Focused on Jesus

Text: 1 John 4:1-6

Focus: Jesus

Function: To remind people to focus on the big picture: JESUS!

Form:

I love verse 1 from The Message: ¹My dear friends, don't believe everything you hear. Carefully weigh and examine what people tell you. Not everyone who talks about God comes from God. There are a lot of lying preachers loose in the world.

Don't believe everything you hear... ...not everyone who talks about God comes from God... ...a lot of lying preachers loose in the world.

How do we know?

What may seem a little odd is that this is in the 1^st Century of the Church. The apostles, the ones who walked with Jesus, were still alive. If anyone had any questions they could have just went to one of them and asked them what Jesus actually said.

We have been studying 1^st John. You may have noticed two weeks ago that we learned that we are the Children of God regardless. We learned at times that we may doubt our faith and we learned that God's Word tells us to trust God at His word. If He calls us children, then we must be. John answered the question that we although strive to be pure and holy, and all of us sometimes fail, God sees our hearts and knows we are trying. He sees that since we trusted Jesus, the Holy Spirit is in us working to change us and as long as we are in process of change, we can be assured, we can know, that we are His.

We learned, that if we wanted a “test” of our faith, then we shouldn't clear ourselves based on the fact that we are perfect. But we should clear ourselves based on the way the Holy Spirit is changing us. We have a new orientation. Our orientation steers away from evil, unforgiveness, bitterness and revenge. Instead if indeed God has softened our hearts towards others, and we are in a process, then we can have some assurance.

Last week, the same question comes up in our text: How do we know for sure if we are saved?

And we learned that we can apply two tests, The two tests of love. The first is: Are we forgiving others? And the second is: “do we give charity without selfishness?”

Now we are at a third text with another way to “test it” to know if it is true.

Someone who is critical might say: “But pastor, if THE ANSWER was given in the first sermon, and THE ANSWER was given in the second sermon in this series from 1 John, then how can there be a third THE ANSWER in this third sermon?

Which one is it? I am not confused.

The reason is: the book goes from passage to passage giving us ways “to know” that our relationship with Jesus is real.

John keeps answering the question of “how can we know?”

There was an heresy that cropped up in the Church in the 1^st Century. The heresy was known as Gnosticism.

The Gnostic believed that there was no way that Jesus could have had a mortal body. They believed that anything mortal was corrupted by the fallen nature of the world.

Therefore, they believed that Jesus was some sort of angelic being, not human at all.

The word Gnostic comes from the Greek word Gnosis. It is spelled: G,N,O,S,I,S. It means knowledge.

The G at the beginning is silent. If you listen to it, “Gnosis” and “know” you can hear that the English word is a direct transliteration. Even the “K” in know is silent like the “G” in Gnosis.

Why did they reject the humanness of Jesus and what difference does that make?

It wasn't so much that they rejected Jesus' humanity as much as it was they took their focus off of Jesus on to something they could do themselves.

As with almost any cult, there is a lot of shame and then duties that must be performed in order to win God's grace.

Every cult has a power structure that is used to burden people down in order to control and exploit them.

And I believe that the reason is that the hardest thing to accept, the most difficult concept to completely believe in, and the hardest thing to trust in is the concept of grace.

Grace is just plain outright messy. In parable after parable, Jesus points out just how difficult grace is for us. The parable of the man who owed a King's ransom proves how great God's grace is. The parable of the prodigal son is more about the elder brother resenting the grace given to the wayward brother.

The story of the demon-possessed prostitute, who washed Jesus feet with tears and perfume, and the way the religious leader thought that it was a scandal that such a woman would be in his house, and that Jesus would allow her to even touch Him exposes how grace is really hard for us to accept.

Jesus was a friend of sinners and the religious people couldn't handle it.

Grace is free. It is a scandal. We cannot earn it by our works. It can only come to us by our love for Jesus and our trust in Him.

We cannot earn God's favor. It is God's gift to us.

And time after time, even when we sin the same sin again and again, God still forgives us.

I don't understand why. But God's grace is incredible.

It is so incredible that throughout the centuries different cults, and factions have rejected grace for their own brand of religion.

The Gnostics were among the first.

Why?

Grace seems to good to be true.

And it gets in the way of our pride. It makes us depend on Jesus. It keeps us focused on Jesus.

Since God saved us by grace, we are completely dependent on Him for our salvation.

Wouldn't salvation be easier if there was indeed a list of black and white rules that we could do ourselves?

Then we could prove that we are believers.

But we know better. The people who had that supposed list of rules were some of the ones who were offended at Jesus Himself and had Him crucified because He didn't buy into their religious system.

But let me tell you, sometimes that list of rules seems more concrete, and it is easy to fall into the trap of trusting ourselves than Jesus.

