Copyright 2005
by Pastor David Legge
All Rights Reserved
(Permission is granted to distribute this transcript in its entirety, with no alterations)

First John, the first epistle of John, if you can find 1 and 2 Peter, it's just after it - just before the book of Jude, the little book before the last book in the Bible, the book of the Revelation. So, if you can't find it after that, you're in trouble! Now, I haven't given this series a title, it's self-explanatory - 1 John - and the only title I have for tonight is 'An Introduction'. We'll not really be dealing with specific verses this evening in an expositional manner, I just want to give you somewhat of an overview and an introduction to this little book. I think that's important for our understanding in subsequent weeks, it gives us a backdrop and a context in which to fit our expositions from here on in.

We'll read the first four verses of chapter 1, just to get the flow of John's argument in the introduction of his epistle. Verse 1: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life; (For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full".

Now this first epistle of John, of course, if you're familiar with the New Testament, you will know it's the first of three epistles - the second straight after it, and the third which are only a chapter long each. John, the author of these three epistles, is one of the sons of Zebedee, along with his brother James that we read of in the Gospels. But of course, they were christened again by the Lord Jesus Christ 'The Sons of Thunder', because of their vehement personalities. John was also one of the inner circle of intimate disciples that had special fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ when He was upon the earth, the other two being James and also Peter. As such, as one of the twelve, and one of the inner three, he had a unique eyewitness experience of the ministry, the earthly life of our Lord Jesus Christ. Some would go as far as to say that, even beyond the inner circle of the three, that John was special, and indeed the Scriptures speak of him as 'the disciple whom Jesus loved'. There's something special about John and his relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, and indeed at the Last Supper he is found to be reclining on Jesus' breast.

Of course John, the author of 1, 2 and 3 John, is also - and many people don't realise this, believe it or not - the author of John's gospel, and indeed the last book in the Bible, the Apocalypse, the book of the Revelation. He wrote them all. But this book in particular, although it's called a letter, is not really like a letter in that it has no proper introduction, or address, or even close - and it seems to be, because of that, a circular letter, a letter that isn't specifically addressed to one person or a particular church. It's not like the book of Romans or Ephesians, it's not addressed to an individual like Timothy or Titus or Philemon. Yet, as we read it, though it's not addressed to specific people, we find that it is intensely personal - so personal, in fact, that John doesn't even feel the need to mention his own name to those he's writing to. He knows that they will know who is writing to them, and he is so attached to them, so intimate with them, that he bares his pastoral heart of compassion and love for them, and so often we read of him calling this flock 'My beloved', or 'My little children'.

Now John's writings are dated near the end of the first century, probably somewhere between AD 85 and AD 95, and because of that John, as he is writing this first epistle, is a very old man. Now I want you to picture him, as he sits wherever he wrote this epistle with a quill and a piece of parchment, and there he is well over his pension age, and he looks back and reminisces over the life that he has lived with Christ - bodily on the earth - for Christ as an apostle, as an evangelist, as a missionary. He remembers all the experiences he had with the Lord, he reminisces concerning the rise and spread of Christianity across Europe - what must his thoughts have been?

I don't know about you, but I think it's rather interesting to hear what old men of God have to say - especially at the end of their lives. If you can get aside an old man of God, listen to the advice that, as the Bible puts it, 'the hoary head' of wisdom would give to you! In fact, a very famous evangelist in our world today recently said, as he is almost at the end of his life looking back on the years of service that he spent for the Lord, that he wished that he had spent more time studying God's word and praying to the Lord. When someone who is a great giant of the faith says something like that, we tend to sit up and listen because of the authority of the experience, the weight that is behind their statements and the life that they have lived. When proven servants of God speak, we ought to listen!

Now, here is John, the apostle, at the end of his life - and he is speaking with great authority and with great influence, because at this point he is the only apostle now still living. He's the only human being, really, who has had this intimate communion with the Lord Jesus in bodily form as He was upon the earth. So he speaks to these believers with a fatherly counsel. As we see in chapter 2 and verse 1, he says to them: "Little children" - 'This is the message that I give to you, as I look and scour over the whole of my life and I assess where the church of Christ is at this particular juncture in its history, this is the message that I feel that God would have me bring to you'.

So what does he say? Well, that's one of the difficulties, because some have found it hard, in a sense, to analyse this little book - because it doesn't really develop an argument in any order, the way that, say, the book of Romans might do, or the book of Ephesians. John tends, as he goes through these five chapters, to repeat prominent themes that are in his mind and heart. Every time he repeats a theme, he tends to add a little bit more to it in repetition. If you look at the slide up here on the screen, it just gives you an idea - it's out of a commentary - how some men have tried to explain how John develops the themes in the first epistle. They have used the illustration of a spiral staircase, and he has these three main themes: righteousness, love, and truth. As you go through the five chapters you find that you revisit those themes again and again and again, and they're actually three cycles in the book, but each time he revisits them he tells you something that he hasn't told you before.

Peter Barnes in his well-known commentary on the Bible on this little book, he relates a story personal to his own family where he, at the breakfast table with his wife and children, was reading through this little epistle and sharing some thoughts. During one of the readings his eight-year-old daughter interrupted, and said: 'We've read that before' - we've read that before! He hadn't read it before, but sometimes we feel like that if you have read the first epistle of John, because he keeps repeating the same themes over again and again, the same truths. Why does he do that? Well, here is an old man at the end of his life, and he's coming and bringing perhaps the final message that he's going to bring to the church and going to be able to do in his lifetime, and these three themes that we'll share with you later, he feels are the most important things - so he just repeats them again and again and again, because they're worthy of repetition.

A bit of advice that was once given by a preacher, an old one to a young one, was: 'Say something, and then say what you've said, and then say it again' - say something, say what you've said, and then say it again. It's like hammering a nail into the wood over and over again. That's what this little letter is like. But I ask you the question: what must it have been like to have been in the church where John was a pastor, or he was an elder? What would it have been like to have worshipped in the Ephesian church, where John resided until he died and was buried there? Because, in the same way in this letter John keeps repeating the same truths, it seems that that's what he did in the little church at Ephesus. In fact Jerome, an early Christian, says that when the aged apostle was so weak that he could no longer preach, he used to be carried into the congregation at Ephesus, and he used to content himself with just a word of exhortation: 'Little children', he would always say, 'Love one another'. 'Little children, love one another', and when the hearers grew tired of the same message over and over again, they asked him why he so frequently repeated it. He responded: 'Because it is the Lord's command, and if that is all that you do it is enough!'. Little children, love one another!

This is not the onset of dementia in this old man of God, but John was commenting, inspired by the Spirit of the Living God, on the need of the hour - what these Christians in Ephesus needed most! He also comments on how these Christians could equip themselves to meet that need. So we must not grow weary, ourselves, in reading this epistle, of repetition within it - but neither, here's the application for us today, should we ever become weary with repeating the same message from God's word, whatever that message may be. Because God's word is the message that our generation urgently needs to hear, just like John's! The gospel, though we repeat it over again and again, and to some it might seem not to bear any fruit, that is the message that our hour cries for.

So what was the message that John brought to Ephesus? Well, let us look first of all at the primary reason for his writing, and then we'll be able to make more sense of what he actually goes on to teach them. I believe the primary reason for his writing is found in chapter 5 and verse 13, one of the key verses of the epistle, if you turn to it with me. John says: 'These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God'. This is why he is writing, that those who have believed in the Son of God may know that they have eternal life. Now if you would turn back with me to John chapter 20, we see there the reason for his writing of the Gospel of John. John 20, and in verse 30 we read that he could have written many other things, 'Many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: But these are written', the things that I have written, 'that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name'.

So we see the distinction here. When John writes his gospel, he is writing to a people who as yet are not converted. He is trying to lead them to faith in Christ. But when he comes to his epistle, as chapter 5 and verse 13 tells us, he is talking to a people who have come to faith in Christ, but he's trying to lead them all into a deeper understanding and a further maturity in their life. In fact, as you go through this little epistle, you'll find the word 'know' over again and again and again and again. That little word infers to us that there was something that these Christians in Ephesus didn't know. Yes, they had believed in the Son of God, they were saved, but John is writing that they might know that they have eternal life. In other words, there seems to have been a lack of assurance in their salvation.

Now there are two Greek words for 'know' in this little epistle, and they're repeated about 38 times through 1, 2 and 3 John. Now you might say, and it would be a worthy question: why were they doubting their salvation? Why had they a lack of assurance? Well, if you turn to chapter 2 for a moment, and verse 19, we are given a hint as to the reason. Verse 18 says: 'Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us'. Now here we have a clue to the reason why some believers in Ephesus had a lack of assurance. It appears within this little church that an intellectual or a spiritual elite had arisen, and this little group of so-called Christians were claiming that they had some superior anointing from God. They were super-Christians, and they had a supernatural knowledge - that's the key word, a 'knowledge' - that just run-of-the-mill, five-eight, ordinary, nominal Christians didn't have. You could call it a special revelation from God that was unique to them, but this is the point: they were claiming to have discovered an improvement on what had been previously taught in the New Testament church. They had discovered something new.

Eventually this little group of 'elite' broke away, they caused a schism in the church in Ephesus. Consequently there's this little band of simple believers that maybe weren't the most intellectual among them, maybe weren't the most gifted, but they are left there on their own. That little flock of sheep, perhaps, is confused, bewildered, saying to themselves and one another: 'What's this all about? Is there something special about the people that have left us? Are they better Christians than we are? Is there something in their supernatural knowledge that we don't have? Have we really got the truth? Is the message we have believed the gospel, or is our truth and our salvation deficient? Is there something that we are missing?'. Perhaps they even went as far, and I believe they did, as to say: 'Are we really saved?'.

So their assurance was at a low ebb. Assurance is extremely important for the Christian, and if we glean anything from our studies of 1 John, it surely will be that. Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones said on one occasion: 'Assurance is not essential to salvation, but it is essential to the joy of salvation'. You see, you could be saved and not have assurance, many people are. You could have assurance and not be saved, and many people are that too. But the best position to be in, and the biblical position that we all should strive after, is to know that we are saved and have the assurance of it that brings the joy that can only come through that certainty.

So John wrote to these disciples who had already believed, that they should know for sure that they possessed eternal life. Of course in chapter 1 and verse 4, he tells us: 'These things write we unto you, that your joy may be full', as a consequence of your assurance. So John writes to them in a world of doctrinal, social, and moral confusion, and tells them they need assurance to survive. Increasingly, as we go through this little epistle, we will see the relevance of it to our own contemporary age, but particularly regarding the issue of assurance and certainty, we need to expose the truth of 1 John - because we live in a world, even in a Christian church, sadly to say, that is relativistic. In other words, they believe that everything is relative, even truth - that there are no longer any absolutes, no longer any right and wrong, black and white. We live in a society that is not necessarily immoral, though it is that, but it is amoral, there are no morals whatsoever! There is no truth, you have your truth, I have my personal respective truth, but no one can say that this is 'the truth'.

