Well, the new twenty dollar bills have come out and I made sure when I went to the bank this week that I got a brand new one so I could look at it. As you may have heard on the news, the new twenty dollar bills come out and just a few days after they were out the counterfeits had already hit the street with color copies. But if you take out a new twenty dollar bill, it’s really very interesting. They have all kinds of anti-counterfeiting things on it. They’ve got colors. The number “twenty” down here is in a kind of a gold paint. They’ve got a blue eagle over here and if you hold it up to the light you can see another picture of Andrew Jackson over here. It’s called a watermark. Has anybody else seen these? Of course, there’s always the plastic strip that’s embedded up here in the corner or the whole width of the bill, so that a color copier can’t see that. So, if you have a twenty dollar bill and if someone gives you a new twenty dollar bill now you have a lot of ways to tell whether it’s good. You can hold it up to light and if it’s been a copy then you’ll see all kinds of things missing. The true bill has a lot of things on it that you can see.
I’m a fan of Antiques Road Show. Anybody else watch this program on Channel 8? It’s really pretty cool. It’s always hard. One of the hardest things about the Antiques Road Show is when the guy brings in his alleged antique and the evaluator uses that worst of all words, ’reproduction.’ He’s not talking about making babies. He’s saying, "This is a fake. It’s not the real thing." And the way they can tell is there are certain marks. Some people can bring in something that looks like a Tiffany lamp, but unless that little "T" is on there and a date and these different markings, it’s not real. So, there are ways to tell counterfeits and there are ways to tell what’s real and what’s true.
Now, in the first century church, as we have already seen in our brief study so far of 1 John, there were counterfeits. There were people running around who talked a good story, who said the right things, who said things that sounded awfully spiritual. John has already pointed out that there are tests that we can apply, not just to what people say but to what people do. And he goes on with that same idea here in chapter 2, starting in verse 3. He is holding the faith of these people up to the light to see if there are certain identifying marks in their lives that mark them out at a believer. Now this fact, these facts can cut two ways. One, if a person is all talk and no action he is identified, to his dismay, as someone who is out of relationship with God. He does not have, he is not part of that fellowship that John has been talking about since the very first verses - the close communion people with God and with each other, this close communion that has been brokered by the person of Jesus Christ. So, it can be discouraging in that way. But, it can also be tremendously encouraging as we look at our lives and say, "You know, I see these marks. I see that watermark. I see that plastic strip. I see that particular color. I see that particular grain," and find it very encouraging because you know that one of Satan’s favorite tactics is to cause us to question whether we indeed are in fellowship with God.
John’s going to give us some great identifying marks and the first one is this. A real relationship with God changes everything. A real relationship with God changes everything that really matters. It’s easy to look at this passage and say, "Okay, here are the things I need in order to have a relationship with God." But these are marks. These are characteristics, not conditions. These are characteristics that say if you are indeed in a right relationship with God, if He has brought you into His family, these are the things that are going to show up in your life. Look at verse 3, "We know we have come to know Him if we obey His commands." What it doesn’t say is, "If we obey His commands, then we will come to know Him." If that was the case, we would be into a works righteousness. We would be earning our way into God’s family instead of receiving it as a gift of grace and then manifesting the changes that are consistent with that grace at work in our lives.
It says here, "We know." We know. And that word here is a word for security of knowledge. This is what we know for sure. In Southern California these last weeks, it was terribly smoky. So smoky that sometimes the sun was almost blotted out. But do you think those people who were under that smoke really wondered if the sun was up there or not? They knew it was there, even if they couldn’t see it like they normally could, even if it wasn’t casting the kind of shadow that it normally does. They knew it because, well, the sun comes up. It always does. And what do we know? What is it that we know, as John says? "We know that we have come to know Him." It’s the same word but it’s in a different tense. And it means something a little bit different. It means a past event with an ongoing result. In the Greek, it’s called the perfect tense. The perfect tense is a great tense. It means - Here’s something that has taken place in the past. You can identify it. A time when you came to know God, you were brought into a relationship with Him and the good news is that that relationship continues on. It is an ongoing relationship. It’s not one that started once, like a fourth grade romance and that ended two days later. We have come to know Him. We have come into a relationship of love with God that is going to have an impact in our lives. It is a miraculous transformation that has changed us from being God’s enemies to being His friends. And we were His enemies. The Bible is full of that statement. We were at enmity with God. And God has redeemed us and brought us into a relationship of love and acceptance and security.
