Sermon Manuscript W ALKING IN THE L IGHT : E XPOSITORY S TUDIES IN F IRST J OHN “Resisting the Revisionists” (1 John 2:12-14) • July 8, 2001 • Dr. Doug McIntosh, Sr. Pastor Introduction: Reading Backwards Today we come to the sixth in a series of studies in the little letter we call First John. This is a letter that is an attempt to repair some rips in the fabric of the Christian church that had been caused by false teachers. We know what the false teachers taught by the process that has sometimes been called “reading backwards.” That is, we look at the points that the writer hammers on, and figure that he’s not speaking in a vacuum; he’s answering those false teachers that he’s writing against. Whatever John addresses, he ad- dresses because somebody was saying the opposite. Today we come to a passage that is a case in point. John is writing to encourage his readers about their faith. If you read this text backward, it isn’t hard to discern what the false teachers were peddling. They were telling these Christians that there were no certainties in Christian living. There nothing that they can count on, nothing that they can build on. John is writing to counteract the effects of these false teachers who are seeking to undermine the faith of his readers. I gave the name revisionists to the people in question, because they were approaching their goal by telling John’s readers that their Christianity was faulty and needed to be updated. They needed to get in step with the times. They needed to flex with changing conditions. There are revisionists that are still around today. Quite a few, in fact. Their num- ber one tactic is to move the basic elements of Christian faith out of the realm of certainty and into the realm of ambiguity. That is certainly the preferred method today. Keep peo- PAGE 1ple from getting too excited about their faith. After all, it’s only their opinion. Some day, maybe, they can have a degree of certainty about things; but right now it is important to not claim too much. So John pauses at this stage of the letter to give some assurances to his readers. They need to know what he thinks of their faith. After all, he is an apostle. He walked with the Lord. He was appointed to help build the worldwide church, so what he has to say is critical. And what John does by way of assurance is to address the church from dif- ferent points of view and to tell them what their assets are. Scripture: 1 John 2:12-14 12 I write to you, little children, Because your sins are forgiven you for His name’s sake. 13 I write to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, Because you have overcome the wicked one. I write to you, little children, Because you have known the Father. 14 I have written to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning. I have written to you, young men, Because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, And you have overcome the wicked one. The Revisionists’ Approach The approach of the revisionists is one that is still in use today. It is to rob Chris- tians of their joy by pushing a virtue so hard that it becomes a vice. That happens all the time. In their case, they take a virtue like humility and push it hard. “You want to be humble, don’t you? Didn’t Jesus say that we should be humble? How can you be humble and say at the same time that you know that you have eternal life? That’s a very proud statement. If you say that you know you have eternal life, you aren’t being humble.” The effect of that kind of reasoning is to drive truth entirely out of human experi- ence. Any truth you might profess can’t be really true, because when you profess that anything is true you profess to know that for certain, and that is not a humble statement. So the revisionists came along and they said to John’s readers, “Now you don’t want to take all this talk of eternal life too seriously. I mean, at some point your faith might grow weak or even stop entirely, and then where would you be? You have to keep believing to the very end, or your relationship with God will be severed. Pay attention to us and we’ll tell you how you can keep that from happening.” That was their approach. John counteracts all this by calling attention to his read- ers’ spiritual assets. These assets are the assets of any group of Christians. These people were not remarkable or unusual in what they possessed as spiritual assets. John talks about these in these three brief but meaty verses so that his readers and we can know what we have to build on. He describes their assets twice, and for a reason that I will shortly explain. The Readers’ Assets (1) 1. The assets of little children PAGE 2Notice as you look at these verses that he uses three terms. He calls them “little children,” “fathers,” and “young men.” Now even though he uses masculine terms here, these are not masculine ideas. He is addressing the whole church, male and female, through the use of the generic masculine. It is simply a form of shorthand that has served humanity well for many centuries. It keeps us from having to use two pronouns where one can serve. Nobody thought anything much about it until the twentieth century, which, of course is when we became enlightened. Today, however, the use of the generic mas- culine bothers some people immensely. I don’t know if you saw it in the paper or not, but there is a college in Manchester, England, where the word “history” has been banned. The reason for this is that it begins with that horrid syllable his-. The same campus also banned the use of the phrase “ladies and gentlemen” because it carries offensive connotations of class superiority, and the phrase “slaving over a hot stove” because it “minimizes the horror and oppression of the slave trade.” I noticed that they said nothing, however, about that terrible first syllable in the word “Manchester.” John is worried about none of this, of course. The terminology is metaphorical in any case. When he addresses the “little children,” he is addressing people who might be of any age. A person can be eighty years old and be a little child spiritually. Little chil- dren are beginners in Christian experience, and he tells them in verse twelve what they have to build on. So what does the merest beginner have to build on? That’s what he tells us in verse twelve: “I write to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for His name’s sake” (1 John 2:12). John says, “Even the merest beginner, even the smallest child in a spiritual sense, can say categorically that his sins