What we have within 1 John is a message for today, if ever there was, and it's this - John says: 'There are certainties, you can be certain, you can know'. If this book tells us anything, it tells us the fundamentals of the faith, and it encourages and exhorts us, calls us back to the basics of biblical Christianity. You can be sure, John says. What he does for us in this epistle, and for these early believers, is that he gives us three main tests how we can know that we are truly Christians. This is something that we can apply personally to our own lives, and it is something that we can apply across the board to Christendom at large to know those that are really the Lord's people.

Let me say, before we look at those three main tests, that there is no hesitation in the apostle's mind - the first thing he does for us is to declare categorically that a Christian can know the certainties of the gospel and the certainties of personal salvation. Throughout this book, over and over again, let me just give you an example at the end, if you turn to chapter 5, the last couple of verses, in verse 18 he says 'We know' - there it is, you could circle every 'know' in this book - 'We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not; but he that is begotten of God keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not', and again, 'we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness. And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life'. This is John's point: 'You Ephesian believers lack confidence, but knowledge breeds confidence. I am here to tell you, as the last living apostle who encountered the Lord Jesus Christ physically, that you can be sure of the tenets of the gospel and your own personal salvation experience'.

Can I ask you, before we launch into these three tests of assurance, are you sure of your personal salvation? Do you know you're saved? Are you convinced of the Lord Jesus Christ, who He is, what He accomplished in His death, His burial, His resurrection, the truth of the gospel - by grace, through faith, not of works? Have you received it, embracing the offer of the gospel? Well, maybe you don't know, maybe you're in the same camp as these Ephesians? Well, here are the three tests. Put very simply, and it's been summed up by others in this way, there is first of all a doctrinal test. Then secondly there is a moral test. Thirdly there is a social test. Now we shall explore these, giving the reasons why they were crucial, and still are crucial to ascertain our own personal assurance.

Let's look first of all at the doctrinal test. Now this breakaway group that I spoke of, they had a name - they may not have been given that name actually in John's day, but a little bit later they came to be known as the 'Docetists'. The Docetists really were an early form of Gnosticism, you might be a bit more familiar with that word - but maybe you're not. Let me explain it: the word 'Docetist' comes from the Greek word 'Doceo' (sp?), which means 'I think', 'I seem', or 'I appear'. They taught, concerning the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, that Christ, as He came to earth, only appeared to be a man. He only looked like a man and seemed to be a man, but he was not truly human or physical. Now the Gnostics later developed this in the second century and had some similar views. 'Gnostic', the word comes from the Greek word 'gnosis', which incidentally means 'knowledge'. They believed that they had a special superior knowledge to other people who called themselves Christians. The Gnostics taught, along with some of the Docetists, that it was at the baptism of the Lord Jesus Christ, when He went into the waters and the dove came down, that the Spirit of Christ, the Christ-spirit descended on the man Jesus, and that same Christ-spirit, they taught, left Him before His crucifixion.

Now think of the implications of that for a moment, that means there was no real incarnation of the Saviour. When John tells us in chapter 1 of his gospel, verse 14, that 'the Word became flesh and dwelt among us' - well, He didn't. When Colossians speaks of the fullness of the Godhead dwelling in Christ bodily, well, that is wrong - and of course both John and Paul in Colossians were writing against Docetism and Gnosticism in this sense. It's a form of dualism, that means this: that they reckoned that material things in the universe were evil, everything that you could see and touch, even your very flesh and body was evil; the only thing that was good is the spiritual realm and the spirit of man. Therefore it was unthinkable to them that Christ should take upon Himself a physical body, flesh, because that would be intrinsically evil. Do you know what that means? It means that whenever you see Christ in the Gospels eating and drinking, and growing weary, and sleeping in the bottom of the boat, He is acting! It is all a facade, because He wasn't a real man! But here is a fatal implication of this doctrine: when He went to the cross, and the Christ-spirit ascended from Him back to God, it was not the Son of God who died there! Christ, God's Son, did not die on the cross, and He did not die as a substitute for sinners, and we are all lost!

There are many implications to this heresy, but the bottom line that John is highlighting here is that the Docetists did not think rightly of Christ. This was the doctrinal test: how do you know you're in the faith? How did these Ephesians know whether the group that left them were the correct ones, or whether the truth that they had was the whole truth and nothing but the truth? These Docetists, they preached Christ, they looked and sounded like Christians, but this is John's point, it's Paul's point, it's all the apostles points, it was even Christ's prophetic point: the Christ that they preached was of their own making! The test, doctrinally, is given in chapter 4 and verse 2: 'Hereby', John says, 'know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God'. In other words, anyone confessing that He did not come in the flesh is not of God.

I said to you last evening in the Gospel meeting, and I never tire of repeating it, the most important question that we can ask anyone in the ecclesiastical world or in the ordinary everyday world is: what do you think of Christ? That is the doctrinal test. John Newton put it poetically in verse:

''What think you of Christ?' is the test
To try both your state and your scheme;
You cannot be right in the rest,
Unless you think rightly of Him'.

We have spent many weeks, fifteen in all, looking at confusing cults and false world faiths - and you will remember, I hope, that if not all of them, at least most of them erred regarding the person of Christ. Everything else fell out of tandem with that false doctrine. Can I say to you this evening that I believe, to an extent, that the early Christian church took this Christological heresy more seriously than many Christians in the church do today. In fact in the early second century, Ignatius of Antioch wrote against one who took this view of Christ, and he said, I quote: 'This one blasphemes my Lord by denying that He ever bore a real human body. In saying that he denies everything about Him'. In fact, in Asia at this particular time, there was a Gnostic teacher contemporary to the apostle John and an opponent of him, called Cerinthus. It is only a legendary story, but nevertheless some of these stories have a lot of weight behind them, the story is told that John one day bathing in the baths in Ephesus noticed that Cerinthus was beginning to descend into the pool. The old man, as he was then, girded himself and ran as fast as he could, lest the roof of the baths would fall in upon him in judgment on Cirenthus.

You see these men of God in the early church, they strongly opposed anything that denigrated Christ - because they saw this doctrine, and all other departures in relation to the person of Christ, as a departure from the historical faith that God had given to them. That's what it is! We need to see it as such today! Wasn't it Jude who said in verse 3 of his little book that we are to 'earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered' - the Greek is 'once and for all delivered to the saints'. It cannot be changed, it cannot be added to or subtracted from. Now, of course, this adaptation of Christianity made the message of the church more acceptable to Greek culture. Philosophers could swallow it better with this spiritual element. Plato was to accept many of these philosophies later on, but the fact of the matter is: John saw it as it was! He saw this false doctrine as destroying the essential nature of the Christian message. For John, the Christian message was not a body of ideas or theological precepts, but it was an historical unalterable fact that was personified in Christ Jesus the Lord. Now have you got that? Christianity is Christ, the Christ of God, the Christ of the Bible.

As James Montgomery Boice put it: 'Gnosticism produced a type of philosophical religion that was divorced from concrete history, for concrete history tells us that Jesus was born as a man in Bethlehem's manger'. He lived as a man among men, whilst He was the Son of God and the Christ of God, He was a man, otherwise He could not have been the Saviour of the world. Now friends, here is a lesson if ever there was one to our modern age, because if we, like these Docetists, try to adapt the Christian message to be acceptable to our modern society, the message itself will eventually become irrelevant when the values and philosophies of society change, as they will and must. Whereas God's message applies to all generations and to all people - now we've got to preach it, and meet people where they're at, but sometimes I hear people say 'We've got to make the Gospel relevant' - the Gospel is relevant! We shouldn't attempt to adapt the message to suit our age, because the Gospel is the very message that people need to conform to, as the revelation of God that will change their lives and change their world.

So John, and I love the way he does this, no wonder he was called one of the 'Sons of Thunder'! In verses 1-3 he says it like it is: 'That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life; (For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ'. It reminds me of Genesis chapter 1, where God just comes in through Moses and says: 'In the beginning was God'. He states the facts, they are nonnegotiable, he doesn't even attempt to argue them - because, as far as he is concerned, the evidence is too great. We know that God made the world because it's here, and we know that Christ came in human flesh because they saw Him with their eyes, they touched Him with their hands, they heard Him with their ears. He was there!

Can I say to you this evening: the church needs to discover again what it is to preach the old message of the Gospel. I'm not talking about caricatures of the Gospel, sometimes you would think we were going back in time when we look at how we do things and how we say things even in this modern age. But what I am talking about is this: it is the historical Christ, the Christ of the Bible, the Christ of church history that we need to preach - and if we try to modernise Christ, or modernise the Gospel, we divorce it from history. Do you know what you do when you do that? You change its character and you make it another gospel. I love modern songs, and there are certain modern trends in Christianity today that I think are very welcome, I would have to say. But on the other hand there is a certain trend within Christendom that is trying to divorce itself from all of Christian history up to now, you'd think the Christian church was something that only happened from 1960 or 70 up to now. We are an historic people! We're not rooted in any age, but yet the fact of the matter is: our Christ and our gospel is relevant to every age. But this is the warning: if we do not have the historical Christ of Christianity, we do not have the Christianity of Christ.

C. H. Spurgeon put it well, I can do no better than put it in his words: 'The truth, the old truth that Calvin preached, that Augustine preached, is the truth that I must preach today, or else be false to my conscience and my God. I cannot shape truth, I know of no such thing as pairing off rough edges of a doctrine. John Knox's gospel is my gospel, that which thundered through Scotland must thunder through England again!'. Here's the test: is the Christ that you have and believe in the Christ of the Bible? That's the personal test to your salvation: do you believe that He is God the Son, that He also came as a man among men and died as the substitute for sinners? That's the test of Christendom.

The second test is the moral test - these two are shorter if you're worried about the time! The moral test. I need to give you a bit of background regarding Ephesus first of all, that we believe John was writing to - his own church. This was a circular letter around many, but the context of Ephesus gives us an insight into some things that John teaches here. The first thing I want you to notice is that Ephesus was a place that had now become familiar with Christianity. Like our own age, perhaps like Ulster, many believers were now the children of believers, or even the grandchildren of the first believers. You remember the day in the Acts of the Apostles where there was a great thrill and excitement, Paul was preaching the Gospel, challenging the god Diana of the Ephesians. Those who plied their trade in making little images for people to worship in devotion of Diana were up in arms, they were losing in their livelihood. Gone were the days when people would go every day for two years to the school of Tyranus and listen to the apostle Paul exegeting the Holy Scriptures. Now this second, or even third-generation Christianity in Ephesus had lost the glory of their witness, they'd lost their power and their zeal. They were becoming tainted with the world. That's who John is writing to.