Now, wouldn’t everybody like to say that they had that kind of relationship with God? "Sure, I’ve got a relationship with God. Yeah, I have this kind of security in my relationship." Well, verse 3 says, "We know we have come to know Him, [and now here’s this ’if’] if we obey His commands." In other words, we know that we have come to know him, we have the security because we have seen in our lives the change that has taken place so that the commands we once thought were ridiculous and stupid and life-destroying, we now learn to joyfully obey because God’s work in our lives changes our understanding. We have come to learn that this God who we used to hate, we now love. And the commands that we used to disregard and hope that they were somebody else and ’not for me,’ now become something we love. What can explain a psalmist writing this, "Oh, how I love Your law! I meditate on it all day long." Does that sound like something a typical non-believer would say? No. This is a person who has been changed, who’s understood that the God he hated and feared is in fact a God of tremendous love and has embraced him and brought him into fellowship with Him and he says, "Man, I love Your law! The lights are on. The blinders are off and now I can see how wonderful Your commands are."
That statement is in stark contrast to verse 4 of 1 John 2, "The man who says, ’I know Him,’ but does not do what He commands is a liar." And in fact the man who says, "I know Him. I have this relationship with Him," but manifests in his life no change – "I don’t do what He commands. I don’t listen to what He says. I just do what I want to and if I know that God is unhappy with that, oh well. That’s the way it is." Actions tell the story. If there is no relationship, then there is no trust. And if there is no trust, then there is no obedience. That’s the sign of it.
All of us with children have taught them that when a stranger drives up next to them and says, "Hop in. Let’s go for a ride," we tell them, "Don’t even think about it. Run as fast as you can in the other direction." Why? Because there is no relationship there. It is a stranger. It is not someone who you are in relationship with, therefore there is a lack of trust there and we encourage their disobedience at that point. "Don’t obey him." But, if it’s someone that they know, someone who knows the secret word, perhaps, that we’ve taught our children, then we say, "Sure. Obey them." But, obedience comes from relationship. And when we are in a relationship with God, a trusting, loving relationship, it’s going to show up. It’s going to show up in obedience. "If anyone obeys His word," verse 5, "God’s love is truly made complete in him." That word ’made complete’ is that powerful, economic word that Jesus used on the cross when He said, "Tetelestai." It is completed. It is finished, paid in full. Same word, same tense, the perfect tense once again. This is a work that has been started and will continue on.
The person who obeys God is a person in whom God is working. And there is going to be a growing obedience, a growing joy inside. We’ve used the illustration before that the Christian life is like a tube of toothpaste. You take off the cap, unscrew it and open up the back end and its full of lies at the beginning of our life – full of lies about ourselves and about God. And as God begins to open up that tube and starts to squeeze in His truth, it expels out the other side lies that we have believed. And He keeps on doing that until we begin to embrace that truth and pull it in and say, "This is for me. This is right. This is what I want." Then we become overwhelmed with the truth and that truth reflects itself in our lives, in lives of obedience. God’s love for us changes us so that we will love and trust Him more and more. And with that growing change, as we see in our lives the impact of God’s love for us, as we see in our lives that growing obedience, as we see in our lives that increasing power over temptation, we say, "Yeah. God’s love is being made complete in me." And we have a growing security in that relationship.
Well, what does obedience look like? You know, there are a lot of ways we could go with this obedience thing. Maybe there are things that we find that are maybe acts of obedience that are easier for us, and some that are hard and maybe we put on the back shelf. What’s the model? What do we look at when we want to know what a life of obedience looks like? Look at verse 6, "Whoever claims to live in Him must walk as Jesus did." Jesus is the model of a trust relationship with God. Now this is important. You see, this whole passage is about relationship. In fact, this whole book is about relationship. "If you’re in relationship with God, this is what’s going to be evident in your life. If you’re not in relationship with God, this is what’s going to be evident in your life. If you’re in relationship with God and He is at work in your life transforming you, here’s the model of what you’re going to begin to look like." This is not to say, "Okay, here’s the model. I’ve got to pursue that. I’ve got to go after that." And the fact is that as we grow in our relationship with God, that desire to become like Christ becomes the goal of our life. But again, be careful not to make this a rule instead of a relationship. It’s a relationship with God that will play out itself out in the following of this particular model – the model of Jesus Christ.
Of course, whenever we use Jesus as a model, don’t we all get a little nervous? Don’t we all tend to just throw up our hands and say, "I can never achieve that, so let’s just quit before we’re ahead." That’s of course what Satan would like us to do. But, the idea here is this. This is not a statement that says, "Now, everybody go out and get a pair of sandals. Those of you who can grow a beard, grow a beard. Get a robe. Sell your house. Sell your car. Walk everywhere you go. Live outside. And then go and find a cross to die on." That’s not the idea here. When we were looking, in the past when we were looking for Youth Staff, I got an application once from a guy who said he was so much like Jesus, he even looked like Him and people would stop Him on the street and ask him if he was Jesus. I don’t know what exactly that meant. He must have had long hair and a beard maybe. And I don’t know if he wore robes. But he would be stopped and asked. And I remember somebody else got the same application from the same guy.
