a visible change.

We do this with medical stuff all the time. When Jojo was in the hospital, that’s why she was hooked up to so many wires and boxes that she looked like something out of a science fiction movie. Because once everything’s sewn up, you can’t tell just by looking at somebody that the heart is working correctly.

Now, sometimes you can tell by looking at them that it’s not, but you can’t tell the heart rate just by looking at somebody. You can’t tell the oxygen levels just by looking at somebody. To our eyes, these are invisible changes, And that’s why there are tests, so we can look at the little box.

And the way they described it to me every day, I still couldn’t tell how they could detect the subtle differences in those waves, but they could by looking at it. There’s a box there that says this percentage of the blood oxygenation. We need sometimes when we’re trying to determine what’s happening invisibly, we need some kind of visible sign.

And when it comes to our spiritual standing with God, our relationship with God, that’s invisible the Bible talks about how we’ve passed from death into life how we’ve been translated from darkness into light how we’ve gone from being God’s enemies to being God’s sons and daughters it describes all of those things but those are not things that we can we can see I mean God doesn’t send us a a birth certificate that we can look at that says we’ve been born into his kingdom we need some kind of visible test we need some kind of visible evidence as we’re going through of 1 John and looking at some of the things that God says there, you can know. You don’t have to wonder about this. You can know, and these are the ways you can know.

God has given us, He’s pointed us to some of the visible evidence of how we can know that our standing, our situation, our relationship with Him has transformed by some of the more visible transformations that take place. And that’s what we’re going to look at this morning in 1 John chapter 3. If you would turn with me in your Bibles there.

If you’re using your phone, there’s a link in your bulletin. It’ll be on the screen. But once you find it, if you’re able to, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, we’re going to be in 1 John chapter 3, and we’re going to start in verse 10 and read through verse 16.

It says, In this, the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest. Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is he who does not love his brother. For this is the message that you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another, not as Cain who was of the wicked one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him?

Because his works were evil and his brother’s righteous. Do not marvel, my brethren, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life.

Notice that we know that we have passed from death to life because we love the brethren. He who does not love his brother abides in death. Whoever hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.

By this we know love, because he laid down his life for us, and we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. And you may be seated. So what is it that we can know here?

God wants us to know. God wants us to have a way of knowing for sure that our situation with him has changed. We’ve talked about this already in this series.

I’ve talked to you about it in the series I just finished up on the Holy Spirit. God spends a lot of time in the New Testament talking about the transformation in our spiritual condition. How we start out as the enemies of God.

How we start out as being separated from God. We start out in spiritual death. We start out in spiritual darkness.

And then God does this transformative work in our lives through Jesus Christ where we become His children. We have this relationship with Him as our Father, where we are given spiritual light and spiritual life. But as I said, we can’t always see that or measure it.

And so for us to know that that’s taken place, because He didn’t want us to have to wonder, well, did it really happen? Am I really right with God? Has anything actually changed?

He didn’t want us to have to wonder about that constantly. And so He’s given us a powerful piece of evidence here that we can use to gauge whether that’s happened. And because God transforms our hearts, what we need to understand first of all is that His children are going to act differently from the world.

Now we started here in verse 10 where He says, in this the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest. This is another one of those areas where I tell you it’s nice to not get up and just preach my opinion. I preach what God’s Word says and then if somebody gets mad, I tell them take it up with Him, right? He says, here’s how you can tell the children of God from the children of the devil.

That preacher down at Central just called people the children of the devil. No, I didn’t. John did.

All right. John did, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. But what he’s saying is, here’s how you can tell those who belong to God and those who don’t.

Here’s how you can tell. Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God. Now, just like where John writes about those who are born of God do not sin, he’s talking about the pattern of our lives.

He’s not saying that we will never sin, Because in the same book, he says that if we sin, and when we sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. When we fall short in the righteousness department, when we fall short inevitably in the goodness department, Jesus has more than enough to make us right with the Father. And when we sin, it says He is faithful.

If we confess those sins, He’s faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. John does not say that we will never again sin, But he says there should be a change in us where the pattern of our lives changes. Where when you and I mess up, as we inevitably will, somebody doesn’t look at us and say, well, isn’t that just like Jared?

Somebody says, no, that’s out of character for him because of the change that he’s made in us. He said there’s a very clear dividing line, or should be a very clear dividing line between those who belong to God and those who don’t. Those who belong to Him are going to be obedient as a pattern in their lives.