Also Ephesus was no longer a place of persecution. No, the enemy now was false doctrine. They were at peace, but yet false doctrine was entering in just as Paul had warned them in Acts chapter 20 and verses 29 to 30. As he left the elders in Ephesus he warned them of ravening wolves that would come into the church and devour them. Thirdly, sin was rampant in the city of Ephesus. The Bible tells us it was a pagan city, wholly given over to idolatry and superstition. There was a whole huge religious industry that was dependent upon the worship of this goddess Diana, and it was centred upon the magnificent temple of Diana. The wealth that was derived from that idolatrous worship not only brought great wealth, but it brought spiritual bankruptcy and gross immorality that we couldn't even go into this evening. We know from the Acts of the Apostles 19 verse 19, from those who were converted out of Ephesus, that there was sorcery and a lot of the occult and dark arts, because they brought their books and their artistic instruments in spiritism and they burned them after their conversion.

Therefore it should be no surprise that in chapter 1 of this epistle, verse 6, John tells them not to walk in darkness. In chapter 2 and verse 15 he warns them not to love the world nor the things of the world. In chapter 4 and verse 1 he tells them to try every spirit, not to believe every spirit that is manifest. In chapter 5 and verse 21, doesn't he tell them: 'Keep yourself from idols'? What a place Ephesus was! But what I want you to see, fourthly, is that there was an error concerning Christ that had crept into the church, but that error with Christ was intrinsically linked with an error in their understanding of sin. Their theology of sin was wrong, because the false teachers were maintaining that sin is essentially in the flesh. They didn't believe that Christ could become a human physical being, therefore they reasoned that the physical was sinful and the spirit was the only holy and good thing. But that led them to the view that because the flesh was sinful, and eventually would be destroyed, would never be resurrected again, you could legitimise sin in the flesh - sin as much as you like, because it has no consequence.

So the second test was a moral one. John said in chapter 2 and verses 3-4: 'Hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him'. Now this is not sinless perfection that some teach, because in chapter 1 verse 8 he says: 'If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us', and verse 10 'If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us'. But nevertheless, what he is teaching is that the Christian's obedience is not an option. One writer has put it like this, I think well: 'While we are imperfect there must be a real, habitual, and substantial obedience to God'. Real, habitual, substantial - do you know what that's against? Easy-believism, false profession, 'You can take Christ as your Saviour but not as your Lord'. I'm not getting into a debate tonight, but I'm telling you this much: there's nowhere in this book where God says you can come for justification, but not sanctification - nowhere.

A. A. Hodge put it like this: 'You can no more separate justification from sanctification than you can separate the circulation of the blood from the inhalation of the air. Breathing and circulation are two different things, but you cannot have one without the other. They go together and they constitute one life'. You can't come to God and say: 'I want to be forgiven for all my past sins, but I want to live on in sin. I want to be justified but I don't want to be sanctified. I want Christ's salvation but I don't want Christ's image'. That's not on offer. So this is a test, a moral test. None of us are perfect, none of us are what we should be as Christians, we all feel guilty where we fall short - but is there at least a real, habitual, and substantial obedience to God's commands? That is the second test that will give assurance.

The third, very briefly, is the social test. We've seen the doctrinal, the moral, and now the social in chapter 4 in verses 20 and 21. 'If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also'. In other words John is saying, 'Look, if I claim to be a Christian, and if God is love, and He is love, and I claim to know this God of love, I too must love others'. Is that not what 1 Corinthians 13 is all about? You can have all the gifts of the Spirit you like, you can die at the stake for Christ - but if you have not love... Wasn't it the Lord said in John 13: 'A new commandment I give unto you, love one another'. I sometimes am amused with some of these books in Christian bookshops, you've seen them perhaps. They're called 'The Hard Sayings of Christ Explained' - there are many hard sayings of Christ, but I think there's no harder than this one. This one doesn't seem to be in any of those books: 'Love one another'.

Oh you might have the doctrine test alright - 'Oh I know my p's and my q's doctrinally'. You might not even be affected by worldliness in any shape or form, perhaps that's not a problem for you. But what about this one? You can tick the doctrinal test and the moral test, what about the social test? Do you love your brother? Or is there a brother or sister that you hate? Can I say to you tonight: it is very doubtful, if there's hate in your heart for a brother, that you're saved. Luther put it like this: 'It is not Christ walking on the sea, but His ordinary walk that we are called on here to imitate'. Oh the gifts are wonderful, the power is wonderful, the charisma that is in this church, the anointing, the knowledge, the doctrine - but what about the walk? I'll tell you, here is a test that the church needs to apply in Ulster: the bickering, the backbiting that goes on in congregations in our land, the dissension that is among believers today - is there another message that the church needs to hear more than this one? This is the test! It's not about loving your own people in your own church, it's not about loving your own denomination, it's loving Christ's ones - whoever they are!

With John these matters, with this Son of Thunder, they're just black or white - there's no grey areas. It's right or wrong, it's true or false, it's good or evil, it's either salvation or damnation, it's either Christ or Antichrist. There's no middle ground, no neutral ground.

You need the doctrinal test, the moral test, the social test - and then you can have assurance! What relevance has this little epistle to our modern day? Have you not seen it already? It has something to say to those in our world that are unsure about spiritual things - they are floating from one religion and one cult to another. But it also has something to say to Christians who have falsely professed faith, and who feel secure when they shouldn't be secure. It has something to say to Christians who are insecure and have no reason to be such. It's telling us this: you can know that you're saved, and here's how you can know! It has something to tell us about Christian ethics, the debates that go on about how a Christian should live in an ungodly age - and sometimes it seems to change from age to age with fashion, how Christian should live. The question we ask here is: does it change in the eyes of God? John says 'No'. Then there's so much charismatic phenomena around today, people are claiming special anointings and knowledge and revelation - and they make a lot of believers, simple souls, feel second-class citizens because they haven't got that. It says: 'Ye have an anointing from God'. Then it has something to say to all of us who think that we have all the truth and got it all correct, yet how often we betray an absence of true agape love, and betray the fact that all we really have is an empty, bitter orthodoxy.

That is why these things were written. God willing next week we'll look in more detail at these first number of verses. Do go home, it's only five chapters long, and read it through for next week a number of times to familiarise yourself with the content. Can I ask you all to search your hearts, just now before God, the doctrinal test, the moral test, the social test - how do you fare, honestly? Is your assurance founded well on solid ground? Or should it be a little shakier than it is? Are you not saved tonight, and you know it deep in your heart? It's time you were. Maybe there wasn't true repentance there in the beginning, and that's why you've got the problems now that you have. Well, set it right this evening.

Father, we give thanks for a wonderful Saviour. We thank You for a Saviour who, just as the children partake of flesh, He likewise partook of the same; that He might die, defeating him who brought death upon this whole race, even the devil. Lord, where would we be if He hadn't become a man, if He hadn't lived as a man among men? We wouldn't have a High Priest to bring us to God. We wouldn't have One in the glory with prints on His hands, His feet, and His side - but we have. We need no other argument, we're on solid ground tonight. But Lord, for those who aren't, oh Lord, search their hearts, what they think of Christ, what fruit is in their lives, how they behave to others - even if they call themselves Christians. Let us all be a people who have this mark: 'Behold, how they love one another'. Take us to our homes in safety, with the fragrance of Christ in our soul, Amen.

"Authentic Christianity"

Copyright 2005
by Pastor David Legge
All Rights Reserved
(Permission is granted to distribute this transcript in its entirety, with no alterations)

Now I want you to turn with me to the book of 1 John. I would encourage you, if you haven't been at our introductory evening, that you would get the tape recording tonight - you can get it on CD or on audio cassette - it just gives you...I spent the whole night giving a background to the theme and the context of such a book like this. I'll not be going over all of that ground tonight, so it's important that you get that knowledge, though I will be touching on some of the relevant information. But you'll be glad to know that we haven't dealt with any of the verses in any depth, and so we're looking at the first four verses specifically this evening from chapter 1 under the title 'Authentic Christianity' - authentic Christianity.

Verse 1 - do note that there is no normal introduction that is given to a New Testament epistle or letter, John just cuts to the chase and gets right to the point: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life; (For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full".

The reason why John wrote this epistle, as we saw in our introductory week, is found in the last chapter and verse 13 - let's just remind ourselves of that: 'These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God'. Now we were recapping that in John's gospel he wrote that particular narrative of the life of the Lord Jesus in order that people should believe in the Son of God. But now, as he comes to his first epistle, he is writing to those who have believed in the Son of God, but he is giving them an assurance - because, for a reason which we will touch on again this evening, they lacked assurance. Though they had trusted in Christ, they had not that particular assurance that every child of God should seek that brings joy, that brings the satisfaction, the reassurance of the faith of Jesus Christ.

Now why was it that they lacked such assurance? Well, we found out in our first week that there was a sect within the church at Ephesus who considered themselves as an intellectual and spiritual elite. They were, in fact, claiming superior anointing from the Spirit of God, they believed that they had a knowledge and a revelation from God that was almost an improvement on the gospel message that had been revealed to the apostles and passed down through the church to this stage in its history. We have a hint in chapter 2 and verse 19 that this sect broke away, they caused schism within the church in Ephesus. So there's a group of believers that John is writing to - and of course this is a circular letter, but I believe that primarily it was written out of the situation in Ephesus - those who were left behind after this split, those who were confused, shaken, made uncertain because of those who said: 'We have an anointing that you don't have, we have a knowledge and a revelation that you don't have!', and they were starting, perhaps, to ask themselves 'Well, what if they're right? What if there's something in this anointing and knowledge that they have that we don't?'.

So John comes, and if this epistle teaches anything, it teaches Christian certainties. He gives the certainty that these Christians, because they had believed in the Son of God, could know that they have eternal life. In order to bolster their assurance, we saw in our introductory week that he gave them three litmus tests - how they could know that they were the children of God. The first was the doctrinal test, which specifically we'll take up tonight in most of our time, which related primarily to our view of who the Lord Jesus Christ is. That is the test of Christian authenticity. Then the second test was moral, and we find this right throughout this book, and we'll spend much time on this, that you can't call yourself a Christian - even if you believe correct doctrine - and not live a sanctified and holy life. Then the third test was social, because a holy life is not just all about you and how you live, but it's also entails how you react and relate towards others - particularly your brethren and sisters in Christ, and even those outside in the world. So there was a social test as well as a moral and a doctrinal one.

