Fellowship with an Unseen God

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Well, I got a phone call Monday morning from the lady that rents my old house in Norman. And she called and said, we got some hail damage last night, some pretty significant hail damage. I said, well, I figured I’d be hearing from you today because it sounded like parts of the city got pounded pretty badly.

And she said, there’s a roofer here. I said, oh? She said, he’s going door to door giving estimates and he wants to know if he can get on the roof.

Okay, is he going to charge me? If he wants to get on the roof for free, he’s more than welcome. So she said, I’m just going to put you on the phone with him.

I’m trying to eat lunch. I don’t want to talk to this man. But I get on the phone with him.

I don’t have a chance to say no. I get on the phone with him. He says, the roof is totaled. I said, okay.

He said, we can put a new one on there for you. I said, can you? I wasn’t going to say anything that sounded like I was agreeing to anything.

I said, can you? He said, yes, and it’ll only be $1,500 to $2,000 out of pocket. And my first thought is, how do you know that?

Because you don’t know what my insurance policy is. You don’t know what company I’m with. You don’t even know who you’re talking to.

You don’t know that I have insurance on that. How can you promise this? I said, okay, well, here’s what we can do.

I said, I don’t know if she told you, but I’m in Lawton. I can’t just come meet you today. I will give you my email address, and you can send me up an estimate in writing.

Send it all to me in writing. Oh, no, no, we’ll send you to your phone. He said, we’ll snap some pictures and send it to you, and we just do things that way.

I said, I don’t do things that way. I know I’m a millennial, but I’m not doing business over the phone for $2,000, somebody I’ve never met. I said, I don’t know you.

if I’m going to pay you $2,000, by the way, I called a reputable roofer that I knew, and he said, we’re looking at $8,900. Okay, so that’s going to be fun. I said, if I were to pay you $2,000 for a roof, I’m going to come visit with you in person, and you will need to send me something in writing first. Oh, no, we do everything over the phone.

I said, all right, would you hand the lady back her phone, please? And I told her, I said, you’re welcome to pursue other roofers, and I’ll contact some also, but this is not how this is going to go down. I don’t know this person.

I’ve never met this person. I’ve never seen this person. There’s no way I’m sending this person $2,000 on PayPal. He may not even be a roofer, for all I know.

He may just be some guy with a truck and a ladder. You see on the news all the time that happens. But I thought, I’ve seen enough things, I’ve heard enough stories to be leery of things like this.

I told you last week about my dad being a banker. He tells all these fraud stories and it’s made me probably a little more paranoid than I ought to be. But we’re trained.

Don’t just hand over your money to people that you’ve never seen and never met before. A few years ago, there was a church member that called me, shaken up because she’d gotten a call from somebody she didn’t know saying her grandson. had been in a terrible car wreck out of state and knew all this information.

He’s in the hospital. They needed money to take care of his care. And she’s calling me just frantic. She’s on her way to the bank and she’s just in a panic.

She’s scared she’s going to have a wreck because she’s so jittery. I said, I will meet you at the bank. Don’t do anything.

Okay. So we got there. We talked about it.

They called her again. And she realized that these people she was about to send money to, having never met them, having never seen them, that they were scammers. And her grandson was just fine.

Then she was so shaken up, I said, get in my truck, we’ll go over to the police station. Probably nothing they can do, but we’ll take care of it. There’s a reason why you go into Walmart sometimes and there’s a sign up by their counter where you do the, what are they, money orders, stuff like that.

Don’t send money orders and gift cards to people you don’t know. These things are scams. We hear this on the news all the time. We are taught, understandably, to be leery of doing business with people that we’ve never seen and never met.

And by the way, if you get a phone call that sounds too off the wall to be true, remember this message, okay? And the introduction of this message. We are trained to be leery of those things.

