Choosing Confidence over Confusion

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Well, I very nearly made a catastrophic mistake last night. I was headed upstairs with a couple of syringes full of heart medicine for Jojo. And it was her 9 o’clock dose, and she’ll take it in her sleep, fortunately.

So I was headed up the stairs to give it to her, but in my brain, we’ve been taking care of Abigail for the last couple hours, so in my brain I was headed up the stairs to give it to Abigail. That would not have been a good idea. You know, there are some places in life where it’s okay if we’re a little bit confused.

That would not be one of them, right? And fortunately, by the time I got to the top of the stairs, I kind of snapped out of it. So tired yesterday.

I kind of snapped out of it and went, wait. So, I mean, Abigail was in no real danger, but there for a moment, I had in mind I was headed someplace different than I was. There are all sorts of places in life where we don’t want people to be confused, okay?

How confident would you feel? How good would you feel about your chances in life if as you’re boarding a plane, you hear the pilot say to the co-pilot, what does that switch do? I think at that point I’m getting off and taking a later flight.

Or surgeon, you kind of want one that knows where to cut, right? I remember when we were going in just before Jojo’s surgery, and Charlotte said, I wonder if they’ll draw the lines down her chest so that they know where to cut. And I said, you don’t think they know where to cut?

You think this is a cut-by-number situation? I’ve been told the guy’s the best in Oklahoma, and I kind of panicked for a moment. You don’t want the surgeon not to know where to cut.

Politicians. Let’s get started on that, right? I’m not naming parties.

I just said politicians. Where your mind went is not my fault, okay? But they have so much power over so many areas of life.

Doesn’t it just make you feel great when there’s a problem and they just start saying, we’re going to try something. We’ve got to do something. We’re going to try anything when they don’t really even understand what the problem is.

But they’re going to try something. That always turns out well, doesn’t it? Everybody, both sides of the aisle are always happy when that happens.

There are some situations in life where we do not want people to be confused about what they’re doing. And I’ll tell you, even as important as it is for us not to be confused in some of these areas of life here on earth, it’s even more important that we not be confused when the implications are eternal. When we’re dealing with spiritual matters that are going to last beyond the here and now. If a doctor makes a mistake, it can be tragic, but at some point, life is over.

And that mistake doesn’t matter anymore. When we make a mistake about things spiritually, when we’re confused about spiritual things, it’s catastrophic and it’s ongoing. And that’s what John talks about in the passage that we’re going to look at this morning.

Spiritual confusion is the most dangerous kind of confusion of all. God wants us to be confident in what the truth is. And that’s why John wrote to us what he did in 1 John 2.

So if you would, turn with me there if you’ve got your Bible, 1 John chapter 2. If you’re using your phone to look up the scriptures, there’s a link right there in our bulletin that’ll take you to it, or it’ll be on the screen if you don’t have either of those options available to you. But we’re going to be in 1 John chapter 2.

We’re going to start at the end of the chapter and go through the beginning of chapter 3. So once you find it, if you would stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, if you’re able to stand without too much difficulty. We’re going to start in verse 24 of 1 John chapter 2.

It says, Just as it has taught you, you will abide in him. And now, little children, abide in him, that when he appears, we may have confidence and not be ashamed before him at his coming. If you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who practices righteousness is born of him.

Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us that we should be called the children of God. Therefore, the world does not know us because it did not know him. Beloved, now we are children of God and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when he is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

And everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself just as he is pure. And you may be seated. So I struggled with this passage quite a bit this week because I started reading from really from verse 26 on to the end of what I read you in chapter three and trying to make heads or tales of it, trying to get to the point to bring you this morning.

And I kept dealing with the stuff where he’s talking about the appearing of Jesus and the embarrassment that we may or may not feel at his appearing and dealing with those questions and trying to figure out what it is he’s trying to say. Is he talking about judgment? Is he talking about, I just struggled with it, trying to make sense of it as a whole.

Now I could pick any particular verse out of there and talk to you, but trying to make it all make sense as a whole, and I just couldn’t do it. So I backed up to verse 24, and I realized that more than he’s talking about the judgment, more than he’s talking about what we’re supposed to do and how we’re supposed to live, it’s a warning against people who were teaching false ideas about the judgment and about what we’re supposed to do. This is a warning about false teachers.

It’s a warning against people who were going to introduce spiritual confusion. And so what we need to understand from this, and this is not the only place that John talks about this in this letter, there are false teachers, there were then and there are now, false teachers who are willing to try to confuse Christians for the sake of their own agendas. Now for some of them, their agenda is that they’ve got this wrong area of theology that they want to promote, and some errors on that are more glaring than others, but some of these errors that false teachers will spoon feed you hit right at the heart of what the gospel is.