are forgiven.” Knowing that is something to build on, isn’t it? God doesn’t say, “Now believe in Jesus, and when you have accomplished some things, when you have made some advancement in Christian practice, then and only then can you know that your sins are forgiven.” He doesn’t say, “You behave and I’ll forgive your sins.” He says, “Your sins are forgiven. You are se- cure. Now behave in a way that is consistent with being a member of my family. My goal is to draw you to Me with cords of love, so I have put one of my biggest gifts right up front. I have forgiven your sins. Now that you know Me to be that kind of person, what sort of person should you be?” The most basic asset of the most basic level of Christian faith is forgiven sin. It’s not out in the distance somewhere; it’s a gift that comes at the very beginning. And a lot of people have their Christian faith arrested at this stage. They never get beyond it. They remind me of that familiar story of the little boy who fell out of bed. When his mother asked what happened, he said; “I don’t know, I guess I went to sleep too close to the place I got in.” A lot of Christians are like that. Even so, they still possess the forgiveness of their sins. And even if their development is arrested, even if they have made little pro- gress, they can at least count on that, because their forgiveness of sins does not depend on their progress: “Your sins are forgiven you for His name’s sake.” That’s a lovely expression: “for His name’s sake.” Did you ever think of that and what it implies? Today there is a kind of logic that says, “Don’t tell a new Christian that his sins are forgiven and that he has eternal life for all time. He might get cocky and pre- sumptuous and do things that will ruin God’s reputation.” John says, “That’s not the way it works. God worries about His reputation from PAGE 3an entirely different angle. He forgives sins for the sake of His reputation. He knows that if He didn’t forgive them, that would ruin His reputation as a Person of integrity. He promised to forgive the sins of those who would put their trust in His Son. To do other- wise would compromise Him morally.” The Father forgives even baby Christians be- cause Jesus died for them, too. Then he looks at this group from another angle and addresses the kind of people he calls “fathers.” 2. The assets of fathers What are the most basic assets of fathers? Look at verse 13: “I write to you, fa- thers, because you have known Him who is from the beginning.” If you were sitting in the congregation when this letter from John first arrived, and you heard the word “fa- thers,” of whom would you think? Well, you might be likely to think of the people at the opposite extremity from the “little ones” of verse twelve. You might be likely to think of the elders of the church, for example. But probably John doesn’t have office in view so much as he does experience. The elders probably would fall into that term “fathers,” but so would many other people, including many people, male and female, with no office at all, but with a deep and rich spiritual experience. People who are solidly mature and knowledgeable Christians are fathers. And what is their most basic asset? John says that they have known Him who is from the beginning. What he has in mind here is that spiritual fathers know the Lord. They match the requirements of the passage that we looked at earlier in the chapter. “Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments” (1 John 2:3). Fathers have already decided who is in charge of their lives. They keep His command- ments. They don’t debate, they simply obey. As a result, they know the Lord. They have a familiarity with the Lord that comes from friendship. Remember that Jesus said, “The one who keeps My commandments, He it is who loves Me.” Fathers have a deep and rich connection with the Lord. In fact, that’s the least you can say about spiritual fathers. Fathers know Christ from personal experience—the kind of experience that de- velops over a long period of time. No one can become a father, in this sense, overnight. There must be years spent in fellowship together. The inevitable result of that kind of ac- tivity is resemblance—the mature believer becomes like his Lord. You often see this on the physical level, too. If two people live together a long time, know each other well, and communicate properly, they grow to be like one another. So what about the third group? What about the assets of young men? 3. The assets of young men And who are the “young men” that John has in view here? If we simply go by analogy, the young men are people who are past the little child stage and are not at the father stage yet. They are vigorous and engaged in spiritual conflict. They are making progress, and John says to them, “You have overcome the wicked one.” They have won the most vital battle of all. They put their trust in Christ and were translated into the king- dom of God. Young men are defined by the battles that they engage in. They are people who are fighting the battles that must be fought if they are to get to the level of maturity. In other words, they are doing the things they need to do that will produce growth. The key to growth is fellowship with the Son of God, which, of course, is what John is writing about. If you want to mature as a Christian, then give yourself to the con- PAGE 4ditions that make for health. Do what produces growth in the physical realm. You know what those things are: good food, exercise, and rest. That’s what we need in the spiritual realm, too. We need good food, so we feast on Christ and His Word. We need exercise, so we learn to obey and live our faith out in the world that we live in. We serve Him, we min- ister for Him and to Him, we look to meet needs in His world. Then we need rest—so we rely on His promises and the realities that we know are true of us because His Word tells us about them. All that produces growth—if there is one more ingredient, and that is the life of the parent present in the child. The young men obviously qualify on that score, since they have overcome the wicked one by their faith. So he has now looked at the reader’s assets from the minimal point of view: little children, fathers, and young men, from the perspective of the least that they have going for them, and it’s quite a lot. Now he runs through the same list again and this time gives the maximum they can have going for them. The Readers’ Assets (2) 1. The assets of little children So what are the