Tonight, I wanted to start off our time together by talking about being let down. This is something that has really been on my mind the last week as I have been experiencing a big let down personally. A few months ago, I thought everything was all taken care of and it would be a breeze the rest of the way, but low and behold, we are near the end now and it looks like the Red Sox might blow it again…
Now, even if you can’t relate to being let down by the Red Sox, maybe you can at least relate to the worst let down in sport history by the one and only New York Yankees in the 2004 playoffs…but seriously though, we all have moments where we have been let down by close friends, family members, churches, schools, or whatever. Let’s see a raise of hands of who has been let down before in life? Would anyone be willing to share about their experience?
Being let down is not a fun thing at all and most of the time it really stays with a person for a long time. I think when it comes to being a teenager, being let down is something that you have to deal with almost every single day. It’s almost like everything about life is constantly changing, shifting and adjusting; and sometimes it is not a very graceful change. Unfortunately, being let down is simply a fact of life that happens and will happen to all of us.
The other day I came across a poem in a book I was reading that I thought communicated this very idea.
I’ve got some time to kill
until I’m not a teen, but being my age is harder than it seems
adults always saying
“oh you kids have it so easy.”
Oh please, you have no idea,
you make it sound so cheesy,
all the social pressure, yeah
we make it look like a breeze
to steer through the popularity ranks.
But do you seriously believe
that the peer pressure is bearable?
Oh, less than you may think,
sex, drugs, and alcohol,
the fight’s a ship that’s just about to sink.
Even being a Christian,
can be so hard nowadays.
They say things like, “oh it’s not cool”
And its not just some cheap phrase.
You say we don’t have to work for food and the necessities of life,
but we have to deal with people,
and emotions can hurt like a knife.
I don’t think you understand,
actually, scratch that, I know,
because if you could get it,
your respect for us would grow.
It’s so hard dealing with all the pressure,
doing what’s right is so much harder that it seems,
you have to polish your reputation, clean it up until it gleams,
but underneath,
there’s so many dirty lies,
that cover up the ugliness that this generation hides,
just beneath the surface,
is all sins of all our peers,
and sometimes it’s hard to realize, that God can fix all this.
***Taken from Disconnected by Chap Clark
This young woman’s poem is so insightful into life and definitely is heavy of being let down, especially by a number of adults in her life and I think there is even a hint of letting herself down. I love how she brings everything full circle though and ends it with a very important thing to remember. She writes, “sometimes it’s hard to realize, that God can fix all of this.”
I think this is exactly where I find myself a lot of the time, “that God can fix all of this.” This is especially difficult, because I know at least with my life, it is very easy at times to feel like God is the one doing the letting down. Even if I’m not blaming God, sometimes I can get so focused on the people or things around me and forget that God is in control. Even though it sometimes doesn’t feel like it, the fact of the matter is that God is the one thing, the only thing in this world that you can count on to be constant in your life no matter what.
Let’s open our Bibles to 1 John 1:1-4 to help us explore this idea about God being a real and constant force in our lives.
Before we dive in and read it, let me just give you guys some background to this passage. 1 John is an epistle, or a letter that was written by a guy named John. Does anyone know who John was? John was one of Jesus’ disciples, closest followers, he wrote the Gospel of John which talks about Jesus’ life, and he was the only disciple not to be killed but was exiled to an Island called Patmos which is where he wrote the book of Revelation.
This particular letter was written to early Christians to help encourage them in their relationships with God, particularly because there was a group of Jews getting involved with what we would recognize as Gnosticism and were pulling people away from God. Does anyone here know anything about Gnostic beliefs or practices?
There are two main components of Gnosticism that John was writing against in his letter. First, the mind and knowledge are most important in life. The basic meaning of Gnostic is “the knowing ones” and they claimed to have superior knowledge from everyone else. It was because of this special knowledge that they believed they would get into heaven thus making moral living and a relationship with Christ irrelevant.
The second component stated that matter is evil and that only the spirit is good. In other words, everything around you that you see, really doesn’t matter and would eventually be destroyed. Your spirit, because of that special knowledge you had, would carry on into eternity. The biggest problem this view creates, other than again affirming that it doesn’t matter how you live your life, is that Jesus as God’s Son was impossible because the spirit of God could not have taken on human form. That meant that Jesus either wasn’t God or that everything He did was in appearance only.
Can you guys see any similarity with Gnostic thinking and the way our culture thinks about life and God?
So now, let’s jump into the passage and see what John has to say about Jesus.
***Read 1 John 1:1-4***
The first thing that we need to pay attention to is the very first line, “We proclaim to you the one who existed from the beginning.” First off, who is the we? The apostles or those who had witnessed Jesus. Second, who is “the one” that the verse is talking about? Jesus. Then the verse says that Jesus “existed from the beginning.” What does the beginning refer to? It refers to creation and any early Christian who was reading this would have been reminded of two passages. Genesis 1:1 which says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” And John 1:1 which says, “In the beginning was the Word [which was a name John used for Jesus that we see here in his letter], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
So, right off the bat, John is doing something very intentional with the way he was writing to make the point that Jesus has always existed, since the beginning of creation and He Himself was God.
The next thing we need to notice is the language John uses to describe his and the other disciple’s experience with Jesus. What words does he use? He says they have heard, seen, and touched Jesus. Those words are very present, real, physical words. John is speaking about his personal experience and claiming, “I heard him speak, saw him with my own eyes, and even touched and embraced Jesus. He’s real! He was a man.” So first, John starts with a look at the past, back towards creation, then he talks about the present reality that he and the other disciples were privileged to have. I bet you can’t figure out what’s coming next?
In verse 2, John calls Jesus “the one who is eternal life” obviously looking ahead to the future and the promise we have of heaven through a relationship with Christ. Past, present, and future, John is trying to drive home the point that Jesus is and has been a constant throughout all eternity. Why is John proclaiming this? For two reasons.
The first is in verse three and is, “that you [who? you, everyone, not just selected people with “special” knowledge] may have fellowship with us.” What does that mean, to have fellowship with us? He means to partner together or to believe the same thing about God as he does. The second is in verse four and is, “that you [again, everyone] may fully share with our joy.” What joy is John talking about? The joy of having a relationship with the eternal God and being able to go to heaven when we die because of Christ’s gift of life to us through the cross.
The gift of heaven and a relationship with the one true and eternal God is available to everyone who wants it. Because of Christ’s death on the cross, the death that we deserved because of our sin or disobediences to God, we are able to come to God without guilt or blame to receive his grace and forgiveness.
What is really important to remember about this relationship is that it is the only thing in life that will always be there. As we already mentioned, we are going to be let down over and over again in this life by people and things that are so important to us. The only thing that remains constant is Jesus Christ. Parents, friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, money, jobs, material things, all of it…they will all let us down. Jesus though, even though it might seem at times like he is out to lunch, promises to have your back all the time. I would argue that the times where we feel like God isn’t there isn’t His fault but ours, and it’s partly because we are looking for other things in our lives to be constant instead of looking to God. Our view of him is blurred and blocked by things that we are paying more attention to.
I would like to close with the following questions: if you have a relationship with Christ how should your life be different knowing that God is always with us?