It’s absolutely deadly. So some people are willing to deceive for that particular, their theological agenda. Some are willing to deceive because of a financial agenda.

Send God all your money, but put my name on the check. Numbers below me on the screen, that sort of thing. And they promise you that God will do this and that for you if you’ll just send him a check with their name on it.

Things haven’t changed. There of that kind of agenda as well. Sometimes it’s a political agenda.

Sometimes it’s just that they want to be famous. They want to be the celebrity teacher. And they’re willing to say things that aren’t true to a massive following.

And they’re all over the place. By the way, this is not a witch hunt. I’m not saying everyone out there is a false teacher.

I’m just saying they’re out there. And if we go out there thinking they’re not out there, we’re in danger. And so John was concerned for these early believers because of these false teachers that he said in verse 26, try to deceive you.

Now, some of them may not realize that they’re deceiving you, but that is their goal, is to deceive you. Their goal is to get you to believe something that is not true. And they were absolutely bombarded with people who were promoting new ideas.

That was sort of the hallmark of the Greek culture that they lived in, even though they were in the Roman Empire. It was built largely on Greek philosophy, and they wanted new ideas. But in spite of these new ideas, he said to them, the anointing, this is in verse 27, the anointing which you have received from him abides in you, and you do not need that anyone teach you.

Now that does not mean that there’s no place for Bible teachers, because there are too many clear verses where we’re told to preach the word and teach the word. So this is not saying that somebody like me just needs to sit down and be quiet. It’s talking about these people who are bringing new ideas and saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know you’ve heard what Paul said and what John said and what they said about what Jesus said, but I’ve got something new to tell you.

John was saying, when you’ve already heard what Jesus said and what the apostles said to explain what Jesus said, when you’ve already heard that, you don’t need Mr. So-and-so over here with his new ideas to get you any closer to God than what Jesus is going to. You don’t need a human teacher in the place of Jesus and the word that he sent through the apostles.

That’s what he’s talking about with a teacher. You don’t need somebody with new ideas. You just need somebody to preach the old ones and make them make sense.

And so he was concerned because there were all sorts of people. There were all sorts of weird ideas, but they fell really into one of three groups, most of them. They were legalists where they said, let’s emphasize the law in a way it was not meant to be emphasized.

Let’s teach the law as a way of salvation or even, you know, sometimes in our day, let’s pull a scripture out of context and make a new rule without bothering to realize why it says what it says. But let’s make a human rule, a human tradition with very shaky scriptural support. And let’s expect people to live up to this standard instead of what God said about grace.

We have to be careful about legalism. We have to be careful on the other side of what I’ve been telling you about on Wednesday nights is called antinomianism. It’s a big word.

Nomos is the Greek word for law. Anti means against. Antinomianism is the idea that there is no law. There are no standards.

It’s just grace. And so we can go and live however we want because Jesus. Now, Christianity says, Jesus said, the apostles said, that if we belong to him, our lives are going to be different.

They’re going to be changed. We are not saved by the law. We are not saved by good works.

But at the same time, if there is no obedience to God, if there are no good works, it’s evidence that nothing has changed in our hearts, and it’s evidence that the grace isn’t there. You’ll hear a lot of that today. That you can do whatever you want, live however you want, and God’s going to be cool with it because grace.

When Paul said, should we continue in sin that grace may abound? And he said, God forbid. So John was worried about them.

He was worried about the Gnostics, who I’ve talked about the last few weeks. The Gnostics were a group of people, really, their beliefs were very complicated. Even sometimes I have trouble wrapping my mind around what it was they fully believed.

But there were three basic principles that the Gnostics believed. And that’s who a lot of 1 John is written to, are these Gnostics. They believe that Jesus did not come or die in the flesh, and that there was no shedding of blood on the cross, there was no judgment of sin, there was no reconciliation, no need for any of that.

They believe that people can sin with impunity, because they believe that there’s a difference between the physical and the spiritual world, and the physical world, the material world, is just an illusion. By the way, this has a lot in common with some of the Eastern religions. They believed that these things were just an illusion and only the spirit world is real, so whatever you do with the physical body doesn’t count.

It doesn’t count until you do it to them, right? What happens in the material world doesn’t matter until they’re the ones getting mugged, right? And they would say, third of all, if we want a connection with God, we gain one through secret knowledge that comes through our own experiences.

That’s in a nutshell what the Gnostics were all about. And they were the main group of people that John was concerned with. But he deals in places with the legalists and the antinomians as well.