As I said, the first four verses of chapter 1 really comprise of this doctrinal test, part of it, that we will find within this epistle. You remember that I told you in our first week of introduction that the group that broke away from this church in Ephesus most likely were a group called the Docetists. It was an early form of Gnosticism. Basically they believed that the Lord Jesus just appeared to be a man, He was not really human flesh and blood like you and me, but He only appeared to be such in a sort of phantom or ghostlike manner - He wasn't truly human, so therefore there is no doctrine of the incarnation any more according to these Docetists and Gnostics. That has great ramifications. It means that when the Lord Jesus lived His life before men on this earth, He was really playacting, He wasn't a genuine man. He didn't hunger, He didn't thirst, He wasn't tired, He wasn't really tempted in a human sense. The Word, therefore, did not become flesh, as John says in chapter 1 of his gospel and verse 14, and tabernacle among us. It contradicts directly the teaching of Colossians 2 and verse 9, that the fullness of the Godhead dwells completely, bodily in our Lord Jesus Christ. But here was the fundamental problem in relation to our salvation: obviously incarnation. If He wasn't incarnate He could not go to the cross, and there's a problem regarding salvation and substitution. If He didn't become a man, He couldn't become men's substitute, a sacrifice for all mankind on behalf of man and before God. So this doctrine of the Docetists and the Gnostics had fundamental ramifications for Christian doctrine. They did not think rightly of Christ, and so the whole of Christian faith was at stake. They had created a Christ of their own making.

This is why John was so strongly and vehemently opposed to the teaching of these false teachers and false prophets. Because, as far as he was concerned, and remember he is inspired by the Holy Spirit, this was a complete departure from historical Christian faith. You remember that verse in Jude, verse 3, where he encouraged them to earnestly contend - or defend - for the faith that was once and for all delivered to the saints...a completed faith that does not need to be added to, and certainly should not be taken away from. Now this is terribly important: we live today, in the 21st century, in a culture that is eager for religious experience. I think that in our post-modern age we have evolved out of a sceptical society, to a large extent - there aren't as many atheists or agnostics about today, but there are a lot of people around who are yearning for a particular religious experience, and it doesn't have to be Christian necessarily. You see it in the New Age movement, you see it in ecumenism: it doesn't really matter the particular religious label that you take, as long as it seems to work for you! It is a religious pragmatism, it throws out the idea of truth, right and wrong, and accepts that, 'As long as it does something for me, gives me a buzz, gets me to my desired end and goal - well, I'll embrace it, it doesn't really matter whether it's the truth or not'.

Let me illustrate this to you: George Barna, in one of his polls in the United States, and I take it from there because not only is it one of the greatest 'Christian' countries in the world, so-called, but it's the only one I could really get my hands on figures for. The Barna poll reports that in the US over 80% of people believe in God or gods. It is not an atheistic country by any means. When the folk were asked in this poll in the States if all of the world's religions essentially prayed to the same God, 64% of the adults said 'Yes, they did'. The next statistic is staggering, because the figure among evangelicals in the United States that said everyone prays to the same God was 46%. Among those who labelled themselves as 'born again', as opposed to 'evangelical' - you can make the distinction as you like there! - 48% said that they all prayed to the same God. Among the regular church attendees that may not have considered themselves evangelical, 62% within American churches believed that everyone in the world, whatever religion they belonged to, prayed to the same God in heaven. That means that within the pews of America, two thirds of churchgoing people believed that the exclusive character of the Christian message was now obsolete! Indeed, with those who call themselves evangelicals, half of them believed the same.

So the question needs to be asked today, as it was asked in John's day, in the light of so much confusion: what are the essentials of Christian doctrine? What makes you a Christian? What makes a church Christian? Not only what are the essentials of doctrine, but what are the essentials of fellowship? How can we join with other people? On what grounds? Now, especially in the light of ecumenism, one commentator who I'll share some excerpts from this evening shares the dangers that he encountered in interfaith fellowship. He was there, he fellowshipped with other religions on a low-key level, not, perhaps, to the extent of the fellowship that we would have tonight, but he operated and cooperated with them in various ways, even if it was on a social level. He says this, and I quote him: 'Trying to build unity, particularly for commendable social programs, I recall attending one such attempt in Illinois. This was a meeting of Jewish rabbis and Christian pastors who, for the sake of Chicago's northern suburbs, agreed that a united front was needed against crime and drugs. As the discussion progressed, all sides pressed for' - he quotes - ''common theological denominators' that would be the basis of prayer and worship and ethics. It goes without saying', he says, 'that the Christological emphasis had to be set aside'. Christ, that's what Christological means, the study and understanding of Christ had to be set aside.

Now this writer also expresses how at one stage in his life he was a navy chaplain in the United States Navy. He says from one experience in that career, I quote: 'I recall leading a prayer at an Officer's School near the Navy War College in Newport, Rhode Island. I was reminded gently by the commanding officer not to include anything offensive, such as any reference to Jesus Christ'. He says: 'Imagine wearing a cross on your collar device in the military, and not referring to Jesus'. Now whether we care to admit it or not today, that is the attitude of the world, largely speaking a religious world, and it is even an attitude that is starting to invade the church - a pragmatism. In fact, the same writer goes on to say of a specifically Christian situation in a broad sense: 'A friend of mine once told a story about Harvard Divinity School', which hundreds of years ago used to be a very reputable Divinity School, 'upon learning that one of her professors was an agnostic, she inquired about the range of theological diversity on the seminary campus. 'Anything goes', came the reply. My friend pursued the point, 'You mean there's no belief or absence of belief that would keep one from being hired to teach theology?'. 'Only one', came the clarification, 'the refusal to endorse women's ordination''. That was the only account on which someone would be refused to be a Professor of Divinity in Harvard Divinity School. It didn't matter what you thought of Christ, what you thought of the Gospel, all that seemed to matter was what you thought in endorsement of women's ordination!

The same confusion, perhaps not to such an extent, exists among evangelicalism today. The Evangelical Theological Society is an academic fellowship of hundreds of evangelical professors and pastors, and it has only one doctrinal affirmation for every member to sign, and it is the inerrancy of Scripture. The Mormons could write a signature beside the inerrancy of Scripture! That tells you nothing! What John tells us is that there is no Christianity if Christ is not at the centre of it. They, as we, were trying to discern: what are the essentials for Christian identity? Indeed, what are the grounds for Christian unity and Christian fellowship? So he gives us both the historical and the experimental aspects of what Christianity is.

So let's answer that question this evening: what is Christianity? The first answer is found in verse 1, and it is the life that the apostle John and the rest of the apostles encountered: the life encountered. 'That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life'. What John is giving to us now is the objective, foundational, historical basis for the faith that we have. Something objective is something that you can see, something that you can handle, something that is solid. So he tells us: from the beginning, from the beginning! What a statement! It's very reminiscent of how he began his gospel in chapter 1 and verse 1: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God'. It's even reminiscent of how the Bible itself begins in Genesis 1 and verse 1: 'In the beginning was God'. What John is seeking to do here is lay down a foundation: this is historical, this faith that we have is founded in the Christ of God who came before the world - and he records the account in John 1. But it's also more than that: it is a faith that is rooted and grounded right back to creation, Genesis 1 verse 1, and this is none other than the pre-existent Christ that we preach. This is the One who was with God before the world was.

This is so important that we maintain and realise that we believe in the pre-existent Christ. The Gnostics did not believe this, the Docetists believed that the Spirit of Christ fell upon Him, the man Jesus, when He was baptised in the Jordan, and it left Him before He was crucified on the cross - but the man Jesus who was born into Bethlehem wasn't really that Christ in and of Himself. But He is! He was the pre-existent Son of God. This is important to realise, that our faith is not just an historic faith, our faith is an eternal faith in the eternal pre-existent Son of God. You see the Mormons would say: 'We believe the Bible, but we believe our Mormon Bible too - it's a new revelation added to the Bible', like the Docetists and the Gnostics. But we have to reply to the Mormons: 'I don't need your new book, for I have a book that gives me the revelation of God from the beginning, and tells me that His complete revelation is perfected in Jesus Christ'. Mary Baker Eddy might say to us: 'Well, you need the book 'Science and Health' to complete your understanding of God and how to get to Him'. Pastor Russell and Judge Rutherford of the Jehovah's Witnesses would say you need the books 'Studies in Scriptures', but we say: 'No, we don't need any of those, because our faith goes back to the beginning - that which God gave at the first, the One who was with God before the world began. Our faith is founded on the pre-existent One!'.

You see, what John is saying here is that the foundation of all true fellowship with God and with any other people is the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, and these first two verses are telling us of His eternity. Not only His eternity, but the reality of His incarnation as He came from eternity into time to be our Saviour. He articulates it in such a graphic way by saying: 'We heard Him' - the 'we' being the apostles - 'We saw Him with our eyes, we even handled Him with our hands, this Word of life. We say this because He was not an illusion, He was not a phantom, He was not a ghost, He was not a figment of our imagination, He was real! He came in flesh and blood as a man. That one who came in flesh and blood was from the beginning', and as verse two says, 'He was with the Father'. Now the Greek phrase there is 'proston patera' (sp?), which means He was in closest face-to-face fellowship with the Father, that fellowship that existed in the eternal mystery of the Godhead. This is God the Son, and He became flesh! What John is telling us is that this is a central tenet of what Christianity is, and if you don't believe in it - either the deity of the Saviour or His humanity - you cannot call yourself a Christian. The life was encountered, it was revealed.

Then secondly, as we look into verse 2, we read: 'For the life was manifested', a favourite word of John's, 'and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us'. The life was manifested. The New Age movement, even the Baha'i Faith, and many of the cults follow the heretic of John's day, Cerinthus, in the view that the divine Christ is a sort of spiritual entity that just came upon the man Jesus at His baptism and left Him before the cross. What they do is, they take away this truth, they take away the truth that this life, this Son of God, this Word of God, this Christ was actually manifested in the flesh. The whole of Christianity stands or falls on that truth - it falls to pieces without it. Christ's teachings mean nothing, they fall to the ground and rot, if he was not the Son of God in human flesh. His miracles mean nothing, they are not signs, they do not point to anything. His death was not for sinners, it did not atone for your sins. His precious blood was worthless, because on the cross He was not the Son of God nor the Christ of God. His resurrection didn't happen, His promises to raise the dead are all empty and futile, and therefore we will not rise from the dead, we will rot too. Our sins cannot be forgiven, and He is not coming to judge the world and bring His own to glory. Everything in Christianity rests on the person of Christ, and who He claimed to be.

May I say, that's where it differentiates greatly and fundamentally with other religions in our world. What I mean by that is: it doesn't really matter who Buddha was, Buddhists follow his teaching. In a sense, it doesn't really matter who Mohammed was to the Moslems, other than the fact that he was a prophet, what matters is his teaching and what he revealed. We could go through all the religions of the world, but Christianity is different because it rests fundamentally on who Christ was, and who He said He was. It rests on the premise of Him being God. Confucius and Buddha and Mohammed never claimed to be God in the flesh, but He did! So Christianity as a faith is more than a conglomerate of ideas, it's more than a philosophy, the greatest miracle of Christianity is Christ, and if we don't have Him we don't have anything!