But a lot of people have the same kinds of concerns when it comes to a relationship with a God that they have never seen. Now, for some people who’ve never had any kind of relationship with God, you probably have seen things like this as well. Just in the last week, I’ve seen it again, people trying to put us down over our invisible friend in the sky.

And they say that to write it off as though there’s no evidence for Christianity. We’ve talked about some of the evidence for Christianity. There are arguments and evidence to be made.

And people are free to reject that if they want to. But it doesn’t mean there’s no evidence. And I think it’s intellectually dishonest to write it off and pretend like it’s just a fairy tale.

Somebody like that that says, well, you can’t see God. How can you put your trust in a God you can’t see? How can you put your trust in somebody you’ve never seen in person, that you’ve never met in person?

Now, to somebody that is a skeptic like that, I’m not going to take them to what we’re going to look at today in 1 John, because I want to take them to something concrete. I want to take them to something objective. I want to take them to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. which we talked about this spring, the evidence for the resurrection.

I want to take them to that. Something that they can evaluate from a historical standpoint. But for people that may be in the boat that some of us are in today, that we know God is real, we know that Jesus rose from the dead, but sometimes we wonder about our relationship with God because we’ve never seen Him, we’ve never met Him face to face.

We wonder, how can I know for sure that it’s real? I have no doubt in my mind God is real. I have no doubt in my mind Jesus Christ rose from the dead, but sometimes late at night you may have those questions. How do I know my relationship with him is real when I’ve never met him face to face?

John deals with that question. And so if you’re listening to this this morning and you’re saying, I’m not even sure I know God is real, we can talk later about the resurrection of Jesus. But if you’re saying, this relationship I think I have, how can I know for sure that it’s real?

I know God’s real, but how can I know the relationship is real? John answers that question for you we’re going to be in first John chapter 4 this morning first John chapter 4 as John deals with this concept of of a fellowship that we have with a God we’ve never seen first John chapter 4 if you would turn with me in your Bibles there if you’re using your phone or tablet there’s a link in our bulletin that’ll get you right there in the in the scriptures and it’ll also be on your screen most of you are already standing but if you can without too much difficulty, if you would stand with me as we read together from God’s Word. We’re going to be in 1 John chapter 4 starting in verse 12 and we’re going to read through verse 16 this morning.

It says, No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us and His love has been perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us because He has given us of His Spirit.

And we have seen and testified that the Father has sent the Son as Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in Him and He in God. And we have known and believed the love that God has for us.

God is love and He who abides in love abides in God and God in Him. And you may be seated. So how can we be confident in our relationship with somebody we’ve never met?

Again, I know God exists. I’ve looked at evidence. I’ve looked at arguments.

I’m convinced God exists. I’m convinced that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is exactly who He claimed to be. How can I be confident in my relationship with Him if I’ve never met Him face to face?

If somebody said, you know, there’s a thing in some jurisdictions where you can marry somebody by proxy. It’s kind of strange, but it happens. Usually you’ve met and now you’re separated.

Say somebody’s in the armed forces and they’re deployed. You can, I don’t know, get married over the radio or I don’t know how they do it exactly, but you can get married by proxy. It would raise some eyebrows, though, if I said I was married.

Oh, what’s your wife like? I don’t know. I’ve never seen her.

Would y’all look at me a little weird for that? Okay. That would raise some eyebrows.

How can we be confident in our relationship with a God we’ve never met? Now, John previously described our knowledge of God and his love for us earlier on in chapter 4. Talked about God and our knowledge of Him and His love for us.

But then he transitioned here because John knew what he says at the beginning of verse 12, that no one has seen God at any time. We talked a little bit Wednesday night about what this means, that nobody has seen God. Because the Bible talks about Moses speaking with God face to face.

Now the more I study this, I’m leaning toward that being Jesus Christ appearing in the Old Testament. The other explanation is that it’s a figure of speech indicating a closeness of the relationship with God the Father. but not that God the Father has a face.