Again, not perfect, but they’re going to be seeking to be obedient to Him. And those who don’t belong to Him are not. Now be very careful not to get this backwards and think I’m saying, well, just be righteous and do good things and then you’ll belong to God.

No, no, no. He says that’s the evidence that you do belong to God, is that you’re being obedient to Him and you’re practicing righteousness. That’s not how you get there. That’s sort of the t-shirt or the coffee mug that says, I was there, right?

Some people will go on vacation to the Bahamas or Cancun, they’ll come back with the t-shirt and you know, unless they bought it at the thrift store, you know they were there, right? The righteousness is the t-shirt that says, I’ve been there. I belong to Him already.

It’s something that He does in us. And He said, this will be manifest. It’s going to shine through. It’s going to shine through in the pattern of our lives.

This is not self-righteousness. Again, this is not how we get there. This is not something that we take and lord over the world outside of here and say we’re just better than you.

It’s not a judgmental thing. It’s something that God gets all the glory for. If there’s anything praiseworthy in me and in my behavior, if there’s any area where I am better than I used to be, it’s all glory to God and not something I’ve done for myself.

That’s his point here. And he says you’re going to see that transformation and it’s evidence of the fact that you belong to him. Jesus even said in Matthew chapter 7, By their fruits you will know them.

He said a bad tree doesn’t bring forth good fruit, and a good tree doesn’t bring forth bad fruit. By the way, this should give us pause about the idea of trying to completely blend into the world. We have been sold a lie that says we as Christians have to completely blend in with the world around us in order to reach them.

We have to be just like them. That’s not true. Now, we need to have some things in common with them, and it’s okay to have relationships with people out in the world, to have friendships with people out in the world, but we’re told to be in the world and not of the world.

When Paul said he became all things to all men that he might reach some, he wasn’t talking about joining them in their sins. And when we have been told that we have to blend in with the world and join them in the things that they’re doing in order to reach them, that’s not what God’s Word says. He says we’re supposed to stand out.

We are supposed to be different. The church has been at its most effective in reaching people with the gospel when it has stood out in the starkest contrast from the world around us. So he says we’re supposed to be different.

It’s supposed to be manifest in us. And John ties this new way of living to the way we love others. Because the idea of just practicing righteousness is a little bit vague.

John said, let me give you a concrete example. I don’t think the text is teaching us that this is the only example, but I think it’s saying start here. Here’s how you know.

Here’s what practicing righteousness looks at. This change of heart shows up in a supernatural capacity to love one another. These are sort of the training wheels of what it means to practice righteousness.

How we deal with other Christians is one of the areas where God’s transforming power is going to show up most clearly in our lives. Now, he talks about loving the brethren. Verse 11 says, For this is the message that you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.

And that’s his emphasis throughout this passage is on loving one another. how we treat one another. As a matter of fact, most of the passages in the New Testament that talk about the Christian needing to love others, it’s talking about other Christians.

Now, does that mean we don’t love people who are not Christians? That’s absolutely not what that means. But the easiest people to love are the ones you’re in agreement with, right?

The easiest people to love are the ones you have something in common with. Just like the easiest people to love should be the people in our own family. It’s not always the case, right?

But it should be. Those should be the easiest people to love. The point here is that if we can’t love our brothers and our sisters with whom we have Christ in common, with whom we have some of the most important principles in our lives in common, if we can’t love one another, what makes us think that we can go out there and represent Christ’s love to the world?

So this is like Christianity 101. If we can’t figure this out, we can’t move on to something else. This is the message that you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.

So John’s drawing attention here to Jesus’ command that he gave in John 13 and John 15, where he said, Love one another the same way I’ve loved you. That’s my paraphrase because the two quotes in the two different chapters are a little bit different. It’s not a contradiction.

John recorded two different times Jesus said something, but that was the point of both of them. He was telling his disciples, Love one another the same way I’ve loved you. That’s a pretty tall order, isn’t it?

It’s a pretty tall order for me to love somebody else the way Jesus loves me. Now, the only way I can do that is Jesus loving them through me. Jesus giving me the capacity to love them.

And then he talks about how to do this. He talks about how to do this. He says, first of all, don’t follow Cain’s example.