maximum assets of little children? In verse thirteen, John says that he is writing to the little children because they have known the Father. He uses a dif- ferent word here for little children than he uses in verse twelve. In verse twelve, he uses a word that means newborns, like the Scots term bairns, the newly arrived children in the family. Here in verse thirteen he uses a word which means, “children under instruc- tion”— something like our word students: “Little children who are under instruction, I write to you because you know the Father.” In other words, little children is the spiritual equivalent of being somewhere between birth and school age. What puts a person into the second camp, that of being a school age youngster spiritually, is knowing the Father. And here he uses the expression in its humblest sense, that of being acquainted with someone. Even that is a tremendous asset. Somewhere early on in Christian experi- ence, somewhere when we first begin to open the word of God, we learn that God is a Father. Instead of viewing Him as a stern and austere Judge, we realize that His attitude toward us is that of a loving, strong, and caring Father. We think of him not as a senile old grandpa who gives his grandchildren anything they want, but as one who exercises the care and affection of a strong, tender person with a father’s heart. That is a profound realization. We discover that we are not living in a cold, me- chanical universe, clanking on its mindless way, with us being helpless victims of forces that grind us up in the gears. We are in the hands of one who knows us and loves us, who has a personal concern for our development, a Father who has numbered the very hairs of our head, one who is aware of our deepest needs and is able to supply them. If you’re in the little children category this morning, you’re somewhere between the early realization that your sins have been forgiven for Christ’s sake, and coming to realize that you now have a personal relationship with God as Father. That’s something to build on. 2. The assets of fathers Now he goes on to the fathers. He says, “I have written to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning.” He changes the tense of the verb to a past PAGE 5tense, because he is repeating what he said in the previous reference to fathers. It is word for word the same. He described them as those “who know Him who is from the begin- ning.” When he addressed the little children for the second time, he used the present tense, because he was writing something entirely new to them. With the fathers, he’s re- peating something he has already written, so he uses the past tense. What is the minimum that you can say about a spiritual father? That he knows the One who is from the beginning. What is the maximum that you can say about a spiritual father? That he knows the One who is from the beginning. What else can you say? When someone knows God well, how do you improve on that? Fathers have mastered the basic principles of spiritual life. Having reached the end of the growing process, the rest of their lives are devoted to the richness of enjoying the Lord. We use the word mature in this sense in the physical realm. When a child reaches the age of 21 we say he is full-grown or mature. But do we mean he is ready to stop liv- ing? Actually, we mean just the opposite. He is ready to start living. This is not the end of progress at all. More than anything else, it is the beginning of the enriching of his life. He has now all the physical equipment he needs. Fathers have all the spiritual equipment they need. Their progress is not as visibly dramatic as the progress of a newborn, but there is progress nonetheless. And like fathers physically, they are in a position to repro- duce themselves in the lives of others. Finally, John turns to his second discussion of... 3. The assets of young men He says in the last verse, “I have written to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the wicked one” (1 John 2:14). Again, he uses the past tense, because he has already said some of this, but he adds some important new material. Young men have won certain spiritual victories. At the very least, they have overcome the evil one. There is an irreversibility to salvation that cannot be undone. They have won a resounding victory just by being in God’s fam- ily. But here he adds, “You are strong, and the word of God abides in you.” You’re doing the very thing that you need to do to reach spiritual maturity. What moves a little child in the direction of being a father? The Word of God abiding in him. It is absolutely impossible to grow up as a Christian, or as a real man or woman, unless the Word of God abides in you. This is why the devil hates it when you open your Bible and begin to assimilate its teaching into your character. It is the supremely impor- tant thing to move us into maturity. This passage, remember, says the Word of God “abides.” That means a knowl- edge of the Bible plus a persistent intimacy with it. It is not a matter merely of taking the teaching of the Word into the mind, but it is something deeper. The Word lays hold of us. We first lay hold of it, and then it lays hold of us, and thus the Word abides, it penetrates to the conscience, it lays hold of the will, it exposes “the thoughts and intents of the heart” and that is what produces maturity. That’s the key to progress. This morning we took into our bodies the bread and the cup of the Lord’s Table. Those elements mingle with our bodies and become a part of us. That is what the word of God has to do if we are to grow and make progress spiritu- PAGE 6ally. It can’t be something that is outside of us that we read. It has to be something that we take in and let it become a part of us. These are all certainties that we have been looking at. We really do have truths that we can count on. It doesn’t take away from our humility to say that; humility is not contradicted by truth. Humility is contradicted by pride, as though we were the inventors of the truth. We can take credit for it, but we can allow our lives to be enriched by it. C OPYRIGHT © 2001 P. D OUGLAS M C I NTOSH . T HIS DATA FILE / MANUSCRIPT IS THE SOLE PROPERTY OF THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER AND MAY BE COPIED ONLY IN ITS ENTIRETY FOR CIRCULATION FREELY WITHOUT CHARGE . A LL COPIES OF THIS DATA FILE / MANUSCRIPT MUST CONTAIN THE ABOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICE . 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