So for Moses to speak with God as face-to-face means God took Moses into his confidence in a way that he didn’t with other people. So there’s not a Bible contradiction here, there’s just maybe a contradiction in our understanding. The fact is none of us have seen God the Father face-to-face.

And John, when he says no one has seen God at any time, that’s who he’s talking about is the Father. Because John affirms that Jesus Christ is God, He’s not saying here that Jesus is something else. Jesus Christ is God.

And Paul calls Jesus the image of the invisible God. The writer of Hebrews talks about Jesus being the express image of His person. If we want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.

If you want to know what the Father is like, look at Jesus. So when he says no one has seen God at any time, he’s saying no one has seen the Father. Nobody has looked at Him face to face.

nobody can go and say, oh, here’s a picture of what the Father looks like. But he did say in John 1. 18, no one has seen God at any time.

The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, who is intimately close with the Father, has declared Him. So no one has seen the fullness of the Father’s glory. Nobody has seen God the Father in physical form.

They have seen Jesus. John himself saw Jesus, was one of the last remaining people on earth at this time to have seen Jesus in person, but even Jesus is physically absent at this point. At the point when John is writing this, they can’t even go and look at Jesus in physical form because he’s ascended to heaven.

So how can I know, how can I have a relationship with somebody that I can’t see? And scoffers, as I said earlier, they like to throw this objection out there that we believe in someone or something that we don’t see. And perhaps you have wrestled with that.

Perhaps you’re wrestling with that now. But there are a lot of things in life that we can’t see, and we know that they’re there because of the effects. I heard a radio clip for years of Billy Graham talking about not being able to see the wind.

He said, but you can see the effects of the wind. We live in Oklahoma. We know that better than most people on this planet.

You can see the effects of the wind. I have never seen the wind, but I walk out of the house and I get hit in the face with leaves and dirt. My flamingos are taking flight, and I know that there’s wind.

Next time somebody asks you, next time somebody bows up at you and asks, like they’re smarter than you are, how you can be so stupid to believe in something that you can’t see, ask them if they’ve ever seen their brain activity. I’ve never seen mine, but I assume it’s percolating in there somewhere. Somebody said electricity.

I’ve never seen electricity. I have felt electricity. I’d tell you stories about some of the dumb ways I felt electricity, but we don’t have time this morning.

Plus, y’all won’t let me help out with anything on work day anymore if I tell you those stories. Maybe I should tell those stories. No.

There are all sorts of things in life that we can’t see, but we know they exist because we can see the effects of them. And God, I admit it. I give up.

I admit it. I’ve never seen God, but I can see His effects. And that’s what John points us to as well are the effects.

of God’s presence. And God gives us evidence that we have genuine fellowship with him. Yes, God doesn’t pop up and post a selfie and say, here I am, this is what I look like.

But we can see the effects of his presence all over our lives. How can we know we have this fellowship? By the way, that fellowship is what he means by this talk of abiding.

That he abides in us and we abide in him. It’s describing this fellowship that we have together. And John really here identifies two key pieces of evidence that demonstrate the fellowship that we have with God.

The first is that when we have fellowship with Him, the love of God works in us. The love of God works in us. They talked about that on the missions video too, that people see it and they think it’s strange and they say, why is it that you love me like this?

It’s not because I’m such a loving person. 30 years as a Christian and I still look in my heart and my attitude sometimes and I realize that the love that’s there, that’s not just me. Because when it’s my natural fleshly self coming out, yikes.

Any genuine self-sacrificial love that’s there is there because God put it there. And if you think I’m wrong about that, look sometimes at your initial impulse reaction to things. See, what the Holy Spirit does a lot of times is He clamps His hand over our mouth, metaphorically speaking, clamps His hand over our mouth before we get the things out and makes us calm down and gives us something else to say.

But what is your natural reaction to something? I know what my natural reaction is to things all the time, and I can see the flesh there. And so when there’s love there and there’s compassion, I know it’s not necessarily me.