So this cult that cropped up early in the life of the Church was called the cult of knowledge.

It sprung from the false teaching that Jesus didn't have a real live flesh-and-blood body.

This group would have rather had a human made list of rules than faith in Jesus.

They want God contained in their own little box.

I am studying the book of Job in my morning devotions.

Is anyone else as confused as I am by that book?

I listen to the speeches of Job's friends. It is hard to find anything wrong with what they say.

They say things like: God is fair, so you must be the one in the wrong... God is wise and has proven your own dark heart...

For those who don't know. Job was a mighty man who loved God and Satan was jealous of him. Satan convinced God to let him take away his wealth, his family and his health. All that was left to him was his wife and his wife counseled him to curse God and die.

The men could not imagine that some times bad things happen to good people.

We still struggle with the concept.

They wanted a universe where they were guaranteed that if they did the right thing all the time, they could be sure of success and blessings.

They didn't want a universe where God was in complete control and sometimes things happened for a greater purpose.

They wanted a list of rules, a list of does and don't that they could follow to ensure their own safety and security.

They wanted God placed in a box with boundaries that they could measure and therefore have some sort of control over.

But God, and God's grace does not work that way.

The Gnostics, the cult of knowledge, were very similar in their beliefs.

The name, knowledge meant that the more one knew, the more saved they were.

They believed that Knowledge is divine, so the more knowledge you have, the closer you are to the divine.

The problem with that kind of religion is that it takes no faith. It is centered on us, the human, and our own ability to earn our righteousness by what we do, in this case, what we know. In many dynamics, it was a lot like the Church of Scientology, where you pay to get more and more knowledge.

And sometimes that kind of religion is appealing because it gives us something to do. It gives us something concrete that we can believe in besides God.

But it takes our focus off of Jesus and places it on ourselves and our performance.

It is a form of pride, because we focus on ourselves instead of Jesus and His grace.

That doesn't make knowledge of God's word wrong.

We teach that we should know the Word of God better.

Psalm 119:9: How does a person keep their way pure? By studying God's word?

Or Hosea 4:6: My people perish for lack of knowledge.

Here is the problem with their thinking. Knowing God's word is important but Jesus said clarified its importance: John 5:39: "You search the Scriptures , because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is these that bear witness of Me;”

This knowledge is good when it focuses us on Jesus.

It appears that these Gnostics wanted something other than faith to prove their salvation.

And John is answering the claims of this cult.

In the book of 1 John, John uses the phrase “we know that” fourteen times. We know that we are saved. We know that we are the children of God. We know that we have eternal life. We know that we have assurances before God.

If you want to know anything, you should know the Bible, but don't take pride on Bible knowledge, rejoice in knowing Jesus.

John is pointing this out very clearly in this passage.

Don't believe every thing you here. Test these preachers, or these ideas that come into your heads. The Spirit of the Antichrist is already loose on earth.

Why was it considered an heresy that Jesus didn't have a mortal, flesh-and-blood body?

Last week, at the end of our worship service spells out that importance.

We partook of the symbol of Jesus body and blood that was sacrificed for us.

Jesus says: “I have come to seek and save the lost.” (Luke 19:10)

Jesus is the Savior of the world. And His grace flows freely to everyone who believes. Everyone. Everyone who believes.

To some, the grace given to certain people is a scandal. They have taken their eyes off of Jesus.

Jesus didn't come to prove us as being better than others. He came to save those who admit that they need the savior.

The moment we take our eyes off of Jesus' grace and focus on a specific sin committed by others (one that conveniently happens to not be a sin we do), we have taken our focus off of Jesus.

Jesus came to save us.

And, in the divine order of things, it took a perfect human sacrifice to free us from our sins. Hebrews 10:3-5 tells us that animal sacrifice is merely a reminder of our shame. It took Jesus' own blood to save us.

The perfect human specimen, without sin, either committed by Himself, or inherited by his lineage from Adam and Eve became the sacrifice for all of humanity.

He had to have an human body to provide the means of grace for us.

We have free grace that is amazing. Free grace that transcends all of our sins.

But, it was costly. It cost God dearly. That is why John talks about holiness in this book so much.

But it all ends with Jesus.

John warns the people of the Antichrist.

The Antichrist is the one who denies the atonement of Jesus on our behalf. He denies Grace. He supplants Christianity for something that we do, something that we earn, something in a nice little box with a set of rules that we can live up to or fail in instead of faith and trust in God's grace.

So, the passage starts out with don't believe these Spirits. I have been talking about false preachers.

But this is all a part of spiritual warfare.

So how do we know if we are being tricked?

Let us keep ourselves focused on Jesus and the wonder of His grace.