Are You In Or Out?

Are You In or Out?

Text: 1 John 2:18-21

OPEN WITH PRAYER AND THANKSGIVING

Listen, all of us can see what’s happening in the world around us, and when we go to Scripture, and we look into the Word of God, and we read through what Jesus and the Apostles say the world will be like before the return of the Lord, and we rightly discern the times, then there’s a good chance you’re thinking that Jesus is coming back soon… at least there should be.

And let me just say this right off the top – we don’t read our times into Scripture… we read and understand the Bible, and then we discern the times. We read and see what God’s Word says about the signs of the coming of the Lord, and what is to take place, and then we look at the world around us, and we can see that those things ARE taking place. But in reality, they’ve always been taking place. Lying, murder, immorality, deviance, unrighteousness, hate, envy, greed, wars and rumors of wars, plague, pestilence, famine… all of those things have been going on for thousands of years. They are the “Birth Pains”. And as birth pains tend to do, they have increased in frequency and intensity as time has gone on. And so, we can look at these “Spiritual Contractions” if you will, and say, “Yup, I think it’s going to be soon.”

But one thing we do see now, that we haven’t seen on such a large scale previously, is apostasy. That’s one of the things the Apostle Paul tells us about in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-4. He says, “Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to Him, we ask you brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us – to the effect that the Day of the Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way. For that Day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first… (that’s the apostasy – the falling away of those who claimed to follow Christ)… and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.”

And that is something we are seeing more and more of today, a falling away. People who would gather with the Church, and who claimed to know Jesus, turning away from Him, and falling in love with the world. This is exactly what John is writing about in this passage that we’re using as our text. In verse 3 (1 John 2:3) John says, “And by this we know that we have come to know Jesus, if we keep His commandments.” In verse 6 he says, “If we claim to abide in Christ, we should walk as He walked,”… in other words, live lives of increasing righteousness and holiness… Live in light, not in darkness. In verse 9 he says, “Whoever hates his brother is in darkness and walks in darkness.” In verse 15 he says, “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”

So John is writing all of this as a way of giving his readers a test to determine the genuineness of their faith, and he wants to do that because of what he says in our text (verses 18-21). Now if you’ve read through this chapter, you’ll notice something… John has repeatedly used a specific phrase over and over again… In verse 4 he says, “Whoever says, ‘I know Him’…”, in verse 9 he says, “Whoever says, ‘he’s in the light’…”. So he’s talking about people who SAY they are Christians. People who claim to know Jesus, and who claim to follow Jesus, and people who claim to be in the “light”. In other words, John is talking about people who profess Christ with their lips, but in reality, their hearts are far from Him. He’s not talking about genuine Christians; he’s not talking about people who have been truly born again – born from above. But about people who make a profession of faith, but actually lack saving faith. People who have been deceived, and who are deceiving themselves. This is why he says what he says in verse 19 – “They went out from us, but THEY WERE NOT OF US; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.”

Let’s tie it all together.

A person can say all day, every day, that they are a Christian… they can say they follow Christ… they can say they are a believer, but if they’re not keeping His commandments… if they’re not walking as He walked… if they hate their brothers and sisters in Christ… and if they are in love with the world… John says, they are not believers. They can say whatever they want, but John says, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit… they are not in Christ.