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I Believe in Life Eternal - February 26, 2017
1 John 5:1-13 (Luke 15:11-32)
Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been
born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves
whoever has been born of him. 2 By this we know that
we love the children of God, when we love God and obey
his commandments. 3 For this is the love of God, that
we keep his commandments. And his commandments
are not burdensome. 4 For everyone who has been born
of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that
has overcome the world—our faith. 5 Who is it that
overcomes the world except the one who believes that
Jesus is the Son of God?
6 This
is he who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ;
not by the water only but by the water and the blood.
And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit
is the truth. 7 For there are three that testify: 8 the Spirit
and the water and the blood; and these three agree. 9 If
we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God
is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has
borne concerning his Son. 10 Whoever believes in the
Son of God has the testimony in himself. Whoever does
not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not
believed in the testimony that God has borne
concerning his Son. 11 And this is the testimony: that
God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his
Son. 12 Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not
have the Son of God does not have life.
13 I
write these things to you who believe in the name of
the Son of God, that you may know that you have
eternal life.
Introduction
The final phrase of the Apostles’ Creed tells me that, as a
Christian, I believe in “life eternal”. That’s a kind of
stilted way of saying I believe I’m going to live forever.
And working backward through the phrases of the
Creed,
1. I believe I will live forever,
2. following a bodily resurrection,
3. in restored fellowship with God (because my sins are
forgiven)
4. and in fellowship with all other believers (because
we are the Bride of Christ);
5. one church set apart for all eternity,
all of it through the Holy Spirit, by the work of Christ the
Son, by the command of God the Father.
Do you believe you’re going to live forever?
In the Creed I confess that I believe in eternal life. Very
well. But do I believe that all human beings live
forever? If I claim to be a Christian, I don’t believe that
all human beings share the same eternal destiny; that all
human souls live forever and that some will be eternally
happy and others eternally miserable.
C.S. Lewis, writing in his book Mere Christianity, says,
“Christianity asserts that every individual human being
is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or
false. Now there are a good many things which would
not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only
seventy years, but which I had better bother about very
seriously if I am going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad
temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse -so
gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be
very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million
years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely
correct technical term for what it would be.”
The Essential Story
The essential Story isn’t that God made us all to live
forever, all with the same destiny. If that were all of it,
then it wouldn’t matter at all what I do with my allotted
time on the planet. In fact, if all of us are guaranteed
eternal life of the sort we assume Heaven to be; I would
be absolutely wasting my time here if I did not take,
enjoy, possess, amass, and in every other way
accumulate to myself all that I can in this life.
If death is nothing more than an assured doorway into
eternal bliss, I may as well “eat, drink, and be merry”
throughout. While I don’t know what good thing awaits
me on the other side; it may not include the pleasures of
this life; but I -- and everyone else -- am “going to a
better place;” nothing I do or don’t do here has any
impact on hereafter; so I may as well live it up.
NO, the essential Story is that God made us all to live
forever and all of us squandered the joy of that asset.
Stolen Pleasure, Squandered Joy
We stole pleasure for our own that was God’s own and
went, as the Prodigal Son did in Jesus’ parable, to a far
country where we believed we could be masters of our
own fate. You may be the most disciplined, intellectual,
frugal – even magnanimous – person on the planet; but
if you live your life separated from the pleasure of God’s
company, you can expect to spend eternity separated in
just that same way. Lewis was right: you may live a
disciplined eternity in Hell, you may live an intellectual
eternity in Hell, you may live a frugal eternity in Hell,
you may even live a magnanimous eternity in Hell –
forever giving away vast sums of money, but never
receiving the approval of the one being in the universe
whose approval matters. You will live forever
separated from “the presence of the Lord and from the
glory of his might.”
But the essential Story doesn’t end there; that’s the
beauty of what the Creed points us to. The essential
Story is that we were made by God, for God, and that
even when we squandered all the eternal joy that was
meant to be ours, God still wanted us.
Do not make a mistake at this point: there are not good
people God saves and bad people God destroys as if God
was going through an apple harvest and letting the
rotten ones fall to the ground while lovingly picking the
good fruit to bake into an amazing pie. The truth is we
are all of us bad fruit. The whole tree from which we
sprung is diseased; the tree of Adam can yield no good
fruit. And yet most of us look around ourselves and the
other apples hanging on the tree and say, “Oh, this isn’t
so bad. Actually, I think all of us are getting better;
bruises, worms, and all.”
Calling God a Liar
We have a problem: Look at 1 John 5:10, the second
half of the verse. It says, “Whoever does not believe
God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in
the testimony that God has borne concerning his Son.”
John nearly began this letter by saying, “If we say we
have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in
us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive
us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If
we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his
word is not in us.”
The sin and blackness of my heart always shows itself
as I call God a liar by thinking I can improve myself into
heaven. My need is to call God “true” in all his
judgments. But my heart denies him because I say he
has violated “my rights.” What I need is what I’ll never
ask for on my own: I need to love God, love others, and
make disciples for Christ, because that is what I was
created for. Each of these requires me to give up my
rights, return from the far country penniless, and
receive the intolerable blessing of a joyful reunion with
God, bought at the intolerable, excruciating expense of
the death of his only true Son.