It’s the love of God in me. He says here, verse 12, if we love one another, God abides in us. Part of the evidence that we have this fellowship with God, part of this evidence that God abides in us and that we have this fellowship as a result, is that we’re going to be able to love people in a way we would not otherwise.

Many of you have heard this already, that there are four different words for love in Greek. Three of them are used in Scripture. I think the fourth one might be, but I’ve always heard the three talked about.

Let me tell you, three of them describe natural relationships, natural kinds of love that human beings exhibit. The fourth one is agape, which is the kind of love that’s used to describe God and His love. It is a self-sacrificial love.

It is a selfless love. It is an unconditional love. It is not a love that is characteristic of the way we naturally are.

But that’s the love that’s used here in this chapter. It’s not just that we’ll love like I naturally love my son, or like I love my wife, or like I love Whataburger. Any of the ways we overwork the word love, It says here that if we agape one another, if we love as God loves, then God abides in us.

And don’t get this backwards and think the love is the recipe for getting God to abide in us. Oh, if I can just become a more loving person, then God will take up residence in me. That is completely backwards.

Because you and I cannot agape without the presence of God. What it’s saying is not that that is the recipe for getting God to abide in us. That is the evidence that He already does.

So if you have those moments where you say, I know God is real. I know Jesus rose from the dead. I believe that He promised salvation and forgiveness if I would believe and I believe, but still how do I know that I haven’t made a mistake? How do I know that it’s real?

How do I know that I haven’t let Him down so substantially that I’m out of fellowship with Him? He points to the love of God being in us. And if you can look at who you are now and who you used to be before you came to Christ and you see a pattern where you have grown in love and you are more capable of loving the way God loves than you used to be, that is evidence that you are in fellowship with God.

It doesn’t mean you’re perfect. It doesn’t mean you’re going to exhibit this love perfectly every time. But it means you’re in fellowship with God and He’s working on you.

You’re a work in progress. And if you didn’t belong to Him and He weren’t in you, you wouldn’t be a work in progress. You’d just be stuck where you were.

There should be a pattern of growth. And I can look and see where, I still have a long way to go, but I can look and see where I am more loving than I used to be. And I think, wait a minute, this is where I am now, and I’m more loving than I used to be?

I must have been a nightmare to be around years ago. Kind of feel like I should do the 12-step program thing and call people up and apologize, but there should be a trajectory, a pattern toward love. And if you see that, that’s evidence that He abides in you.

But if you look back over the years and you’re just the same sour old person you always were, or maybe even worse, you might want to take a closer look because that may be evidence that he’s not abiding in you. He points us to another piece of evidence. Well, sorry, on this same point about his love, he says in verse 12, his love has been perfected in us.

That word perfected means complete, means mature. So what we’re going to see is that God’s love will continue to grow to maturity in us. God’s love is there and it will grow larger and bigger and fuller until eventually it takes over.

And I’m still waiting for that day. But the second piece of evidence we have is that when we have fellowship with Him, the Spirit of God lives in us. The love of God works in us and the Spirit of God lives in us.

We are able to express God’s kind of love because of the work of the Holy Spirit. Because the Bible uses the word indwelt. That means He lives in us.

It means He has purchased us as His new home, and He has come and He has taken up possession and residence, and He lives there now. And I don’t know about you, but that gives me goosebumps sometimes when I think about that. The same Holy Spirit that was at work all throughout Scripture, the same Holy Spirit that has sparked revivals throughout history, is the same Holy Spirit that lives right here.

He says in verse 13, By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. And just in the last few months, we’ve talked about some of the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our lives, some of the ways that will show up. And we’ve also talked about how if we belong to Him, it is inevitable that the Holy Spirit lives in us.

We don’t have to say as Christians, gee, I wish I had that. We have it. We just need not to ignore it.