An anonymous writer put it like this: 'I am glad as a Christian that my knowledge of eternal life is not built on the speculations of philosophers or even theologians, but on the unimpeachable testimony of those who heard, saw, gazed at and handled Him in whom it was incarnate'. What John brings to us in verse 2 is not only was that life encountered, but he had a personal experience of it. This life was experienced, he saw it, he heard it, he handled it - it was manifested, it was revealed. In other words, what John is saying, if you look at this verse, he is saying: 'We are not deceived, we saw Him!'. The word for 'saw' there is literally 'We gazed intently upon Him'. You remember when Peter went in and examined the clothes of the Lord Jesus after He had risen again, the grave clothes? There's a word for 'look' there, and it means he 'examined it', he interrogated those pieces of cloth. This is the same word, he gazed intently upon Christ when He was on the earth. We know that of John, he was the beloved disciple, he was the one who was the last at the cross, he was the one whose head was on His bosom on the night in which He was betrayed, he was the one who intently studied the Lord Jesus Christ. He is saying: 'We know that He was a real man, and His vision, experientially, has filled our souls'. Do you know what he's saying? 'This is no second-hand religious experience that has been inherited from someone else. This is not something that we just read in a book and have adopted, we know that this is real! This Christ of God is not a phantom, He is not a ghost, He is real!'.

Now let me add to the fact that this life came in the flesh, the incarnation, He was the Son of God, it was encountered and experienced - this book intrinsically develops for us the doctrine of the Trinity. Because we see that it says in verse 2 that this life 'was with the Father' before the world began. You see, if you believe in the doctrine of the Son of God, you must believe in the doctrine of the Father and in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, in chapter 2 of this book, if you'll look at it for a moment, in verse 23 John categorically states: 'Whosoever denies the Son, the same hath not the Father: he that acknowledges the Son hath the Father also', and that is implied. So what we have here is the doctrine of the Trinity. No matter what somersaults exegetically and expositionally you try to do to say that there is no Triune Godhead, how can you explain these words? 'This life was with the Father' - with Him - 'before the world began'. You must, therefore, accept the Trinity to be considered as Christian. Indeed, one teacher of doctrine said this: 'Try to explain the Trinity and you may lose your mind, but try to explain it away and you will lose your soul'. That is what John is saying: the truth of the Father and of the Son are intrinsic to this Christian doctrine, and you must believe in both. No person of the Trinity is expendable in our faith.

This is serious stuff, because not only are there those like the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses who deny that the Lord Jesus was actually God the Son, there are others who believe that He was not God in human flesh like the Docetists and the Gnostics, like the Baha'i and the New Age Movement; but there are the Oneness teachers, and they teach that there is no Father and Spirit except Jesus who manifests Himself in three different ways at three different times. People have been astounded that I have pronounced that this is not a Christian doctrine, neither should churches like that be considered Christian - but this is what John says! I stand foursquare on the word of God.

Some will say: 'Well, are we not at a disadvantage? The apostles saw Him, they heard Him, they touched Him, they handled Him; but we have not'. Don't misunderstand what John is saying here. John is saying that the One that brought us this life, the Author of our faith, He was a physical reality, and the foundation of our faith is a historical fact - but that does not exonerate us from exercising personal faith in Him. Even the apostles who saw Him and heard Him and handled Him, they had to do that to be saved. Indeed, that is what he reveals in this book in chapter 5 and verse 1: 'Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God' - 'whosoever believeth', faith must be exercised. Whilst the apostles were greatly privileged, we do not contradict that fact, as in Matthew 13 the Lord Jesus reminded them, when He said to them: 'But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them'. They were awesomely privileged, and their witness gives the witness to the authenticity of Christian faith today in the 21st-century - but it doesn't at all diminish from our personal experience of faith and salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ. As Peter said in chapter 1 of his first epistle and verse 8, 'Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory', because the reality of the physical historical fact of the coming in flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ is attested by the apostles, and is of such authenticity that when we put our faith and trust in it, it will save us effectually.

This life was encountered and it was experienced, and it still can be experienced by us in personal salvation. Can I ask you: have you experienced it? Oh, you might have the doctrines all right up here, that's good, but it's not good enough. Judas had the doctrines, but he never had an encounter with Christ in such a manner where he ventured his all upon Him, and trusted Him and repented of his sins. Have you? Authentic Christianity, you see, is not just an historical base, but it has to have an experiential personal identity with Christ.

Then thirdly, in verses 3 and 4 we have the life expressed. Not just encountered and experienced, but expressed. In verse 3 he says: 'That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ'. 'Declare we unto you' - that's a Christian responsibility! Do you do it? Do you declare your faith? Do you share it with others? But the question begs: what is it to share our faith with others? Well, it is to share, obviously, the truth of who Jesus Christ is - but it's also not just to share the historical, but to share the experiential, to express what He has done for us, the experience of personal salvation in our lives! That's terribly important, because although the apostles are the historical witnesses of the coming of our Lord Jesus in the flesh, we are also witnesses. Of course, to be an apostle you had to witness the resurrection, and all of them did - but we are witnesses. I think I've told you this before, perhaps around the Lord's Table, that Lloyd-Jones on one occasion in his book 'Preachers and Preaching' expressed how a preacher is not to be simply an advocate. An advocate is someone who stands and represents another, and looks for evidence and then presents it, historical evidence. But an advocate, or a lawyer, a barrister has not been there at the events, whereas a witness is the evidence - and that's what an evangelical preacher ought to be! That's what a Christian is: a witness! They're evidence in themselves, and there is a sense in which - though it is not physical - we ourselves have touched and seen and known this Word of life. That's what he means, I believe, in a sense, when he says: 'Our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ'.

The Gnostics wanted to establish a fellowship of intellectually elite pilgrims, but the contrast is of the apostles: they wanted to declare, to proclaim to the world what they had received from God. They were not an elitist club and group, there was nothing hidden about this truth that God had revealed through Christ. This was not a secret knowledge to a select few, this was something that was declared to the world, that all men could believe if they would have faith in the Son of God who came into the world, the whole world! This must be believed, the message that is declared. It is an everyday experience.

So we have looked at the objective, the fact that historically Christ came, John saw Him, touched Him, handled Him, the life was manifest. But now we're coming to the subjective, and these are the evidences of authentic Christianity - both the historical base and the subjective experience. Everyday experience! One writer has said: 'This is a rebuke to much contemporary evangelicalism, which divorces a right theology from a Christ-like life'. The sad fact of the matter is, there are many churches that are Bible-believing today and fundamentalist, and they are evangelical, but they do not know what it is to be like Christ, to live like Christ, to talk like Christ, to love like Christ! Sadly, often they hold truth with great arrogance and pride.

Do you have an everyday experience that is authentic Christianity? A man who receives a letter from an absent friend is probably happy and chuffed to get it, but he will be far happier when he actually meets and enjoys the immediate company of his friend. You can know who He is, the Son of God, the Christ of God, in human flesh for us, and all the doctrines of the atonement and the resurrection and His second coming - but you may have an absence in your life of fellowship with the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ; and that is what Christianity is all about.

Can I ask you when the last time was that you had fellowship with the Father and with the Son? This is the subjective experience that authenticates the Christian Gospel. Now he communicates it in two ways. This subjective experience is manifest through first of all fellowship, that's what he says at the end of verse 3: 'our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ'. This word in the Greek language for 'fellowship' is 'koinonia', 'koinonia', it literally means 'to have in common'. It was used in classical Greek language as a favourite expression for the marriage relationship, the most intimate bond between human beings - 'to have in common'. Yet it is used very appropriately here as a description of the fellowship that not only we have with the Father and with the Son, but ultimately the fellowship that will derive from divine fellowship towards others who are in Christ also. Isn't that remarkable? It's one of the deepest expressions of human fellowship that there can be.

Let me say this: here we're getting at the base, not only for what is Christian doctrine and what makes a person an authentic Christian, but we're now seeing the grounds for fellowship and unity within the Christian church - it can only be with those who are authentically Christian, those who hold to the Christian doctrine of who Christ is and what He has done. But what John is saying here is that fellowship with one another is only derived from fellowship with God and fellowship with His Son. In other words, tradition cannot provide a basis for church unity, even common experience cannot provide a basis if it is unrelated and divorced from the historical reality of who Christ was. Sadly today what is so notorious as the grounds for Christian fellowship, and even ecumenical fellowship across all religions, is subjective experience and standards. I'll give you one example: the Roman Catholic Church has its own brand of the charismatic movement that use the same language as evangelicals and have the same experiences. They speak in tongues, they baptise - so-called - in the Holy Spirit, they do all sorts of things - but they're not saved. One or two of them may be, I'm not limiting the grace of God, only God knows those that are His, but the fact of the matter is: when you probe into the meanings behind the evangelical garb that they use, we find that there is classical ancient Roman Catholic theology behind it all.

You see, Christian unity can only be upon the truth of the Scriptures. That can be the only authentic and adequate foundation for fellowship, and we must fellowship on those grounds alone - fellowshipping only with those whose fellowship is with the Father and with the Son, and that means as the Father is portrayed in the Scriptures and as the Son is also. But let me also add to that: that means that we ought not to add to those grounds of fellowship. A man who has fellowship with the Father and with the Son, I can have fellowship with. As the little chorus put it:

'I don't care what church you belong to,
Just so long as for Calvary you stand.
If your sins have been washed in the fountain,
You're my brother, so give me your hand'

That's the Christian fellowship we have here in John. But isn't it remarkable when we think for a moment that as sinners this word 'koinonia' is used toward us, we who have nothing in common with a holy God! We who are the exact antithesis morally and spiritually of all that He is in His divine being - sure we have hardly anything in common, some of us, with each other! But this salvation that we enjoy, this commonality has come because God in His grace has sent Christ into the world to have something in common with us - what was that? His flesh! Koinonia, fellowship can only be upon this fact: that Christ came in the flesh for us, and in that flesh He went to the cross and bore our sin in that body upon it. Because of that, when we trust in Him, what does Peter say in his epistle? 'We become partakers of the divine nature', the new birth, and we are given the very nature of God. Do you see that word 'partakers 'that Peter uses? It is from the same Greek root that is translated 'fellowship', 'koinonia'.

I hear some evangelicals, they say: 'I think the church lacks in fellowship, you know'. So they get a picnic together, or they go for a walk in a forest park, or they go bowling or something like that - not that there's anything wrong with those things, there's not, and it's good for Christians to do recreational things together - but that's not fellowship. Fellowship is something deep, something spiritual. Sure, doesn't God tell us to love our enemies? There's nothing in love or friendship that is spoken of here, this is a deep fellowship with each other and with God upon the knowledge of the Gospel of who the Father is and who the Son is, and what we have together.