What we’re looking at here is not physical resemblance. What we’re looking at here is how Jesus walked What were the foundational characteristics of His life? What was the goal of His life? What was the power source of His life? And here’s what it was: The foundational characteristic of Jesus’ life was that He was walking in a trust relationship with God. What God told Him to do, He did. Who God told Him to minister to, He ministered to. What God told Him to say, He said; all the way to death on a cross. Jesus walked by faith. The way Jesus walked is no different than the way we are all called to walk. "Walk by faith and not by sight." That’s exactly what Jesus did. He becomes then the model for the Christian walk. Man or woman, boy or girl, old or young it doesn’t matter. We can all follow that foundational characteristic of Christ which is to say, "When Jesus says do this, I do it. When Jesus says speak to this person, I speak. When Jesus says turn away from that temptation, I turn away from it." Only the believer is in the unique trust relationship with God that causes him to turn his back on the temptations and pleasures of sin and embrace the positive commands of God. We tend to think of this almost exclusively in a negative way. "Okay, obeying commands means I don’t…." and then we pull out our list. "We don’t smoke, chew and go with the girls that do. I don’t do this. I don’t do that. And all these things that I don’t do that is the Christian life." And the question is: was that the Christian life that Jesus walked? And the answer is, well, there were plenty of things He didn’t do. There were plenty of sins that He did not submit to. In fact, He never yielded to any temptation. And yet, there was a whole list of positive actions that He took and that we can take and walk in His steps – loving God, loving others, blessing those who curse us, putting the needs of others before our own, living by faith in God, taking our concerns to God in believing prayer, being generous, sharing the good news of Christ with others, making the will of God my passion. That’s walking in the steps of Christ. All these spring from the transforming love of God in our lives. When God changes someone then he will walk as Jesus did. A person who does not walk as Jesus did, in that faith relationship with God that changes him and makes him an other-oriented person, that person is not a part of the fellowship, the family of God.
We find that as we walk as Jesus walked, we become fruitful tools. You know, ministry is something that we’ve taken and said, "Okay, in order to do ministry you’ve got to learn this, this, and this. You’ve got to be equipped this way and this way and this way." The fact of the matter is that ministry flows out of our relationship with God. If we are in a faith relationship with God, in a trusting relationship, in a love relationship, He’s going to pour His character into us and change us and pour His love right through us so that we become ministers not out of guilt, not out of high pressure, not out of the whipping from the pastor or someone else, but because it is the natural response of our relationship with God. And if we don’t minister then the question is not, "Give me a job so I can feel better about myself." The question is, "What is my relationship with God? Do I even have one? And if I do, then where’s the weakness? Where’s the weakness in the way that I am walking?"
If you examine the life of Christ, look at the amount of time He spent maintaining His relationship with the Father in prayer, how quickly He turned to the Father in prayer. God was the first person Jesus turned in times of trouble, the first place. Powerful ministry springs not from learning or by experience, but from a relationship with God that changes our life.
Now let’s get specific, because John looks here in verse 7 at the specifics of this walk. As we’ve seen, it’s a walk of obedience and it’s a walk that’s consistent with the walk that Christ walked. When there is a relationship between God and a person, and that person is being changed by that relationship, there’s a very specific identity that takes over this person. John says in verse 7, "I’m not writing you a new command. This isn’t new stuff. It’s an old one which you’ve had since the beginning. And this old command is the message that you have received." The old command is that God desires a love relationship to be restored between He and you. That’s what the Bible is all about. From the infusion of sin into the world, God made a promise that He would deal with it. And all through the Word He’s saying the same thing: "I am seeking to draw you back into the loving relationship with Me that I originally created you for. I am going to give you Jewish people this whole tabernacle so that you can erect physical barriers between you and I so that I can live among you without killing you. So badly do I want to be among you that I will set up this list of laws and rules so that I will be able to be in your midst without killing you." And that was all a shadow of what He really is His ultimate goal which is to change us and remove our sin so much that He can come and indwell us. It’s always been the goal of God to manifest His love to us. That’s always been His purpose.
"Yet I am writing you," verse 8, "a new command." It’s being done differently now. And that new command, "It’s truth is seen in Him and in you because the darkness is passing and the true light has already shined." You see what he’s saying here? This wonderful light that is seen in God is now even seen in the people of God because He has put His Spirit within us and is working to remake us in the image of His Son and put His character to replace our old character. And His plan is working so powerfully that people are being obedient and people are walking in the steps of Christ and according to the model of Christ.
