Text: 1 John3:1-6

Focus: Holy Living

Function: to encourage people to reflect Jesus in their lifestyle.

Form: Bible Study

Intro:

Bible Study!

Let me introduce the theme. My favorite musical is The Music Man. Robert Preston plays Professor Harold Hill. Buddy Hackett plays Prof Hill's squirrelly sidekick, Marcellus Washburn. He has this high pitched nasal voice that almost squeaks. Listening to it long enough could get annoying.

In the scene where they are trying to create the need for a boy's band, right before the song “Trouble in River City,” they are in the High School auditorium and Marcellus is running around behind the bleachers at different locations crying out the words: “Pure boys.”

Prof Hill as created a dilemma over the boys playing pool instead of Billiards, buckling their nickers below their knees are saying words like “Swell.”

The townsfolk get all upset because they are afraid they are losing the purity of their boys.

Purity. Holiness. Sinlessness. Reflecting God's image. That is the nature of today's scripture. (ASK) When you hear the word Holy, or Holiness, what do think of?

Holiness literally means “set apart for God.” In this passage, it means that we are living like we are actually the children of God.

A component of Holiness is purity, but purity is not always holiness. This passage speaks of both.

We are all called to Holiness.

Different Christians have often held different standards of holiness. Striving to be holy can lead to silly rules that somehow become a code as to who is in and who is out. I had a deacon once who believed that Christian men should never wear short pants.

His mother in law was really offended when I got the chance to lead a biker dude to the Lord. The man showed up for Church in his finest clothes, and it was a great set of leather, complete with rivets and spikes. She was alarmed until I pointed out to her that he did, in his attempt to honor the Lord, wear his best.

We need to be holy, separate, set apart fro God, but not legalistic.

The end result of all this is that somehow holiness all of a sudden becomes a code, a sort of list of rules, both written and unwritten that proved whether or not one was truly in the faith. And to do it, sometimes scriptures are taken out of context. It can be abuse of scripture.

So what does the Bible mean when it is talking about us being holy, or pure?

The meaning of holiness was debated even around the controversy of Jesus and John the Baptist.

John the Baptist and Jesus who had completely different takes on holiness. (Matthew 11:18-19) They never argued about it, but others did. John the Baptist adopted a code of holiness that centered around the things he abstained from. He didn't use any alcohol, he was vegetarian in the sense that his only meat was wild locusts, probably grasshoppers and he wore very simple clothes.

They rejected him for living so simply.

Jesus, on the other hand, went to their parties, befriended sinners and drank wine with them at their parties. They accused him of being a winebibber.

Holiness, purity, what does it mean?

This passage addresses it.

And other questions need to be asked as well.

Because of the sexual revolution in the 60's do we reject the concept of purity?

How can we live holy lives in this culture with all of its vulgarity?

We are bombarded with obscene and profane images and ideas all the time.

Yet this passage is a call to holiness.

I like the wristband that people wore in the 90's: WWJD. Holiness could be lived out if in every situation, we stopped and asked ourselves the question, What Would Jesus Do?

It is important.

This passage emphasizes grace but at the same time it includes two sticky verses about holiness that seem, in the surface to disagree. I want to unwrap that with a little Bible study.

This passage calls us to live separate and pure lives, because we are now called the Children of God.

And all of these worldly influences affect affect the sense of our salvation. Sometimes they give us doubts.

Sometimes we gaze upon another person in an inappropriate manner. Sometimes we refuse to forgive. Sometimes we take our own revenge, or worse, we gloat when someone we don't like, or are jealous of, has a setback.

We are not yet perfect and we know it, and it leads to doubts. This passage of scripture seems to say that once we are believers, we have stopped sinning. It leads to doubt.

Listen to these words from one of my favorite commentators:

In the family of God
One of the greatest problems facing believers these days is a lack of assurance (of their salvation). Scratch a believer and you will find someone unsure of their salvation. The reason for this lack of assurance is often related to our clumsy attempts to confirm our salvation by means of our personal piety. We work at proving our standing with God on the basis of our goodness, but every day we fail miserably and so find our standing undermined.