Then the second subjective experience that authenticates Christianity is not just fellowship, but joy. In verse 4 we find it: 'And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full'. If fellowship is the answer to spiritual loneliness, joy is the answer to spiritual emptiness. Didn't the Psalmist say in Psalm 16: 'In thy presence is fullness of joy'. Sin has caused unhappiness right throughout all of mankind, indeed in Hebrews 11:25 regarding Moses we see that pleasures only last for a season when they are sinful ones, but God's pleasures are for evermore - at Thy right hand there are pleasures forever! A life that is real, listen to this, a life that is based on the authentic historical facts of Christianity - who Christ was as God's Son, coming in the flesh to us; authenticated by the fellowship among God's people, and daily experiential fellowship with the Father and with the Son - it'll be a life that is permeated by joy. Is that your experience? Maybe that joy is not there, even though you believe everything about Him - that's right, because you're not fellowshipping with Him.

The night before the crucifixion the Lord Jesus said in John 16: 'Your joy no man taketh from you'. Remember the wee chorus years ago: 'The world didn't give it to you, the world can't take it away'? I know that some of you are going through indescribable circumstances at this moment in time, but the fact of the matter is that if you can lay hold upon the Christ of God and have fellowship with Him and have fellowship with His Father, you will have a joy that transcends even the direst and darkest of life's circumstances - for this is a fellowship of life, the life that was eternal and is eternal, a life which is historical, a life which is personal! You can have it and you can enjoy it! Praise God that we stand on historical fact tonight of who Christ is, and we must never lose it; but equally so let's never lose the authenticity of the experiential nature of Christianity that is both fellowship with one another and all those in Christ, and joy shed abroad in our hearts.

It was old Karl Marx that wrote: 'The first requisite for the people's happiness is the abolition of religion'. The truth of God is: the first and only requisite for the happiness of people is that Word that was with the Father from the beginning, which they heard, which they saw, which they handled with their hands, and which they have declared unto us, and which we have embraced by faith. The fellowship that we enjoy with Him and each other is in that One, and what a joy it brings! Hallelujah! The truth is Christ, He is Christianity, He is our faith!

Our Father, we thank You that our fellowship is with You and with Jesus Christ Your Son, that One who came to this scene veiled in the likeness of our sinful flesh, apart from sin. As the children are partakers of flesh and blood, so He likewise partook of the same that He might die, and die for us. Thank You, Lord, that He rose again, and He could stand before doubting Thomas and say: 'Thrust your hand into my side, look upon me. Behold, a spirit has not flesh and bones as ye see me have'. He is the human Christ, but then we witness Thomas as he falls at His feet and declares: 'My Lord and my God!'. We know that the Son of God has come, and hath given us an understanding that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ, this is the true God and eternal life, in whose name we pray, Amen.

"The Gospel According To Christ"

Copyright 2005
by Pastor David Legge
All Rights Reserved
(Permission is granted to distribute this transcript in its entirety, with no alterations)

Well, let's turn together to John, the first epistle of John, and we're still in the first chapter of course - I think we'll be there for a week or two yet! Maybe this is your first week, I don't know. I'm glad that some of you have been here on previous weeks, it's good to have you back, we hope that you're going to continue coming. Perhaps this is your first week with us, and it would be a help to you I'm sure if you got some of the recordings either on CD or on audio cassette of previous studies, just to put everything into place. We spent some time in our first study looking at the context of this book, and we're not going to repeat and go over that ground again and again every week, so if you want to get the context of all that we're going to say in this book, why not get the first tape, and then it wouldn't do any harm getting the last study which comprised of verses 1 through to 4 of chapter 1, where we looked at the subject of 'Authentic Christianity'. This week we're looking specifically at verses 5 to 7 of chapter 1 under the title 'The Gospel According To Christ'.

We'll begin our reading at verse 1, just to get the flow of what John the apostle is saying to us: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life; (For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full. This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth: But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin" - and we'll end our reading at verse 7.

Now in the day and age in which we live, you could ask a Protestant or a Roman Catholic clergyman the question: 'What is the Gospel?', and you may get a plethora of different and even contradicting answers. Often the answer that is given is a nebulous one, an unspecific one. Sometimes the answer is given that the Gospel is simply the body of the record concerning the life and teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, but it doesn't go any further than that and specify what the Gospel is in exact terms. Often you don't get any more out of a specific answer than just: 'Well, it's to love God and to love your neighbour as yourself' - and I don't know how many sermons and funeral homilies I've heard broadcast over the radio and over the television where a priest or a Protestant clergyman is saying just that, that the Gospel is to love, to love God, to love your neighbour.

I would have to say, in this day and age in which we live, modern evangelicals aren't much different in their understanding of what the Gospel is. I dare you to take this experiment, and set someone down - and beware because they might do the same to you, be prepared for it! - and ask them: 'What is the Gospel?'. Recently I took a series of meetings in Portrush with the CPA on conversions in the Acts of the Apostles, and one of the reasons I said I was doing it was because I'm a bit perturbed at how little understanding there is, especially among young people today in Christian circles, regarding what true conversion is. Sometimes the answer that comes back, even from evangelical folk is: 'Well, it's to know God, it's to know Christ, it's to have a relationship with God'. But if you leave it there in that sort of airy-fairy mamby-pamby undefined language, we are in real trouble! Surely there's nothing more important than what the Gospel is? Therefore we must be certain what it is, because the Gospel is a life or death matter, in fact eternity - your eternal soul and its destiny - depends on the Gospel.

Indeed, that's what the apostle Paul said, wasn't it, to the Galatians in chapter 1 of his epistle, verse 8: 'But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed'. If you preach or believe a false gospel, the inevitable outcome is: you will be damned, you will be cursed! So it's important that the believers who John was writing to in the church at Ephesus, and in the other churches that were being affected by false teachers, would be certain about what the true Gospel was. They had become uncertain because a new Gospel had been introduced into these churches by these false teachers. We saw that they were called Docetists, they were forerunners to the early Gnostics, but basically they were teaching that God had come to them as the chosen few and revealed a new revelation to them that was different and had additions to the original Gospel that was given by Jesus to the apostles.

Now if ever you were looking for the certainty of what the true Gospel is, well 1 John is a good book to go to, because it's a book that is filled with certainties. What better could the apostle John do to stop all the debate of what the Gospel is, than by telling them the Gospel according to Christ. That's exactly what he does here in verses 5 to 7, what he's saying is: 'We', speaking of the apostles, 'We are only communicating to you what Christ told us from God. The message we declare to you, Christ gave to us, and we are only relaying what He told us'. In John chapter 8, of course, the Saviour said: 'I speak that which I have seen with my Father'. So there is this chain of communication: God the Father communicates to Christ what He wants men to know; Christ comes and instructs the twelve, and the twelve are instructed to go into all the world and preach this Gospel; and now John comes and refutes any false gospel claims by saying, 'All that we are giving to you is the Gospel according to Christ'.

Of course, John is not the only apostle that concurs with that view. In 1 Corinthians chapter 15, if you care to turn to it with me, in the first four verses Paul the apostle says exactly the same thing. He's going to go into an exposition of the doctrine of the resurrection of Christ and our subsequent prospective resurrection - incidentally, the backdrop of heresy was quite similar to the Docetists and the Gnostics of 1 John. In 1 Corinthians 15, look at the first four verses: 'Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; By which also ye are saved' - this is the message which I preached first of all, it's the message that was effective to you and saved your soul, 'keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures'.

Paul put it another way in the first chapter of 1 Corinthians, that he would have nothing known among them save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. That was the Gospel they heard from His lips, they saw through His death, they witnessed in His resurrection, and they were instructed by Him to preach. You see, what he has been telling us in the first four verses of 1 John is that the authentic Christian message is that of the historical Christ, who came in the flesh, who they saw, who they touched, who they heard, and from whom they received this great Gospel message, passed to them as apostles, and now they have passed it on to us, the church, through the apostles' doctrine which is the holy Scriptures. You hear what John is saying, hear it loud and clear: the Gospel, the message that we declare unto you, is the Gospel according to Jesus Christ. What is that message? Well, we're going to see tonight: it's a simple message, how sinful men can have fellowship with God through the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now let me ask you, just before we launch into an understanding of this Gospel according to Christ: why would you ever need an additional revelation, an apocryphal writing, a new prophet, when you have a Gospel like this one from the very lips of Christ? We don't need Joseph Smith, we don't need Mary Baker Eddy, we don't need Brigham Young, we don't need any of these new prophets, we don't need any of their holy - so-called - writings; for God hath, in these last days, spoken unto us by His Son. The reason why Christ is able to save to the uttermost all who believe in Him is because He ever lives to make intercession, He has an unchangeable priesthood, Hebrews 7 says. That word 'unchangeable' means literally 'a nontransferable priesthood' - there's no one qualified like Him! There's no one who has satisfied the justice and the righteousness, judicious wrath of a holy God for mankind like Christ. The message of His death, His burial, and His resurrection is, as Jude says in verse 3, 'the faith once and for all delivered to the saints' - full stop, no addition, no subtraction.

How, after such a declaration like that, could you possibly add extra-biblical accounts, or claim to have secret knowledge other than what has been revealed through the Lord Jesus? The whole of the New Testament declares that as an utter impossibility. Romans 1 and verse 1, if ever there was an understanding of the Gospel needed today it's in the exposition of the book of Romans, right there at the very beginning Paul declares that he's going to expound the Gospel of God. Of course, he tells us that it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes. Indeed in Galatians 1, where we've read from already, Paul says: 'I neither received this message from man, neither was I taught it by a man, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ' - God has revealed Himself in His Son, and you can't improve on that!

Christians, you need to beware, because through the 'God Channel' and through cheap Christian paperbacks today there is a false doctrine of revelation coming into the church that is deceiving many. It would almost need that we double up, or triple, or quadruple the pages of this book to have all the new revelations that men are having revealed to them today! A lot of it, all of it in fact, if it adds to and contradicts Scripture, is false! We have a perfect revelation in the Lord Jesus Christ, and we can't improve on Him. That's what we have, can I ask you tonight: Do you have it? Maybe you're here and you belong to a cult, or you belong to a false religion, and maybe you think I'm being far-fetched saying that - but we have from time to time folk who do frequent the building who belong to Jehovah's Witnesses or to Mormons or to other sects. I'm asking you this evening: is this the message that you have had declared unto you? Christ and Christ alone! Christ who is the Son of God, Christ who is the substitute for sinners; and if you embrace Him by faith alone you shall be saved.

Well, to be certain whether or not you do have this message, and that the Ephesians had this message, John gives an outline of what this message was that was declared to the apostles by Christ. Like every good evangelical preacher he has three points! I don't always have three, but I'm not always good! So I'm going to share the three with you this evening, and the first - very simply divided out through this chapter - first of all he tells us: God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. Now, as a Christian, you're going to learn this evening the nuggets, the tenets of fundamental truth in the Gospel. If you're a preacher this will be a good exercise for you, because right away what the apostle John is telling us is that the Gospel must always start with God. Genesis 1 verse 1 starts with God. John, in his gospel, starts with God. Now he's telling us: 'That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life', the One who was with the Father before the world was - we are preaching the message of the Godhead in the Gospel. The Gospel starts with God.