And thirdly, and most difficult, the people of God are beginning to manifest in their relationship with other people the godly characteristic of love. Now we have made ’love’ into an easy word. Oh. Don’t you get sick of on TV. A person, some Hollywood star, will be talking to a group, "I love you all!" "Lady, you don’t even know us all. You don’t even know our names. How can you say, ’I love you all’?" Well that’s the world’s way. "I love you. You do for me, I’ll do for you. You make me feel good about myself, I’ll make you feel good about yourself." God’s love is different. Verse 9 lays it out negatively, "Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness." "Come on, John, that’s a pretty strong word to use ’hate’ isn’t it?" Well, there you have it. Verse 10, "Whoever loves his brother lives in the light and there’s nothing in him to make him stumble." Love is not a feeling. Love is not an emotion. Love is an action. Love is not deserved. Love is a choice. "I will choose to love you. I will choose to put your needs before mine."
I want to read a long statement from a commentator. It’s a little bit long, but please bear with me. Glenn Barker writes "How does John understand hate?", "Does he think in conceptual terms or concrete ones? Undoubtedly the answer for him lies primarily in what one does. To walk in the light is to love one’s brother and God’s love will express itself in concrete actions. If these are missing it is not because love can be neutral or can exist unexpressed. Love unexpressed is not love at all. Love has no neutral capabilities. When it is absent, hate is present." (The Expositors Bible Commentary, volume 12, p317)
He’s right. Love is action that begins with an attitude of putting other people first. "Your attitude," Paul writes in Philippians 2, "should be the same as that of Christ Jesus who being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself nothing. Taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man He humbled Himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross." "This is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and gave His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sin." Love has been defined. It has been defined in the person and work action of the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s an amazing ability to be free from the demands of self and give without thought of return. It’s the toughest test of the Christian life and that’s why I believe we have kind of redefined it and diluted it so that it makes us feel like we’re loving, but maybe we really aren’t.
I want to read you an email that came to our house. It didn’t come to us. It’s a copy of an email that was sent to my sister-in-law. "What a joy it is to hear from you." This is from a neighbor that Jan grew up across the street from. "I think about your mother and father often. They had such a great influence on my youth - between Pals and Pioneer Clubs at church to the sweet taste of your mother’s fudge. Your mother and your family was one of the nicest parts of my upbringing. Your mother made weekly visits with my grandma. She would sit there for thirty minutes and try to talk to Nana, even though neither of them spoke the same language. (Nana was Albanian, which is not a common language)… Your mother has nothing but white light around her. She is a spiritual and healing woman and I carry her influence with me and my family and at my work. Please give them my best. I truly love your parents dearly."
Here’s a kid who grew up across the street from a person, some people, who walked in the footsteps of Christ and manifested love. And here this man is, he’s probably about fifty, in a position of fame really who still remembers forty years ago when a simple Christian woman manifested the love of Christ in his life. Not everybody gets to grow up across the street from Jim and John Belushi and receive this kind of email from a movie star. But the fact of the matter is, here’s a man who was impacted by love. The simple, but caring love of a neighbor. The simple inviting you to come to AWANA at our church neighbor. Forty years later, it’s still impacting this person’s life.
Love is the toughest because it requires the most. My mother-in-law didn’t do these things because she thought Belushi would be famous some day. She did it because she had a relationship with God that changed her. It changed her view of other people. This was just a rough restaurant owning family living in a twelve hundred square foot house, maybe smaller. But she reached out to them because that what the relationship with God did in her life. And it happens through the ministry of so many in this church too, have taken food to homeless people, taken the good news of the Gospel down to a group of forgotten people down at the Chandler Care Center, reaching out to children in AWANA. Love is the deciding, fundamental characteristic of the Christian life. "Am I in relationship with God?" Talk’s cheap. Actions indicate what’s going on inside of me. My relationship with God will change me into a person who more and more does what God says, likes its and finds great joy in it. My relationship with God will change me so that my life will reflect the very character of Christ’s relationship with the Father, trusting and obedient. And my life will reflect this most powerful of all characteristics: active, selfless, other-oriented love. Those are the marks. Those are the marks.
Do you see it in your life? Not that you’re perfect, but that there’s a growing ability to love, that there’s a growing desire to love, that there’s a growing desire to say to God, "I love Your law. How I love what You’ve done in my life. I love how You’ve changed me in real, practical ways." But maybe you have to say, "I have to admit it isn’t there." You know what the good news is? It can be. God has opened the door to a relationship with Him through the giving of His own Son. All the sins that stand between you and God can be forgiven and by God’s grace put behind His back and, as He says in His Word, "Your sins I will remember no more." That’s available, not by being better but by putting your faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and His death in your place on the cross.