And especially when they came and contradicted the gospel, he called them liars. I know we’re supposed to be nice and only say nice things. And honestly, I’m wired to be diplomatic.

I don’t like conflict. I’ll do it if I have to. But I’m not one of these guys that wakes up in the morning looking for conflict.

There are those people out there. That’s not my spiritual gift. I know we’re supposed to be nice and supposed to be gracious all the time.

He called them liars. He called them out for what they were doing. He said in verse 27, the same anointing teaches you concerning all things is true, and is true, and is not a lie in contrast to what these other people were coming and teaching.

So it’s not just, oh, they have their own opinion. He said they are spreading a lie. And what does that make them?

Liars. Thank you, Benjamin. He’s awake this morning.

So Christians were looking at these people. They were looking at false teachers. They were looking at people like the Gnostics.

And they were looking at their apparent love for God. because they would say they love God. They would say they love Jesus.

And they were certainly confident in what they believed. Some of the most confident people in the world are those who are most wrong. They were confident in what they believed.

They looked at these people. They looked at their supposed love for God, their certainty in what they were believing. And some of these Christians were thinking, are we wrong?

I mean, maybe we’re confused. I have these conversations with Charla all the time, not about theology, but about social interaction. I’m just awkward enough that sometimes something will happen and I look at her and say, Is this a normal social interaction?

Is that normal for that person to act that way? Am I the crazy one that that just happened? And usually, no, that wasn’t right what just happened.

But I have to check sometimes because I start to doubt myself. Some of these Christians were probably doubting themselves and thinking, they seem so sure and they seem so on fire. Listen, everybody who claims to love God, everybody who claims to serve Jesus doesn’t necessarily.

Jesus said that there would be many who would call him Lord, Lord. And he wouldn’t know them. As a matter of fact, I wrote a whole book about this.

I’m not trying to sell books, so if you want to read it, I’ll get a free copy into your hands. But I wrote a whole book about this, about how all the religions of the world have some respect for Jesus, but it’s not the same Jesus. Gandhi said he loved Jesus, and a lot of Christians have latched onto that.

Listen, the Jesus that Gandhi was talking about was not the virgin-born son of God who died on the cross and rose again for the payment for our sins. The Jesus that Gandhi was talking about was the Jesus of Gandhi’s imagination, not the Jesus of the Bible. But they were looking at these people and saying, Am I wrong?

Am I confused? They seem so sure. And into this time of confusion, John wrote, because God doesn’t want us to be confused, He wants us to be confident in His truth.

He wants us to know what the truth is. That doesn’t mean we have to be arrogant about it. But He wants us to be confident where we’re not shaken.

And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with asking questions. In our Wednesday night Bible study, I’ve had people come to me in the last few weeks and say, I’m sorry for asking so many questions. That is what we are here for.

There’s not a problem with asking questions as long as our intention is to find an answer. Sometimes people get into religious questions just because they enjoy the question and they don’t care if they ever find out the truth or not. They just want to ask the question.

There’s nothing wrong with asking questions if we sincerely want to know God’s truth. And he wants us to be confident in his truth. He said his truth.

John that the truth of God that led them to God, that brought them to a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, he said that truth had not changed. And by the way, 2,000 years on from John writing this, God’s truth still has not changed. He said here in verse 24, Let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning.

It hadn’t changed from the time that they had received it up until then. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, you also will abide in the Son and in the Father. What he’s talking about there is the gospel.

This message of how we have sinned and been separated from God, and so it was necessary for Jesus to come and pay for our sins on the cross, pay for them in full, and rise again from the dead to prove it. And now He offers salvation as a free gift that we can’t earn if we will simply believe and take Him at His word and trust in His promise, believe that He is our Lord and our Savior. It’s the gospel.

And He said, if what you’ve heard, if that gospel that you’ve heard from the beginning, if it abides in you, if that gospel is still there, you’re also abiding with the Son and with the Father. And here, in this passage, God put his own credibility on the line. I know I keep saying John wrote this, but always understand when I tell you so-and-so wrote this down, God is still the author.

These men were inspired by the Holy Spirit to write what they wrote. That’s why we believe this book, not because it’s John’s opinion or Paul’s opinion, although they’d still be smarter than I would about these things, but it wasn’t their opinion, It was what the Holy Spirit inspired them to write. So even though John is writing it down, God is the one putting his credibility on the line, reminding us that he had made promises.

Reminding them that he had made promises to them. That’s why he says in verse 25, this is the promise that he has promised us eternal life. He said, John’s saying, look, if none of this is true, if the Gnostics are right, if the legalists are right, if the antinomians are right, if some random cult group out there is right, and we’re wrong about what the gospel is, then God’s promises are not true.