Take note of John's point. God's love is beyond calculation, for not only does he call us his children, he makes us his children.... ...No matter how great are our weaknesses or failings, they can't get in the way of God's gracious love for us. Jesus has taken away our sins and we are his forever.”

In the middle of, we are now pure and holy, he God reminds us that no matter what, we are His forever!

Let us read Verses 4 and 6: ⁴Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness... ...⁶No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him.

Wow. When we read those words, we can see what the commentator was talking about when he says, I will paraphrase it “if you scratch below the surface of almost any Christian, you are going to find at some point a doubt that they are actually saved.”

“No one who abides in him sins.”

Those words can make us afraid, and we will get to them, and a bit of study as to what was originally written in the Greek, when it was first written down, in a minute.

But before we go there, let us look at context.

Verse 1) See what Great love God has given us.

He calls us His Children. We are set apart. That is the first part of holiness, it all comes from this understanding. That is why it goes on to say that those who are not yet in God's family do not understand why we live our lives the way we live them.

For example. Those who love God and are part of His family love forgiveness.

When 60 minutes did a special on a missionary couple who were kidnapped right after 9/11, the husband eventually murdered and the wife eventually rescued by the Navy Seals, one of the people in that room took great offense to my reaction.

The missionary woman only agreed to do the interview if she was allowed to tell the audience what her faith in Christ meant to her. When she explained her faith, she did it by showing a picture of one of her abductors whom “she prayed for every day.” It was stuck to her refrigerator with a magnet.

She was allowed to tell how she forgave this man.

One of the people in the room was offended at her, and me for supporting her, because she forgave him.

After they played that segment, the interviewed a psychologist who called it “The Patty Hearst Syndrome.” My friend, and the people producing 60 minutes could not understand what it means for us as Christians to offer unconditional forgiveness to our enemies.

But the passage says that we are God's Children. Because of that, we react differently to everything. We even go beyond the question, “What Would Jesus do?”

So, verse 1, we are the Children of God. Verse 2, what that means is actually a mystery. Even we do not yet fully comprehend it. I love this, because I love the idea that we are involved in God's mystery! We are just beginning to see the fulness of it. But we don't understand it all.

I know this. God changed my heart and made me agree with that missionary woman who forgave the men who murdered her husband. I was watching it and shaking my head in affirmation. “Yes!” I thought. “This is what I believe!” It is a spiritual thing. And it is mysterious.

But the passage says that we have not yet come into this mystery fully. We are still growing. As we grow in the Lord, we are still changing the way we react.

Are you still growing?

Verse 3 says that everyone who has their hope in Christ purifies themselves.

It is important to understand the Greek language. This passage was written in Greek. And the Greek language is more complicated than English. So it is difficult to translate.

The verb tense here is present. It means that we keep on doing it. It does not mean that once we have believe we have arrived, we have achieved purity. Because of Christ, God sees us pure, but we are still maturing in our ability to reflect Jesus' image. And the passage is instruction to us to never stop growing. If we stop growing, we are dead or dying.

This is something that we are participating in.

It is something that we are working at.

It is a continued action. That is how it was written in the original Greek. That is how the original reader understood it.

And the Bible says we do it because we are loved by God, we are His Children, we are His body on earth, and we want to represent him well.

But in context of all that Grace, accepted into God's family, forgiven regardless and etc, we get to those two sticky verses. If we sin, we are lawless. If we abide in Him, we do not sin. Taken out of context, that means that every one of us is lost. Not one of us is perfect.

So, John makes sure that we understand the awesome nature of Grace given to us freely by God.

Because we can take verses 4 and 6 to mean that we have failed, God had John place them in the middle of all those verses about being the Children of God and forgiven.

Now, let us get back to the commentator who said “if we scratch beneath the surface of every Christian, there may be some doubt, some fear that we are not good enough.” He keeps up the theme of Grace and he says:

This truth produces great confidence, it produces great assurance, and this assurance is supported by an amazing fact: a believer is orientated toward righteousness. This doesn't mean that a believer won't sin, in fact, sin will daily infect our lives. What it means is that a believer is attracted toward Christ-likeness. A person who has truly experienced the mercy of God will tend to be merciful - not perfectly merciful, but oriented toward mercy. A forgiven person forgives, strives to forgive. A person bathed in the purity of Jesus tries to express that purity in their lives.