If you want an example of what not to do, Cain, right over here. Because where you’re supposed to love your brother, what did Cain do? He killed his brother.

Yeah, he said, don’t be like Cain who murdered his brother. If you’re not familiar with the story, Cain and Abel were the first two recorded sons of Adam and Eve. And they evidently were told before this about bringing sacrifices to God.

Abel was a shepherd who brought a blood offering of lambs to the Lord, and God was pleased by that. And Cain brought God vegetables. And God did what most of us would do and say, why do I want vegetables?

Right? No, there was no blood in the vegetables. It wasn’t an adequate sacrifice.

It was Cain saying, God, you can take whatever I’m willing to part with instead of what you demand. God accepted Abel’s sacrifice. God rejected Cain’s sacrifice.

Cain looked at his brother who was right with God and got jealous and got angry and began to hate his brother. And then that hate was made manifest in him killing his brother. He said, don’t do that.

That’s the example of what not to do. And now, as far as I know, Everybody in here would say, well, I’ve never murdered anybody, so I’m good. Jesus equated the two.

Because what Jesus was saying when he said, if you’ve been angry with your brother without cause, it’s the same as murder. What he’s saying is the condition of the heart is the same. To say you’ve murdered somebody in your heart simply means that your heart is gripped by a level of hate that is what leads to murder.

And whether or not you actually pull the trigger or plunge the knife in, the condition of the heart is the same, and it’s wrong. As Christians, this is the example of what not to do. Not to let ourselves be gripped by this level of hate toward another person, this level of bitterness toward another person that would leave us in this kind of condition, especially toward one of our brothers or sisters in Christ. Because if that’s the way we live our lives, do you ever get angry?

I get angry. And you’ve probably been so mad that you wanted to throttle somebody, right? I came back from Abigail’s last doctor appointment and told the ladies in the office, they said, how was it?

I said, it was great. I finally found a medical clinic where I didn’t want to throat punch somebody on the staff. So we’re going to all go there now.

I have those moments too. But I’ve also known people who were sitting in church for decades that that’s the way they looked at a lot of people. That that’s the way they looked at a lot of people in the same church.

And man, if they could have gotten away with it, if they knew the law wouldn’t catch them and God turned his back for a minute, they’d kill somebody. It makes me question where they are with Jesus. If that’s the pattern of our hearts, it makes me question where we stand with him because that’s the sort of thing that Cain, that he’s talking about here with Cain.

Now we can look at it and say, but so-and-so hates us. It’s not an excuse. In the same breath that he says don’t do what Cain did, he tells us not to be surprised when the world looks at us that way.

Don’t be surprised when the world hates you. See, the world hates Jesus Christ, but now that Jesus is not here in physical form for them to take it out on, that anger gets turned on us. And we don’t get to respond in the same anger.

Well, they did it first. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make it right. He said, don’t be surprised.

Be prepared for that to happen. So he gives us an example of what love is not, but it’s important for us to understand what love is. The love that John describes here is a love that we can only do when God is loving through us.

And we need to understand that. Love is one of the most overworked words in the English language. I love God.

I love my wife. I love my children. I love my church.

I love Oklahoma. I love Whataburger. I could list off a lot of things.

None of those loves are exactly the same thing I’m describing, right? Right? If I love my children the same way I love Whataburger, that’s a problem.

right? If I love my wife the same way I love God, that’s a problem, right? That’s called idolatry, okay?

That’s a big problem. God doesn’t like that. In Hebrew and in Greek, they had more than one word for love.

We don’t have that luxury. So we have to dig a little deeper and understand exactly what he’s talking about when he says love, because the world has some funny ideas, and even in the church we have funny ideas about what love means. All four references to love in this passage that we’ve read these six or seven verses, they’re all referring to a word agape that some of you are familiar with or the verb forms of that word.

Agape describes God’s kind of love. There are different words in the Greek that mean love, and I’m not going to get into all of those today, but agape is the one that is not a natural kind of love that we just experience out of the ebb and flow of the human life, right? Agape is a love that describes how God loves us and the capacity for love that God puts in us.

It is a supernatural kind of love. It’s a perfect love. It’s an unconditional love.

It’s a self-sacrificial love as evidenced by verse 16 where John says, greater love has. . .

I’m sorry, I’m quoting a different verse here. By this we know love because He laid down His life for us. What does love look like?

