Sermon 14th July

Today, our Honorary Assistant Minister, Gill Tayleur, continues our study of 1 John.  The reading is from 1 John 5 verses 1 to 12. 

WHAT WE BELIEVE REALLY MATTERS!

A young man new to the company was leaving the office late one evening when he found the Chief Executive standing in front of a shredder with a piece of paper in his hand. "Listen," said the Chief Executive, "this is a very sensitive and important document here, and my secretary has gone for the night. Can you make this thing work?"

"Certainly," said the young man. He turned the machine on, put the paper in, and pressed the start button. "Excellent!" said the Chief Executive as his paper disappeared inside the machine.  "I need just one copy."

Believing a shredder is a photocopier is not good. Sometimes, it really matters that what we believe is the truth.

In this morning’s reading from John’s first letter, John says that what we believe about God and his son Jesus, really matters. It REALLY MATTERS. John says there are 3 hugely important consequences of what we believe about Jesus. And that they are a matter of life and death – literally, life & death!

We need to consider them, but first a word about belief more generally. Or rather a word about doubt - because belief and doubt often go together. Jesus healed the son of the man who said “Lord I believe, help my unbelief!”

Tim Keller, minister of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, says in this very helpful book The Reason For God: “A faith without doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. [They’re the things that fight off infections!] People who blithely go through life too busy or too indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do, will find themselves defenceless against either the experience of tragedy, or the probing questions of a smart sceptic. A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if they’ve failed over the years to listen patiently to their own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.”

It’s really important that those of us who are believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts, our own and our friends’ and neighbours’. We don’t have to be afraid of our doubts. We need to engage with them and us them to get to grips with what we believe and why.

So, what is it about Jesus that John thinks it’s so important to believe? And what are the consequences?

In verse 1 John says, “Whoever believes that Jesus is the Messiah is a child of God.” In verse 5 he says, “Who can defeat the world? Only the person who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.” And in verses 10 & 11, “Whoever believes in the Son of God has eternal life.”

The key belief John is putting forward is that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah or Christ.

In last week’s sermon, Cameron put together a summary of John’s letter tweet-style like this: “Christian faith grows directly out of & must directly express the belief that in Jesus the 1 true God has revealed himself 2b love incarnate.”

Jesus is the unique Son of God.

Let’s remind ourselves of the context of this letter. As Cameron explained when he introduced this letter to us, at the time John was writing, there were some false teachings around, some things people were saying about Jesus that weren’t true. In both John’s gospel and in this his first letter, John went to great lengths to tell the truth about Jesus clearly, as someone who had seen, heard, lived with and loved Jesus for years! John described himself as a first hand witness to the things Jesus said and did, and to who he was. John knew that Jesus claimed to be the Son of God in a unique way. Fully man and fully God, the Messiah, or Christ, the one sent by God to bring salvation to the world, to rescue it from sin and death.

But some people had messed with the message about Jesus and who he was as the Son of God, and put forward other ideas. The heresies Cameron mentioned when we started this sermon series were Gnosticism and Docetism. Gnostics taught that the material world was all bad, and the spiritual world all good, and so it would be impossible for a perfect God to take flesh as a man; so Gnostics didn’t believe Jesus was really the divine Son of God. Docetists believed that Jesus wasn’t really human, he only appeared to be so. And Cerinth and his followers believed that God’s divine nature descended on to the man Jesus only at his baptism and left him before his crucifixion.

It’s likely that some of the people who believed these false teachings had been part of the churches John was writing to, and had left to start their own breakaway movements. And those left behind, whom John was writing to now, needed reassurance. How could they be sure of what they believed about Jesus? What did John have to say; John, who personally knew so Jesus so well?

It was to people like this, that John wrote this letter, and he did indeed provide the reassurance they needed. He stated very clearly that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah or Christ. And in the passage we’ve just read, John gave 3 testimonies, or witnesses, to this truth: 3 things that all point to the truth that Jesus is uniquely the Son of God. He describes the 3 witnesses that testify as water, blood and the Spirit of truth.

Biblical scholars have different ideas about the significance of the water and the blood here. Some say John is referring to the water of baptism (indeed the Good News Version actually puts in the word baptism, although it’s not in the Greek). At Jesus’ baptism, a voice was heard from heaven saying “This is my own dear Son, with whom I am pleased.” So Jesus’ baptism points to his being the Son of God. (And John may have been refuting the false teaching of the Gnostics by referring to Jesus’ baptism.)

Other commentators say it wasn’t the waters of baptism, not least because John didn’t include any account of Jesus’ baptism in his gospel. Instead they say the water and the blood refer to events John did record, when water and blood flowed from Jesus’ side at the crucifixion, when a soldier pierced him to check he was dead. The water and blood showed he was indeed dead – and showed he really was a man. John is refuting the false teaching of the Docetists.