But of course, the big question today in our world is: who is God? What is God? The fourth question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism asks the same question: What is God? I'm not going to test any of you good Presbyterians here tonight to see if you know the answer, but that is a question that our century and every century has been puzzled with. Men have stretched their intellect to know 'Who is God? What is He? What is He like?'. Today in our individualistic and relativistic age, people are saying: 'Well, God, for me, is this... and God, for you, can be that...' - and there's such a confusion over who and what God is. It's as if God is a chameleon character, who just morphs into a myriad of people's individual preferences. God can be what you like Him to be, and what I like Him to be at the same time - that is an utter reasonable and rational impossibility!

The Shorter Catechism does say, very prolifically and profoundly: 'God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth' - and we can say 'Amen' to that. But what John is talking about here is not knowing about God, he speaks to us about experience, and he's telling us that it's not all about knowing about Him, it's about knowing Him personally and intimately. This is what he experienced, the message that he had declared to him was experiential through an actual personal encounter with Jesus Christ. No other writer tells us as much about God as John does. He tells us 'God is spirit' in John 4:24, that is in his gospel. In chapter 1 verse 5 here we see 'God is light'; chapter 4 of this epistle and verse 8 'God is love'. But please beware, because John is not wanting to just give us knowledge concerning the Almighty, but he is wanting the goal of fellowship for all. Look at verse 3 of chapter 1: 'That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ'. It's an intimate, personal, experiential knowledge that John desires for us.

But let us not miss the point: how is it that God chooses to reveal Himself initially through the message that He has given to mankind, with the goal of fellowship in mind, but how does He come to men first and foremost? Please note: He does not come as a God of love. While He is a God of love, and that is one of His dearest attributes to all sinners who have been saved by grace, that is not how He reveals Himself to man initially. Rather, He shows Himself as light. You can go back to John's gospel in chapter 1, and the theme is the same there. In fact, even in the beginning in Genesis chapter 1, God speaks and there is light. Here in 1 John chapter 1 and verse 5 there is this declaration before love is mentioned: God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. That word 'darkness' is in the emphatic double negative, which means there is no darkness whatsoever in Him.

Now I am not going to even attempt to expound what it means for God to be light. One scholar has put it well in a one line definition that sums it all up for us. He says: 'Light physically represents glory. Intellectually it represents truth. Morally it represents holiness'. So physically, if we can talk about God even in those terms, for God to be light speaks of His glory, His blinding majesty. Then to speak of light intellectually speaks of His truth, His wisdom, His precepts, His counsel, His word. To speak of light morally speaks of His holiness, His purity. Job could say that even the heavens were unclean to the Lord. Even the lips of the prophet Isaiah were unclean to the Lord. Even His own people are unclean. Habakkuk 1 and verse 13 says that the Lord is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, He cannot look upon sin. Paul said to Timothy that God, who is the only one with immortality, dwells in light which no man can approach unto.

'In light inaccessible, hid from our eyes,
Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days'

So the first theme of Christ's message, the message that the apostles received from Christ, the message that they passed down to the early church, the message that we ought to receive today is first of all: the message of the holiness of God, and therefore man's separation from God because of his sinfulness. Now let me sum that all up in this statement: the first theme of his message is that man lacks fellowship with the holy God of heaven. Now, if we need anything in these days, we need a fresh vision of the holiness of God. F. W. Faber is a hymn writer and poet whom I love greatly, and one of his greatest hymns I believe is: 'My God How Wonderful Thou Art'. Listen to two of the verses:

'My God, how wonderful Thou art,
Thy majesty how bright,
How beautiful Thy mercy seat,
In depths of burning light!

How wonderful, how beautiful,
The sight of Thee must be,
Thine endless wisdom, boundless power,
And aweful purity!'

Oh, that we would get a vision of the Almighty like that, in all of His light, in His glory, in His moral perfections, in His holiness and purity! But of course, Genesis 3 tells us that man is out of fellowship with God, man has been cut off by original sin - our father and mother in the Garden of Eden - and even practically today, as Isaiah 59 tells us, it is our sins and our iniquities that separate between us and our God. Our sins have hid His face from us, like a cloud coming between earth and the sun, it's blocking the light - the light is not getting in!

So what we are seeing here is that John is telling us that an understanding of the separation that sin has caused between humanity and God is intrinsic to the preaching of the true gospel. 'Why?', you say, 'Why can't you just come in there right away and tell them that God loves them?'. Now you must do that, but if you don't talk to them of God's holiness, if you don't speak to them of sin and how men personally have broken God's law - do you know what you do? You cheapen the love of God! 'How is that so?', you say. Simply because you cannot understand the greatness of God's love until you understand both His holiness, His awesome holiness, and the magnitude of your personal iniquity. If you go to a jewellers and you look through the front window, and you see there beautiful diamond rings. But you know those diamond rings are being offset by a black backdrop of black velvet, black as the coal that the diamonds came from. It is that black backdrop that offsets the diamond, that causes the light to shine through it, to see its splendour, to see its glory - it's exactly the same with the love of God. You can never appreciate Calvary love until you appreciate the awesome holiness of God and your awful sinfulness!

Do you know what that means? A message that ignores the holiness of God, and a message that fails to preach against sin and declare God's judgemental wrath because of the broken law of His holiness, is not the message that Christ gave to the early disciples: God is light, in Him is no darkness at all. In some pulpits in our land you dare not even mention sin, judgment, or hell - it's unfashionable, it's not trendy! Well, it's not the message of Christ if you don't preach it!

Well, John's first point is: the message that we declare to you that we received of Him, is that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. Let's look at his second point, for his second point is found in verse 6: 'If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth'. John's second point is simply: fellowship with God cannot be known if we walk in darkness. Because God is light, we must walk in the light, but we cannot claim to walk with God and have fellowship with God if we walk in darkness. Now what you have here in this verse in the 'If we say...' is the first of three denials. The first is found, as we said, in verse 6; the second is found in verse 8: 'If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us'. The third is found in verse 10: 'If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us'.

Now there are three more 'If we say's', but just concentrating on the three in chapter 1 - verse 6 is the suggestion that fellowship can be enjoyed while walking in darkness. There were those false teachers, and maybe some Christians who were starting to believe it in Ephesus, that you could walk in spiritual, moral darkness and still have fellowship with God. John answers this, and he says: 'If you say that and believe that, you're lying, and you're not doing the truth'. Now, it takes on another form a step further in verse 8, because in verse 8 there is the allegation that we have no sin in ourselves - it is the theological assertion that we have no sinful nature, that we are not fallen creatures, that we are essentially good as human beings. In verse 10 there is a further allegation, an assertion that not only are we not sinners by nature, but we have not sinned - we are not sinners by practice. There's a group of people actually claiming here that they never sinned against man or against God! John answers them: 'You're liars, you're not doing the truth, you're deceiving yourselves, the truth isn't in you. You're making God a liar! God's word does not dwell in your heart'.

Now we're only going to deal with the suggestion in verse 6, that fellowship can be enjoyed while walking in darkness. John concludes to them that they are lying, and they are committing untruth. Let me show you how this was witnessed in John's day and in ours in two practical ways. The first is theologically. Theologically what John was trying to bring to their attention was this: that if they walk in darkness, and claim to have light from God, they are potentially opening themselves up to fellowship with others outside the grounds of the Gospel. That's exactly what was happening here. They were following a false Christ, they were imbibing the Greek philosophy of the day that was fashionable intellectually and socially. What Paul said to the Corinthians could be said to some of these Ephesians: 'What fellowship hath light with darkness, and Belial with the Living God? What fellowship hath Christ with temple idols?'.

My friend, here is a lesson for us today theologically: the only grounds on which we can have fellowship with another man or woman in humanity, as brothers and sisters in Christ, is on the foundation of the Gospel. If they deny the fundamentals of the Gospel, they cannot be considered authentically Christian, and they're not proclaiming or declaring the Gospel according to Christ, and we cannot have fellowship with them. Theologically they had to learn that in Ephesus, we need to learn it today. The other side of the coin regarding that truth is that in the one regard we must always fellowship on the grounds of the Gospel, we must never add to it anything else other than the gospel. What was happening here in Ephesus was there was an elitism - it could have been charismatic in the sense that these false teachers were coming along and saying they had a personal privileged knowledge of God greater than the rest. They were making the other believers second-class citizens. They were believing themselves to be above those Christians, that those Christians were not worthy of their fellowship, so they split off in schism. We have exactly the same thing today: you have people who believe they have come into charismatic gifts, and they're leaving churches and forming other ones, and causing a split in the body of Christ. But equally so, there are those who are so tight that they squeak when they move, and they won't have fellowship with any other believer even though they name the name of Christ, and stand upon the fundamental tenets of the Gospel. We must never fall into either of those errors, because that is walking in darkness.

Secondly this has a practical implication, not just theologically but it was practically seen and evidenced in John's day and in ours. Here is the first way it was seen: people were living in sin and claiming that they had the life of God. Living practically in a lifestyle of habitual sin, yet claiming that they were in fellowship with God. This has been given a theological name: antinomianism. Now don't switch off when you hear these big names, you might learn a thing or two! Deuteronomy is the second giving of the law, 'nomy' means 'law' really. What you have in antinomianism is 'anti-lawism', Christians - so-called - who were saying, 'We can trust Christ and have the life of God, be in fellowship with the brethren and in fellowship with the Father through Christ, yet live a life that is against the law of God, and even in contradiction of it'. That's what was written of in Romans 6 when Paul asked the rhetorical question, hypothetically: 'Should we continue in sin that grace may abound?'. Of course he said: 'God forbid' - but what was coming into vogue here was this dualism of the Gnostics, the Docetists. Now don't get confused, remember they were saying that everything spiritual is pure, and everything physical is evil - so therefore they believed that the body would be burned up in the judgment, and it didn't matter what you did with the body as long as you had eternal life in your soul. So they were committing all sorts of sins through the body.

But John says: 'You cannot have fellowship with God and walk in darkness'. I shared this with you a number of Sunday nights ago, the story of J. P. Mehaffey who was a famous scholar and man of the world from Trinity College in Dublin. When he was asked if he was a Christian, he answered: 'Yes, but not offensively so'. What he meant by that statement was, he didn't let his Christianity interfere with his social life. That is exactly what John's preaching against: you cannot claim to have the life of God and walk in darkness, and live habitually in sin. Indeed, many cults fall into this trap because of their intrinsic fundamental error. In the 1960s, during the sexual revolution, there was a group called the 'Children of God' cult, and they actually taught that people could be won for Christ through sinful means. You may find that staggering, but that is exactly what happened in John the apostle's day - so much so that they declared that you could be a 'hooker' that was a Christian, a Christian hooker and win men for Jesus! That was almost 40-odd years ago, and there's a mentality about today that is quite similar. American gangster Mickey Cohen reputedly had converted to Christ, and then later declared that he wanted to be a 'Christian gangster' - if he had come to me, I could have introduced him to quite a few of them! He might have learned a thing or two! But nevertheless there was this idea that you could live the life of God, yet live a life of sin - and it is impossible. In fact, what John is saying is: if you claim that, the life of God is not in you!