It looks like Jesus and Him sacrificing Himself on the cross for us. I don’t want to camp out here for all day and keep you forever, but it is important for us to understand is and what love is not. Because a lot of times we think that love is a feeling, love is something you fall into.

Our society has taught us that love requires that you agree with and affirm everything, otherwise it’s not loving. It’s all sorts of things. One of the best things that I was ever taught, for years growing up in the youth group they taught us from God’s Word, love is a commitment.

It is not a feeling, it is a commitment, which turns a lot of people’s view of marriage on its ear. I was thinking about this this morning, even still on the way into church with the message already written, and was listening to a man on a talk show, and he was talking about a political issue, but he’s a Christian and was talking about it from a biblical standpoint, and he started talking about how on so many issues the church is just not clear in its teaching, not our church specifically, but churches as a whole in America are not clear in their teaching, and he started talking about what love is and what love is not. And I thought, I probably need to spend some more time on this.

And I kind of tuned out what he was saying. Started thinking about all the things that I’ve read in scripture about love. Because I wanted to give you a definition of exactly what I’m talking about.

And here is my stab at a biblical definition of love. It is a commitment to act in a way that seeks the good of the other person from God’s perspective. Does that work?

It’s a commitment. It’s not something we fall into and out of. Well, I feel it today and I don’t tomorrow, so I’m not going to love you anymore.

That’s no basis for a marriage. It’s no basis for a relationship between brothers and sisters in Christ. It’s a commitment. It’s a commitment to act.

It is not just a feeling. We tell our kids all the time, if I tell you I love you and my actions don’t show it, does it really mean anything? No, when you love somebody, you do something about it.

It means you serve them. It means you help them. It means you take care of them.

It means you fight for them. It’s a commitment to act, to seek the good of the other person. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians that love is not self-serving.

God’s kind of love is not self-serving. Yes, I know He ultimately gets the glory out of it. He gets the praise that He deserves.

But listen to this. God was deserving of all the glory and praise we could ever give Him if He had never made a move toward our salvation. Because of who He is, God is worthy of all the glory and praise we could ever give Him.

And yet Jesus Christ came and sacrificed himself on the cross when he didn’t have to. And he did that for us. He said his mission was to seek and to save that which was lost. And he went through the most gruesome torture and laid down his life in order to do it.

That’s the picture of love. Seeking the other person’s good from God’s perspective. Because the world will tell us, well, you just need to support them and encourage them.

No, sometimes we need to tell them the truth even when it’s hard because they were seeking their good from God’s perspective, not the world’s perspective. So all of these things are in play here. But it’s a perfect, unconditional, self-sacrificial love like only God can give and only God can give us the capacity for.

You can only do this. You can only agape somebody if God changes your heart in that area. And He will.

If you’re a believer, He will change your heart in that area. And some days it’s harder than others, but we depend on Him for it. There have been days where I’ve said, Lord, help me to love my wife, help me to love my children, help me to love these people at church the way you love them and not the way I feel capable of doing at the moment.

Because we all have bad days where we just don’t feel it, right? I’m not saying you don’t love the person. You just don’t feel like going the extra mile that day.

I saw a sign on the internet that I thought about getting from my office door that says the pastor is out of order, right? Some days you just feel that way, right? In those days, you’ve got to lean on God to help you do this.

He has to do it through you. And God’s work in this area tells us, as God transforms our behavior, where we become more loving, and we’re able to love people in active ways. We serve them.

We take care of them. If anything, we get in a fight with them because we’re each arguing the other’s case. But as we’re doing this, it’s noticeable.

It’s visible. It shows up. in ways that we can see.

And this visible love that exudes from us, this transformation that God has done in our behavior, is one of the indications of what God has done invisibly and spiritually in us. We know, verse 14 says, we know. We don’t have to guess at, we don’t have to worry about, we don’t have to wonder about.

We know that we have passed from death to life because we love the brethren. We know. Passing from death to life is just what it sounds like.

We have gone from a position of spiritual death where we are separated from God, where we are His enemies, to experiencing full abundant life in Jesus Christ, and we know that because we love the brethren. This is another one of those areas where you don’t want to get them backwards. Loving the brethren is not how you pass from death into life.

It’s evidence that you have. The passing from death into life has to happen first. We have to come to God through Jesus Christ, through faith in His sacrifice first. And the Bible says God moves us from death into life. He takes us from the kingdom of darkness and translates us into the kingdom of His Son.