Either way John’s point is that in Jesus, God became man. Jesus was fully divine and fully human, and his life and death and resurrection all showed the truth of this, supported by his words and actions. 

Jesus lived the perfect life but took the sin and wrongdoing of the whole world on to himself as he died on the cross, so that we might be forgiven and live in relationship with God. Water and blood, symbols of cleansing, purification, and death, and the means by which we are reconciled to God. Saved from the consequences of our sin, the Messiah or Christ means the one who saves.

And the Holy Spirit enables us to see and understand this truth about Jesus and to respond in faith.

So John says there are these 3 witnesses who testify to the truth that Jesus is the Son of God, the Christ or Messiah. But so what? Does it matter?

John says what we believe about Jesus REALLY MATTERS. He says there are 3 hugely important consequences of what we believe:

First he says that believing Jesus is the Son of God means we are a child of God. This refers to what Jesus called being born again, the moment or process in which we enter into a relationship with God as his forgiven, beloved, adopted child. We can call him Father, in a position of surrender and trust, secure that we’re accepted sons and daughters. Believing in Jesus as The Son of God enables us to become God’s children – and also as his children, our belief is strengthened as we grow in relating to him.

The second thing John says about believing Jesus is the Son of God, is that it means we

can defeat the world or win victory over the world by means of our faith or belief.

What is this victory? Preacher John Stott says, “It is won over the world, by which word John gathers up the sum of all the limited, transitory powers opposed to God which make obedience to him difficult. Sometimes these are moral pressures – the standards, outlook and preoccupations of a Godless secular society. Sometimes they are intellectual, heresy, and sometimes physical, persecution. But whatever form the world’s assault on the church may take, the victory is ours. The unshakeable conviction that the Jesus of history is the Christ/Messiah, in the sense in which the false teachers denied it, God become human in order to bring us salvation and life, enables us to triumph over the world. Confidence in the divine-human person of Jesus is the one weapon against which neither the error, nor the evil, nor the force of the world, can prevail.”

Do we want this victory? To be able to win our battles with the temptations, the addictions, the ways we mess up our lives? As children of God, we can expect to be growing in victory and freedom, bit by bit. That is the second real consequence of our belief in Jesus Christ.

And the third consequence of believing Jesus is the Son of God, is that we have eternal life. Verse 11 says God has given us eternal life, and this life has its source in his Son (Jeusus). Whoever has the Son has this life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.

The next verse says more about this, and Cameron may want to pick up on it next week (or he may not), but for now I’ll just say that eternal life isn’t just living forever in what we might call heaven after we die. It’s living in relationship with God, living under his just, loving, gracious rule, now and for ever. It’s living as he has made us to live, to our full potential, by loving and obeying Him. That eternal life starts here and now! And the door to it is in belief in his Son Jesus, as an undeserved gift of His loving Father.

This message is what motivates us to live for God, here in London as much as in Chennai!

So, can you believe in Jesus as the Son of God?!

Can you not believe it?! Tim Keller again, points out that if we don’t believe one thing, we simply believe another – and it’s often equally unproveable. If we say we don’t believe that Jesus was uniquely the Son of God, we’re saying we believe he was lying when he claimed to be? Or that all the stuff written down about him is wrong? Those are unproveable beliefs too – and how does the evidence stack up each way?

Tim says, You may say, “To be honest, I have no beliefs about God one way or another. I simply feel no need for God and I am not interested in thinking about it.” Underneath that feeling is the very modern belief that the existence of God is a matter of indifference unless it impacts my emotional needs. You are betting your LIFE that no God exists who would hold you accountable for your beliefs and behaviour if you didn’t feel the need for him. That may be true or it may not be true, but, again, it’s a belief, in fact it’s quite a leap of faith!”

So, what do you believe about Jesus? If you want to explore further the evidence and the arguments, I highly recommend Tim Keller’s book The Reason For God. I confess I’ve not finished reading it yet, but what I have, I recommend as thought provoking, engaging and honest. (And Trevor has read it all and can recommend it!) An/or, read John’s gospel  itself, to hear what he had to say about Jesus.

Or if you want to talk about belief, or doubt, do speak with me or Cameron – you know where to find us. Or if you’re ready to take a new or next step of belief, or faith, and want to talk some more, we’d equally love to hear from you. A simple prayer is all that’s needed, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief” as a man said to Jesus.

 So the question for all of us this morning’s question is, What do you believe, about Jesus, about these matters of life and death?

And what are you going to do about it?