So, our standing (point between heaven and earth) as God's children rests on his grace alone.

As for our personal piety, it but demonstrates orientation, an orientation toward Christ, or an orientation toward lawlessness. As for sin, the truth is there is no sinless Christian; we all trip and fall.

Here is what happens. He speaks of working toward purity. It is an ideal that we keep growing into.

So let us go back to those “sticky verses” and see how they support the idea of grace instead of leaving us with the feeling of failure.

Both verbs, the one about purifying ourselves and the one about sinning are written in the present tense. Something we are working toward.

Believers work at purifying themselves, sinners work at improving their ability to sin.

The translators of the NRSV fail to take into account the subtlety of the Greek language. They translate it the same was as the King James Version. Both say, “If you commit (and it is implied) ANY sin, you are lost.”

The correct translation of the verb tense is picked up in several other translations with words like, in the NASB “the one who practices sin....” In that translation he is speaking of one who keeps on doing it with no remorse. As a matter of fact, the believer is practicing purity, and getting better at it. The unbeliever is practicing sin, in order to get better at it.

In The Living Bible it is translated about as pure to the original as possible: “The one who keeps on sinning” (with no regret) that is lawless.

When we become God's children, we are oriented to holiness, not sinfulness.

The believer recognizes that our sin, our greed, our lusts, our lack of forgiveness, our lack of mercy, our selfishness and all of our brokenness is what placed Jesus on the cross.

So, the believer strives to live a life that models Jesus behavior. As Hebrews 6:6 says, they do not want to keep on crucifying Jesus.”

The believer reflects the love, mercy and joy of Jesus.

The Believer is not like the Pharisee who uses God's Word to judge others. The believer is like Jesus who uses God's grace to give mercy toward those who are struggling.

The believer does not marginalize the “other” in order to prove himself or herself more righteous. The believer does not marginalize the gay person, the poor, the victim of AIDS, the Muslim, the person of a different race, anyone else. In all these people, the believer points them to the Savior.

That does not mean that once we have placed our trust in Jesus we are perfect in this. But as the Holy Spirit, and God's Word dwells in our lives we become more and more like Jesus.

So, lets go back to the introduction and the concept of “pure boys.” Professor Hill and Marcellus created a “moral outrage” over a pool table and the entire town took the bait and got upset.

What would Jesus have done? Obviously Jesus would not have campaigned against a pool table.

And here is the problem. People can get so wrapped up in the concept of purity that they forget holiness.

Purity is being pure. Holiness is being like Jesus. The Pharisees claimed to be pure, and then they condemned Jesus.

There are times when moral outrage is important.

Look at Jesus. There were several times when Jesus did demonstrate moral outrage:

He was upset with people who turned the church into a place to make money instead of an house of prayer. (Matthew 21:13)

He was upset with the people who brought a woman caught in adultery and not the man. (John 8:1-11)

He was upset with the people who thought that in order to be pure you must isolate yourself from sinners and thereby prove that they are not good enough for us. (Matthew 11:19)

He was upset with the religious leaders who celebrated all kinds of religious practices, but didn't have a conscience about the suffering they created when they did things like foreclose on the mortgage of a widow. (Matthew 23:14)

That is what Jesus did.

He is the light of the world.

So here the rubber meets the road in this study.

We have learned that once we trust in Jesus we become more like Him.

We know we are God's children because the Holy Spirit works with our conscience making us more like Jesus.

We know we are God's Children because we practice being good instead of practice being bad.

And there is an easy way to do it.

I like WWJD.

But I think we need to think about it from the perspective that there are things that Jesus did that we cannot do.

Jesus healed people and Jesus had the power to forgive other's sins. And I have seen God work some pretty big miracles when Christians pray.

But we don't always know God's will about healing.

So we ask the question, WWJHMD? What Would Jesus Have Me Do?

And the answer is simple, be like Him. Reflect Him and in every situation, instead of pressing what is best for us, instead of getting revenge, instead of winning an argument for the sake of winning, let us point people to Jesus.

Point them to Jesus who is still constantly forgiving us and drawing people into His family. God wants everyone back.