He said, this is the promise that God’s given us, eternal life. The stakes are incredibly high here. Where we will spend eternity depends on whether or not we can take God at his word.

God had made promises, and his point here is not, well, I wonder, can God be trusted? His point is, God can be trusted, and because God has made promises, you can trust what has been said and what has been taught, because it’s really God’s credibility on the line, not John. ones, not the preachers.

Don’t shoot the messenger. Talk to the one who sent the message. And so they didn’t have to go find these things themselves.

They didn’t have to be like the Gnostics and go kind of feel their way to God and seek a mystical experience. By the way, if you’ve ever been in a worship service and you thought, wow, today was a wonderful experience. I felt so close to God in that worship service.

That’s a wonderful thing. That is a wonderful thing. But those feelings are not what grow us closer to God.

And we can grow closer to God by learning and growing to rely on His truth, regardless of whether we ever feel the goosebumps and the tingle up our spine as we’re in a charged worship service. Because our relationship with Him is not based on what we feel. It’s not based on what we think our way into.

It’s not based on our philosophies and our experiences and the mystical practices. It’s based on the promises of God and what He has said in His Word. and so God said he’d put the truth right in front of them verse 27 the same anointing teaches you concerning all things and is true and is not a lie and just as it has taught you you will abide in him God said I’ve put the truth out there for you to believe just just as it has taught you just as you have already heard some of you from from the mouth of Jesus but most of you through the through the witness of those who walked with him my goodness there was no man on earth at this time who knew Jesus better than John did.

There was no man on earth who had been as faithful to Jesus as John had for as long as John had by the time this was written. And so if John said, this is what Jesus said, my goodness, you got to listen to him. And here writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he says, you’ve already been taught.

And that same anointing is there. It teaches you all things. It teaches you the truth, not the lies.

And then we come to verse 28. And this is where I struggled for a while. Because it’s easy on first glance, if you read it, and if you don’t look at the verses too much before it, it’s easy to look at it and say, well, if we are obedient and if we stick to believing and doing the right things, then when we stand before Jesus and we’re judged, then we’ll be rewarded and we have nothing to be ashamed of.

I think that’s true. I believe that’s true biblically, but I don’t think that’s what it’s saying here. Here’s what I mean.

If you’re a at the cross. We’re not going to stand before him for punishment. We will stand before him for rewards for our faithfulness.

And if we’ve been faithful in many things, the rewards will be great. If we’ve been faithful in a few things, the rewards will be few. But ultimately, the main thing is that our sins are forgiven because of what he’s done.

So our eternal destination is not in jeopardy at that point. But we will stand there. And so some commentators have said, well, maybe because they were more faithful, they had more rewards, and so they didn’t feel ashamed when they stood before Jesus.

But if you look at what he’s talking about here with these false teachers and those who want to deceive, have you ever had a discussion with somebody and you knew they were wrong, but you couldn’t articulate why, and you thought, I wish there was somebody here who could explain it better? Have you ever been embarrassed in a situation like that? I have.

I’ve told you before, I don’t write books because I think my thoughts are so profound. I write books because I want to remember what I found out. And I won’t.

Otherwise, I have to go back and reread my books. And I hate it when I’m in a conversation with somebody and I think, I know that’s wrong. I know that’s wrong, but where on earth is the verse?

Where is that verse? I can’t find it. Or what was that argument?

Or what was that explanation? And I can’t come up with it. It’s kind of embarrassing because I feel like an idiot in those moments.

these people going to bat with the Gnostics. I’m sure there were moments of embarrassment because the Gnostics could, they were philosophers, they could argue people in knots. And I’m sure some of the early Christians thought, I know this isn’t right, it’s not right according to what I’ve been taught.

It’s not right according to what God’s Word says, but I can’t argue the point. I don’t know, I mean, I don’t have empirical evidence that I’m right. And I’m sure there were moments of shame there were moments, and nobody likes to be wrong, do we?

Nobody likes to be wrong. I see one person in particular shaking his head vigorously because he gets it from me. I have to fight the urge to be a politician and keep arguing the point with my wife even when I know I’m wrong, all right?

We don’t like to admit that we’re wrong because it’s embarrassing. And I think when you look at it in the context of him talking about the false teachers and all that, I think all that about the judgment is true, but I don’t think that’s what he’s saying here. When he says in verse 28 that when he appears, we may have confidence and not be ashamed of him before him at his coming.

I think he’s telling us that there’s going to be no confusion about what the truth is at Jesus’s coming. Every eye is going to see him. Everyone’s going to understand who he is.