We need to listen to Him so we can continue to hear His voice. But the Holy Spirit leads us and He teaches us. By the way, Jesus said the Spirit would guide us to all truth.

we have access to the truth of God if we’ll just listen to the Holy Spirit who will never lead us astray but he leads us and he teaches us so that we begin more and more to do things in a way that’s consistent with God’s will rather than our own sinful nature again this doesn’t mean that we ever become perfect on this side of eternity that’s what John was talking about in one of the earliest messages we looked at in this series on the assurances from God’s word in the in the book of 1 John, when John said, if we sin, which could also be translated as when we sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. He’s there to continue making peace between us and God whenever we do blow it inevitably.

So this doesn’t mean that we ever become perfect, but there should be growth toward doing what God has called us to do and told us to do, as opposed to what our sinful nature wants us to do. We should be moving in that direction. It should, over time, become a little bit easier to obey God in the things He’s called us to do.

You should be able as a believer to look at where you are now and look at where you were and see the Holy Spirit making you more obedient. But folks, it’s not the obedience, just like with the love, it’s not the obedience that is the recipe for getting God to abide in you. The obedience is the evidence that He already does.

Because apart from God, we are disobedient. It’s in our nature. It’s evidence the Holy Spirit lives in us when we become obedient, that we’re in fellowship with God.

We should look at that growth. We should look at that advancement in obedience and give glory to God for the fact that it shows us the Holy Spirit is there. And if the Holy Spirit is there, we belong to Him.

Now, unfortunately, what we tend to do a lot of times as Christians, and I think what irritates the world outside so much, is that we look at that and we kind of forget where we were and just think what wonderful people we’ve become, right? It’s not us. It’s not that you and I are better than anybody outside these four walls.

It’s that the Holy Spirit has done something incredible in our lives because Jesus Christ died to pay for our sins and purchased us. And now the Holy Spirit has come in and taken up residence. But if you can look there and at the history of your life and you can see the work of the Holy Spirit, not that you’re perfect today, but you can see where you’ve grown to be more and more obedient.

That tells you the Holy Spirit is there and working and that John says under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So it’s not just John saying it, it’s God saying it. That is evidence that you have fellowship with God.

It’s the Spirit who works in us and changes us and He points us to Jesus. He points us to become more like Jesus. He fixes our eyes on Jesus so we know to pursue that.

And that’s important because our fellowship is strong because it’s based on what Jesus has done. I think sometimes this is where our fear comes in, that we say, how do I know that my relationship with Him is real? How do I know that it’s strong?

Because we put too much emphasis in what we’ve done, and we think we’ve messed something up, or we were incapable of having the relationship, of starting the relationship. We think it depends so heavily on us, we forget that it depends on what He did. For years, I had doubts and questions.

I believed that God was real. I believed that Jesus rose from the dead. I believed that He promised salvation. we just believe.

But for me, my big question for years and years was how do I know I believed hard enough? Folks, we can make anything into a work if we try. And I ran across a verse.

I never can remember where it’s found. I have to look it up every time. It’s either in Acts or Romans, I feel like, where it says he justified all those who could not be justified by the law of Moses.

I read that one day and realized Jesus wiped the slate clean for those who could not wipe the slate clean by doing all the best that they could do. And I realized that day, it was not dependent on how hard I believed or did I know all the right things. Because I look back on it, I was saved at five.

Naturally, you look at that and you think, well, did a five-year-old understand enough? Look, I understood Jesus died to pay for my sins and rose again. I knew I wanted to be with Him and I believed in Him as my Savior.

There’s a lot I didn’t understand. There’s a lot I still don’t understand. But the fact is, it’s not dependent on how hard I believed.

It’s not dependent on what I knew. It’s not dependent on what I can do and how I perform. It’s dependent on what Jesus Christ did.

And sometimes our fear in this relationship with somebody we’ve never seen is, how do I know I did everything I’m supposed to do? How do I know I knew the right things? How do I know?

He said in verse 14, we have seen and testify. This is John saying he’s seen with his own eyes. We have seen and testified that the Father sent the Son as Savior of the world.