You listen to that carefully tonight, my friend. I don't know where you're living, but what we're talking about here is not just falling into sin now and again - we all do that, and we all try with the Spirit's help not to - but what John's talking about is a lifestyle of habitual sin that marks you out as an habitual sinner, addicted to sin. If you live in sin, you cannot claim the life of God in your soul - that's the Gospel, and we need to herald it out today, because there's an easy-believism that says: 'Come as you are'. That's the Gospel alright, but it lacks repentance - to come as you are, but be willing to give up your sin, and Christ will enable you to give up your sin. In fact, people are coming to Christ with the one hand, and keeping their sin with the other - and that's not salvation! I hope you haven't believed that one.

Then practically this was manifest in those who were actually claiming perfection and living a lie. They were saying that they had not sinned, that they hadn't within them a sinful nature. John says 'Look, if you're claiming that, if you're actually denying that men are sinners, that they're born sinners, you do not have the truth. You're living a lie'. Now what relevance has this to us today? Well, this is a popular Western philosophy in contemporary thought, largely influenced by Freudian psychology which denies any objective basis for guilt. You shouldn't make people feel guilty from the pulpit, they just learn little things as children - they didn't have a rattle when they were in the pram, so they go out and they joy-ride, or they take drugs, or they rape people. You shouldn't make people guilty, and counsellors and psychologists are all trying to free people from guilt - but they don't realise that the source of guilt is sin! They're denying sin, and by denying sin they're deceiving themselves, and they're making liars of all of us.

So, what John is saying is: a message that preaches that you can be forgiven and live a godless life is not the Gospel of Christ, it's not the one that Christ preached to the apostles. 'Who preaches that today?', you might say. Nominal Christianity preaches it. You can go to mass, you can go to communion, you can think you're saved because you're baptised and you go through the sacraments, and that is the same thing. You live a life that is devoid of the power of God, and the transformation that the salvation of Christ brings in the new birth, and think that you're on your way to heaven - well you're not! You need to be converted! You need to have the life of God in your soul! I'll tell you, evangelicals often live like that. They think because of a profession at an early age, that they can ask Jesus into their heart: 'Come into my heart, come into my heart, come into my heart Lord Jesus, come in today, come in to stay' - do you think He's going to come in to stay, and you'll just say that prayer and live like a reprobate through your teenage years and the rest of your life, and think God's going to open the door of heaven for you? That is a lie! That is not the Gospel that Christ preached. Once you're saved, you're saved forever, but to be saved in the first place there must be that initial repentance.

Are you in darkness tonight, my friend? You cannot walk in darkness and claim to be in fellowship with God! Roy Hession speaks even to Christians in his little book 'The Calvary Road' on this verse, and he says: 'Sin always involves us in being unreal, pretending, duplicity, windowdressing, excusing ourselves and blaming others' - do you know what that means? Staying in the darkness! Trying to hide our sins from God! Could you ever think of anything more idiotic? But maybe it's not just hiding sins from God, maybe it's hiding sins from our brother. In Genesis 3 what you have is the relationship broken down with God and man, but then in Genesis 4 we have the relationship subsequently breaking down between man and his brother, Cain and Abel. It all comes together. Are you hiding something from your brother that you're doing? Something from your wife that you're doing? Something against your children that you're doing? No one knows about it - but God knows, my friend! You cannot claim to walk in the light if you're hiding in the darkness. You might as well, as one man has said, live in a coal pit and claim that you're developing a suntan. It's not possible. 'Be not deceived, the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God', and the gospel that preaches that men are not sinners is not a gospel!

'God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all' is his first point. Secondly, fellowship with God cannot be known if we walk in darkness. Thirdly, in verse 7 we see that fellowship with God, and indeed each other as believers, can only be known if we walk in the light. 'But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin'. Now it follows, logically, that if God is light you cannot have fellowship and hide in sin. Spurgeon said: 'To walk in the light is the willingness to know and be known'. To know what you are as a sinner, to know how you are in the sight of God, and be willing to be known as such, and to humble yourself at the cross. To say, 'Lord', just as Amos 3:3 says, 'Can two walk together except they be agreed? So I agree that I am what I am, and You are what You are, and I confess my sins to You'. Walking in the light is just agreeing with what Jesus says about you, and walking with Him in it. I can't put it any simpler than that. He said in John chapter 8: 'I am the light of the world, he that walks after me, follows me, shall not walk in darkness shall have the light of life'. Do you know what He's saying? 'Follow me! Follow me! Come out of the darkness, come into the light - and when you come into the light, your sin will all be shown up, and I'll put my finger on them. When I pinpoint them, if you admit them and put them under the blood by faith, I'll deliver you from them' - bring it into the light!

Is that what Christ is saying to you tonight, believer? You're dabbling in something that is ungodly and is profane, and is an abomination in God's sight, and you know that's why the blessing of God is not upon you, nor your marriage, nor your church. It's time, Christ says, to bring it into the light. If you want to be delivered, if you want the light of God to flood your soul, bring it out of the darkness into the light! 'How can I do that?'. Practically, how do you do it? Psalm 119 says: 'Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path'. If you take the torchlight of God's word and shine it on your soul, God will start showing you those things that are not right. As He shows you them, if you plead the blood of Jesus Christ and confess your sin before Him, He will cleanse you. You see, this is the whole point of what John is saying: God is light, and if you're going to have fellowship with God you've got to walk in the light and live in the light - but that's impossible for a sinner, and you're a liar if you say you're anything but a sinner, but - Hallelujah! - the blood of Jesus Christ God's Son cleanseth us from all sin.

Now you listen to this carefully. Remember the context of 1 John, what he's saying is this - against the Docetists, against the Gnostics - Christ wasn't a ghost, Christ wasn't Jesus upon whom the Christ spirit came at His baptism, but Christ the Son of God came in flesh and blood, and died in flesh and blood, and was buried, and shed His blood for sinners and rose again victorious over the grave, over death and hell. Why? That you should live in the light. I'll tell you, if He didn't come in flesh and blood like they were claiming, you're damned and so am I - but He did! He partook of flesh, just as children do, so that He could die the death of every sinner and defeat him who has the power over death, even the devil.

As we walk in the light, here is the thought, if you seek God's light and seek the Lamb who is the light, the blood will constantly avail for you. It's not really thinking about trying to do a post-mortem of all your sins, because there are some sins that you're ignorant of just at the minute. There are sins that you're unconscious of, sins of omission - and I'm not suggesting you don't look out sins and confess them, but what this is actually saying is this: even the sins that we don't yet know about, if we seek to walk in the light, Christ will cleanse them in His precious blood. That word 'cleanse' is in the present tense, which means 'continuous' - if we seek to walk in the light, He will continuously cleanse us constantly from our sin, Hallelujah! It's not only the guilt of sin that is atoned for in the precious blood of the Saviour, but this is the thought - and I want you to grasp this tonight, you who are bound with some kind of habitual sin and not converted: in His blood the power of sin is broken! Maybe you haven't got that, but I'll tell you: that's what available in His precious shed blood. The sinner is not only justified, but the sinner potentially is sanctified also. The believer is given a new nature through Christ's blood, a new status, a new direction. Holiness is demanded by a holy God, He wants us to reciprocate what's in His nature. He made us in His image, He wants us to be like Him, but that's only possible through the blood - but, hallelujah, it is possible! Holiness is provided in Christ!

Do you see this? Oh, Thomas Binney put it well in his hymn summing up this whole first seven verses:

'The sons of ignorance and night,
May dwell in the eternal Light,
Through the eternal Love'

Is there someone here, and you've never availed of the blood of Calvary? Maybe you're a backslider, and there's sin between you and your God. Or maybe you feel you're walking in the light, but you're really walking in darkness - there's things you're hiding from God, things you're hiding from a brother or a sister. God calls you a liar if you don't feel, this evening, your need of the precious blood - because either you're denying a sin, or you're denying that there is efficacy in that blood! There's only one thing that can hinder your fellowship with God, my friend, and that is sin. You can't get it more simple than that. But there's only one thing that can restore your fellowship with God, and that is the precious blood. By the power of the blood peace has been made between God and men, by the power of the blood there is forgiveness of sins, there is the gift of eternal life, Satan is overcome by the power of the blood, says the book of the Revelation. There is continual cleansing from all sin - and the Greek word for 'all' there in verse 7 literally means 'every sin'. There's not a sin deep-dyed that the precious crimson blood cannot cleanse. You can be set free from the tyranny of an evil conscience. You can serve the living God, win freedom and peace of mind and heart. By the infinite power of the precious sinless blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, you can be brought into the immediate holy of holies presence of the living God to live there all the day long, every day of your life. Hallelujah!

'How can I experience the power of this precious blood?', you say. Look to the Lamb, 'Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world'. 'What do I need to do?' - what's the Lamb of God doing? He's bowing His head, isn't He? He's bowing His head for you, under the load of your sin. Do you know what you need to do, my friend? You need to bow your head. You need to bow that stiff-necked 'I', say 'Lord, help me to bow the head and die, beholding Him on Calvary who bowed His head for me'. Oh, you can pray all you like to be cleansed from some sin. You can pray for the peace of God to be restored to your heart. But you see, unless you're willing to be broken on the point in question, the very sin that you love more than Christ, it will never happen. Take it out of the darkness, bring it into the light, and Christ will plunge it under His blood!

Old Martin Luther on one occasion dreamt that his accuser, Satan, had set before him on a great scroll afresh all of his sins and manifold iniquities. Luther didn't argue with the devil, he just admitted them all without denying any of them. He didn't seek to justify himself before the wicked one, but do you know what he scrawled across that list? First John 1:7: 'The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin' - Hallelujah!

'I may my great accuser face
And tell him Thou hast died!

I hear my great accuser roar
Of ills that I have done.
I know them all and thousands more,
Jehovah findeth none!'

Are you still in your sin tonight? Backslider, are you like the pig that is wallowing in the mire, you've gone back like a dog to the vomit? Can I tell you tonight: the blood of Jesus, oh that precious flow, will make you white as snow. No other fount you can know, nothing but the blood of Jesus, that fountain that is open for sin and uncleanness, to cleanse you now and to cleanse you continually. Will you come tonight?

"The Saint And Sin"

Copyright 2005
by Pastor David Legge
All Rights Reserved
(Permission is granted to distribute this transcript in its entirety, with no alterations)

Well, do turn with me to 1 John again. God willing, we'll hopefully enter chapter 2 this evening, but we have the remaining three verses to deal with in chapter 1 and so we'll read the whole of chapter 1 in order to get the flow of John's thought. Our title this evening will be "The Saint And Sin", and we'll be looking specifically at verse 8 of chapter 1 through to the second verse of chapter 2.