All of that is invisible, but the way we can see it and know that it’s taken place is through this visible change in our behavior. It’s more than just a natural affection. It’s more than just us being a nice person.

Some of you are so nice, I think you would probably be nice people even if you weren’t Christians. There are lots of nice people out there who are not Christians. Hear me on this.

There are lots of loving people out there who are not Christians. But agape love is not something that comes naturally. It’s not something that happens just because we’re nice people.

It’s something that happens because He’s working through us and in us. And as we grow in this, it’s evidence that He’s working in us in other ways. And if you belong to God, He’s training you to love others like Jesus.

Because reading over this again this morning, I was struck by this again, that as He’s describing this kind of love, as He’s describing this kind of sacrifice, as He’s describing this kind of putting it all on the line regardless of what’s going on with you for the good of the other person, as He’s describing all of that, He’s describing Jesus. He’s describing Jesus. He’s not describing me.

He’s not describing an idea. He’s describing Jesus. That’s why he ends up in verse 16.

By this we know love. He said, if you want to know what love really looks like, he laid down his life for us. If you want to see a visible example of what I’m talking about that’s supposed to show up in your life, look at Jesus.

He describes Jesus here as the ultimate picture of love because Jesus died for us at our worst. Romans says, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. He didn’t die for us because we were lovely. He didn’t die for us because we could become lovely.

He died for us while we were still sinners. And it says in that same passage, God demonstrated His love toward us, and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. This describes a kind of love that does not fit into our nature, and yet it’s exactly the kind of love that God calls us to.

In other words, it’s something that can only be done by God working in us and God working through us, God changing us and giving us the ability to love like that as He works in us to conform us to the image of His Son. That’s His goal for the Christians, for us to be more like Jesus, all of this is wrapped up together one of the ways it’s going to show up is how we love one another and so after he finishes that we’re almost finished here after he finishes that and says we know love this way because he laid down his life for us he says and we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren it doesn’t mean that we get sacrificed on the cross so other people can go to heaven we’re not capable of that but laying down our lives is a daily sacrificial selfless kind of love that puts the needs of the other person first, that seeks their good from God’s perspective.

It’s a commitment to do it even when we don’t feel like it. And so you and I are called to examine ourselves for evidence of this genuine spiritual transformation. We ought to be doing this.

Look at Jesus’ example and he says, we ought to also do the same thing. So that’s the evidence that we look for. That’s a big part of the evidence that we look for.

How do I know that God has really transformed my standing spiritually? One way it’s going to show up is in the way we love one another. This is not the only test given in Scripture for evidence that we belong to Him, but it’s a pretty clear one.

We know that we passed from death to life because we love the brethren. Again, it’s not how we pass from death to life. It’s the evidence that we already have.

And a willingness to love our brothers and sisters is something that we should look for in ourselves. You should ask, is it there? Is it there and is it showing up regularly?

Sometimes believe this, but sometimes I get a little negative. Sometimes I get a little frustrated and a little bit touchy. We all have moments like that, but if I start seeing a pattern of that in my life, that’s a reminder to say, okay, Lord, something’s not right here.

I don’t believe it means I’ve lost my salvation, but it means there’s something else going on. It means something’s not right because as a believer, the pattern of my life should be love for other people, especially my fellow believers. And as I’ve said, I’ve known, I can’t point out anybody, I wouldn’t even if I could, but I can’t point out anybody in here and say this is you I’m talking about, but I’ve known people who’ve been in church longer than I’ve been alive, who’ve been professing Christians longer than I’ve been alive, and are some of the sourest, meanest people I’ve ever met.

And they hate, there are people, they will tell you they hate, and some of them are sitting down the pew from them. And I think, okay, your salvation is between you and the Lord? if you put your trust in him as Savior, in Jesus as Savior, you believe he died and rose again, he can change that.

But this ongoing hatred makes me question whether you’ve actually done that or not. So we need to examine ourselves. Are we demonstrating the love of Jesus?

And if we see it at work in our lives, that’s evidence of the fact that he’s changed us. That love of Jesus is so important. That’s what led him to die for us when we were so unlovable.

Our sin had separated us from a holy God. And God would have been entirely justified if He’d written us off and said, okay, you want to sin? You want to rebel against me?

You want to hate me? That’s fine. Enjoy he