And no matter how we may have been mocked here on earth for what we believe, no matter how we may have been slandered for the gospel, no matter how we may have been put down or called idiots or been called backwards. I read an article just this morning where a pastor in our denomination called groups of people who cling to the word too strenuously, called us fools repeatedly. We don’t have to stand for that.

And by the way, that’s the minority. I’m not trying to get us to leave where we are, but I thought that’s insane. No matter how we are slandered here on earth for the cause of the gospel, when Jesus appears, we have nothing to be ashamed of.

If we’ve stood with the truth that we know that he’s revealed, that he’s written to us, if we stick with what has always been true and will always be true, it doesn’t matter how much cause there might be in the moment for embarrassment here on earth. When Jesus appears, we have nothing to be ashamed of because all the truth will be revealed. And so I think you go study this out for yourself.

But in context, I think what he’s doing here is reassuring them that there will come a day when things we don’t understand will be revealed. And as long as we have stuck with Jesus, there won’t be the embarrassment of having been wrong. It’ll be all those with the better arguments and those who were more articulate, those who mocked, will be the ones who are ashamed.

But what can we hold on to in the meantime? He points us here as he’s talking about the way we’re supposed to live. And I need to finish up quickly here this morning.

He talks about the way we’re supposed to live. He talks about really changes that are brought about in us because of the gospel, because of the truth of the gospel that he’s defending, it has implications for us now. And the transformation of sinners is what he’s talking about.

And the transformation of sinners is powerful evidence for the gospel’s truth today. How can I know that what I believe and what I’ve been taught, how can I know it’s true? Now, if we’re talking to a skeptic, if we’re talking to somebody who’s not a believer, this is not the line of reasoning I would use.

I want to go back and talk about the resurrection. Ultimately, that’s where I want to go back and talk about the resurrection. because Jesus either died and rose again or he didn’t.

It’s that simple. If he didn’t, there’s no point to any of this. If he did, let’s listen to the guy who died and rose again, right?

Makes sense. I would go back and have that discussion because if we’re talking to somebody who’s not a Christian, talking about the change and talking about the spirit, they’d say, well, that’s all subjective. Okay, but you and I know who we are in our hearts.

We know what lurks inside here, right? at least in ourselves, and we can see over time the change that Jesus has made in us. We can see over time who we were and who we are now.

And who we are now, even after decades of walking with Jesus Christ, may not be perfect. It may not be the Christian we think we ought to be, but if we belong to him, it’s the Christian that’s better than where we started from. And that’s not because we have the power to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and be better people.

It’s because of the transformative power of the gospel. It’s because Jesus makes the change in us. Our starting process here, the starting premise here is God’s holiness.

He says in verse 29, and you know that he is righteous, if you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who practices righteousness is born of him. So his righteousness is inextricably linked to the righteousness of his children. We become righteous because he is righteous.

And that righteousness is something he puts inside of us. his nature is reflected in what he’s making us to be we become more righteous because that’s who he is but his righteousness is also our motivation for why we do the things that we do it’s not enough as the pharisees found out all the time as we’ve seen on sunday nights it’s not enough just to do good things with a selfish and wicked motive instead we’re told to do righteous things in obedience to god and do it with the righteous motivation because he’s righteous I’m going to do this because of who my father is. It’s a much better motivation for why we do the things we do.

But because he is righteous, he makes us righteous when we belong to him. And it’s the natural result of our belonging to him, our adoption in Christ. And that’s why he goes at the beginning of chapter three and says, behold, what manner of love the father bestowed on us that we should be called the children of God.

He is, John is, is, is bursting forth in enthusiasm over the love of God because it is that love of God that led to us being adopted as his children in Jesus Christ and that adoption is what makes the change in us and it all stems back from the love of a God who looked at us when we were unlovely and unlovable and was willing to sacrifice for us anyway and when he says there that the world does not know us because it did not know him that that’s a clue to us that the change he makes in us this righteousness is something completely different from who we naturally are because when we’re in the world, we don’t understand it. And those who are still in the world don’t understand the change that He’s made in us either, because it is completely different. But He assures us that we are His children, and that He is changing us, even if we’re not yet seeing the final results of that change.

We don’t see the finished product yet. We may get discouraged, and we may get confused, because we don’t see the finished product of who we are becoming in Jesus Christ. We see the problems, we see the sin, we see the bad attitudes, we see the things that are still there, and think, well, if God was doing this work in me, wouldn’t that be gone? Wouldn’t I be different?

But he reminds us, just because we haven’t seen the finished project, doesn’t mean that God isn’t still working on it. Look at verse 2. Beloved, we are now children of God, and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

We have not yet seen what God is making us into. We’ll see it