John saw it. John knew it. John watched Jesus crucified.

John knew where Jesus was buried. John saw that tomb empty three days later. John saw Jesus walking around.

John saw Jesus appear through walls. John ate with Jesus. He knew it wasn’t just a hologram or a ghost. He ate with him.

He saw the wounds and he saw him taken alive into heaven. If anybody alive knew that Jesus Christ was sent by the Father as the Savior of the world, it was John. And not only that, he said, we know this.

These were people who had been convinced and persuaded. They were people perhaps like us who knew the truth about Jesus Christ, but still wondered about where we stood with him. How can we be certain of this relationship with him when we’ve never seen him?

And John points their attention back, not to what they did, not what they earned, not what they performed for, but pointed their attention back to Jesus and what He did. Folks, we cannot put our trust and our confidence for our relationship with God in what we do to perform or to earn or to hold together. It is entirely dependent on what Jesus Christ has done.

It doesn’t depend on our performance. Folks, it doesn’t even depend on our feelings. You ever have those days where you don’t feel saved?

Anybody? My wife started making me get up early with her. I tell you what, there are times a day that should only show up on the clock once a day that now show up twice for me and that early in the morning I do not feel saved.

All right? In all seriousness though, we all have those moments where our feelings try to lie to us. It does not depend on our feelings.

It does not depend on our ability to answer every question that arises. Our fellowship with God is secure for one reason and one reason only and that that’s Jesus Christ, God the Son in human flesh came to earth, lived a perfect sinless life, that He was the righteous one who could be righteous on our behalf. And He was nailed to the cross where He shed His blood and died to pay for our sins in full and rose again three days later to prove it.

Our relationship with God, our fellowship with God is secure for one reason. Jesus. Jesus, don’t trust in anything else this morning.

Don’t trust in your abilities to hold yourself secure in a relationship with a God you’ve never seen. You can’t. Let me tell you, you can’t be good enough.

And I’m not saying that to be mean to you. I’m saying that because that’s what God’s Word says, but I also know from my own human nature, I’m not good enough either and can’t be. Jesus did all that was necessary.

And folks, our confession of Jesus is the door to fellowship with God. If this morning you’re thinking, how can I have that fellowship with God? I look at the evidence.

I don’t see the love of God growing there. I don’t see the work of the Holy Spirit. I don’t have a relationship.

I don’t have a fellowship with Him. How can I get it? Jesus Christ. And our confession of Jesus Christ is the door to that fellowship because he says in verse 15, whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God abides in him and he in God.

Now this idea of confession is not just the idea of agreement. It’s not just that you’re going to look at a statement of facts about Jesus and say, okay, I agree with that. I can get on board with that.

Confession grabs hold of what God has promised. Confession reaches out and says, I’m going to cling to that like that is my only hope, like that is the one and only life preserver. And it requires us to understand that we have sinned, we have fallen short of God’s standards, and we are separated from a holy God.

And to realize that there’s nothing, we are drowning in sin, and there’s nothing you or I can ever do to pull our own selves to the safety of fellowship with God. And yet we see He has thrown us that life preserver in Jesus Christ. Confession means we reach out and we grab onto it with both hands for Him to pull us to safety. Folks, this morning, for you, it means understanding that Jesus Christ paid for your sins in full, that that is the only way you can have fellowship with God and trusting entirely in that.

I’m not saying you’re going to have a backup plan. I’ll go perform some religious rituals just in case. I’ll start going to church just in case as my parachute.

I’m mixing metaphors up here, but we throw all the parachutes out. We get rid of all the lifeboats. We put our trust entirely in Jesus Christ and what He’s done.

Only by trusting in Him can we be saved and experience fellowship with a God we can’t see. But at that point, He’ll begin to work in our lives. He’ll begin to change us so that even if we don’t see God, we will see the effects of that relationship and we can be confident that we have it.

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