Impossibly Born of God
John calls this in chapter 5 of his letter what it means to
be “born of God.”
His thesis is this (look at verse 1): “Everyone who
believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God,
and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has
been born of him. 2 By this we know that we love the
children of God, when we love God and obey his
commandments.”
The Son – Jesus – is eternally born of God, and John is
telling us here what is normative for the Christian.
Jesus is born of God. When we receive Christ, John says
in his Gospel, God gives us the right to become Children
of God and we are born of him.
There were two main things Jesus did while he during
his life. He loved the children of God – yet to be adopted
and born of God; but he loved them. And he loved
whatever was his Father’s will. Jesus loved to obey God
the Father.
John says, “For this is the love of God, that we keep his
commandments.” THE demonstration of the new birth
in you and in me is that we begin to love what God
loves. This takes a special work of the Holy Spirit;
because you and I are completely unable to love what
God loves; in our sin we continually buck against what
God loves.
Pulled toward Christ
We’ve talked before about the centripetal love of God.
Agape. The love that draws us God-ward. The Holy
Spirit is the one who pulls us in toward Christ when our
own will would pull us away. That is how John can say
that his commandments are not burdensome. In Christ,
we overcome the gravitational force of the world and all
its pressures and attitudes. The victory is our faith.
But John is quick to prove to us that “our faith” isn’t
ours at all. Look at verse 6.
6 This
is he who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ;
not by the water only but by the water and the blood.
And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit
is the truth. 7 For there are three that testify: 8 the Spirit
and the water and the blood; and these three agree.
Do you know what that’s saying? What we call “our
faith” is actually the Spirit of God witnessing to the
person and work of Jesus Christ. The way you and I are
“on our own” is separated from God three ways:
1. We’re separated in our spirit, our soul, which never
testifies to Christ and always testifies to our own.
2. We’re separated from God in our mind, polluted and
dirty toward God in our thoughts, our hopes, and our
aspirations.
3. We’re separated from God in our body, which we
make a servant of sin rather than a servant of God.
What John calls “our faith” is God’s redress for all that
disobedience.
1. When we receive Christ we receive God’s own Spirit,
who always testifies to Christ.
2. When we receive Christ, he washes our mind;
cleanses our thoughts, our hopes, and our aspirations;
he makes us able to see the folly of our selfishness; like
taking a good bath, we are baptized into Christ.
3. When we receive Christ, he renews all the systems of
our body. That’s why a bodily resurrection is vital to
making you and me fit for eternity with God. A body
polluted by sin is no more able to stand in the presence
of God than an unwashed spirit.
That’s what this enigmatic phrase means, “there are
three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the
blood.” When Jesus died on the Cross, nearly his last
word was a word of utter obedience, “Father, into your
hands I commit my spirit.” Moments later, a Roman
soldier approached Jesus and pierced his side and out
came pure water and pure blood, signs of the pure
obedience of Jesus toward his Father. There are three
that agree in Christ’s death; there are three that agree in
my life. My spirit testifies with God’s Spirit, my mind is
cleansed by the washing of regeneration, and the blood
of Jesus renews my body; because God tells us in
Hebrews 9:22, “without the shedding of blood there
shall be no remission of sin.”
I Believe
When I say, “I believe…” I’m doing more than just giving
mental assent to truths about the Triune God. We who
believe bear the testimony to the world and bear the
testimony to our own heart: “10 Whoever believes in the
Son of God has the testimony in himself,” “11 And this is
the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life
is in his Son.”
Beloved, everyone lives forever; it is just a question of
whether you will live forever with God, or separated
from him for all eternity. Can you truly say:
I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven
and earth: I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our
Lord. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of
the Virgin Mary. He suffered. Under Pontius Pilate he
was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to
the dead. On the third day He rose again. He ascended
into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the
Father Almighty, and he will come to judge the living
and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy
Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the
forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life
everlasting?
If you can, believing must work its change into every
fiber of your being. As John said, “I write these things
to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that
you may know that you have eternal life.”
Beloved, when you say “I believe…” you are testifying
that you bear Jesus, spirit, mind, and body; Jesus
when you sit in your house, Jesus when you walk by the
way, Jesus when you lie down, Jesus when you rise;
Jesus when you teach your children, Jesus when you
are at work and Jesus when you retire; Jesus when you
paint your house and when you plant your garden;
Jesus when you sing; Jesus when you dance; Jesus
when you play; Jesus when you are sick; Jesus when
you suffer; Jesus when you buy; Jesus when you sell;
Jesus when you marry; Jesus when you are single;
Jesus when you speak; Jesus when you are silent; Jesus
every moment you live; Jesus in the hour of your death.
And when you awake in his presence, raised in body,
cleansed in mind, restored to full union with God, Jesus
for all eternity.