May 6, 2012 1 John 3:18-24
Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.
Be Fully Alive in the Deadest Sense of the Word
Dear children in Christ,
Jeremiah wrote in 17:9-10, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? “I the LORD search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve.”
The heart is deceptive, Jeremiah says. It can trick you. You can feel something is so right, but it can be so very wrong. Sometimes sin can feel really right, but your brain will be screaming at you, “This is really wrong!” You can’t trust your heart because it can be corrupted by your passion.
That doesn’t mean that the heart doesn’t matter. God looks to the heart for evidence as to why you are doing what you are doing. Imagine if you gave your mother a bouquet of flowers on Mother’s Day and you said, “Here’s some flowers. I had to buy them because Hallmark has declared this to be Mother’s Day and I know you’d be mad at me if I didn’t get them for you.” That’s not a “heart-felt” gift. It’s fake. God wants us to do what we do because it comes from our heart, not just our mind and neither as an emotionless and robotic action.
God examines our hearts, and he wants us to do so as well. Some people are very attuned to their hearts while others are not. It’s impossible to know, but on the surface it makes me wonder how many really struggle with themselves at night or by themselves? God said that the love of most would grow cold near the end times. It appears to me that in a general way people are becoming more and more calloused and less introspective to how they are speaking and acting in our society. Do you ever stay up at night with feelings of guilt over something you said or didn’t say; did or didn’t do? Do you ever worry about what kind of attitude you have – whether you are angering God or not?
Do you expect that God should just accept you as you are? Do you demand Him to do so and think that anything more is not fair? Do you ever fear that God might punish you for something you did? I just don’t sense this within American Christians, and it scares me that we are taking the grace of God for granted; that we have a sense of entitlement with God; that He owes it to us to be gracious and kind to us. It never crosses our minds that we might actually make God angry with some of our behavior; even with our lackadaisical attitudes.
Read through the Psalms of David and you will find a person who was very introspective; who was very conscious and concerned about what God thought of him. David was very strong before men and a mighty warrior, before God He was not. His Psalms reflect the spirit of a person who struggled on the inside with his action and his inaction, his sin and his guilt. God didn’t disrespect David for this. He didn’t think David was a sissy or a girly-man for being so emotional before Him. He said David was a man after his own heart. God liked that about David.
In this letter from John, he speaks to people whom he assumes have troubled hearts and agitated consciences. This is supposed to be what happens when the Holy Spirit shines a light in there. You start realizing the sins that you have, and it naturally agitates you. Instead of bringing peace, He brings guilt. It bothers you when you find yourself with feelings of anger and impatience, when you shouldn’t. It makes you feel bad when an emotion of passion comes raging in towards a person that you have no business feeling that way with. It embarrasses you that you are so afraid of what other people think of you. So you feel guilty. You wonder to yourself, “Why am I so afraid of what people think of me? Why do I have such anger and impatience within me? Why do I doubt God’s love and power so much? Am I even Christian? God have mercy on me!” That’s what David went through. That’s the way John assumes Christians feel within them selves. He assumes our hearts will be restless. Luther referred to this as “angst” – a troubled soul within him. Angst is a part of Christianity. No angst = no Christian.
When Luther was growing up under Catholicism, the Church played on his angst. It used threats and promises to play upon the guilt of the people to get them to do some pretty outrageous things. They were convinced to buy pieces of paper called “Indulgences.” Luther joined a monastery partly to try and get rid of his guilt, but no matter what they told him to do, he never felt like he was forgiven and they never told him he was completely forgiven; just that he had taken another step on the pathway of grace; getting a little more each time; never completely having the love of God.
This is the struggle that many still have within the confines of Christianity yet today. An evangelical will hear someone giving a wonderful confession of what God is doing in his life. But instead of only feeling good about how God changed that person’s life, he will say to him self, “I don’t have that experience. God hasn’t worked that way in me.” So he will feel guilty. He will feel as if God doesn’t love him as much because he doesn’t have such strong emotional ties with God. Do you base your relationship with God on your faith? Do you say to yourself, “Why doesn’t God bring my grandson back to faith? Why didn’t God give me the right words to say? I know I should just trust in Him, but I don’t. So I’m not sure that I’m really even forgiven, because I don’t even know if I have faith.”
There’s always something I could be doing better. I could be praying more. I could be visiting more people. I could be calling more people. I could be organizing more efforts to reach out to the lost. I should be spending more time with my wife and paying attention to her. I should be reading and praying with my children and engaging them in conversation. Those things constantly nag at me. They tell me that I’m not the pastor I should be or could be.
That’s why what John says to us today might not give you much comfort. Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. What kind of actions do I have that really prove to me that I am in the truth? In context he is talking about taking care of the poor and needy. James says the same thing when he writes in James 2:15-17,
Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
What can I say that I am doing to really care for needy Christians? What have I given or done that proves to God that I am not just a self-centered sinner? I suppose I could point to the fact that I’m feeding my wife and children. But I could be doing more, and God is never just pleased with the answer, “I’m trying.”
I used to visit a lady that refused to come to church. Time and again she would say to me, “I’ll try.” She was able to make it to doctor’s appointments and social gatherings, but no matter how hard “she tried” she just couldn’t make it to church. After a while I figured out what that meant. She was actually saying to me, “I’ll think about it, and that will be all the effort I’ll make. I’ll tell you ‘I’ll try’ so that you stop bothering me for another month or two.” Finally I had to call her on it. The truth is that we do things that are really important to us at our INCONVENIENCE. She wasn’t willing to do that.
God doesn’t want us to excuse our laziness or greed with words like “I’ll try harder.” He wants us to be able to look at our lives and have evidence that there are actual deeds. How can you say you’re trying to let your light shine if your posts on Facebook are continually negative and full of cuss words? How can you say you’ve made honest efforts to refrain from slander if you still bring up talking about people that you have negative feelings about? You can say you care about your children or parents, but are your words followed by actions? Do you help get them dressed? Do you take time to talk with them? Do you pray for them? If you find some evidence of it, then thanks be to God! If you find absolutely none, then your heart should condemn you. It always will find someplace to condemn you.
John seems to realize this, for he also offers another place to go in order to find rest for your soul. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us.
Think about that first statement. God is greater than our hearts. God can conquer the heart. He can overcome its condemnation. The first and foremost way that He does this is through His first command. His first command is to to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ. Doesn’t this reflect the First Commandment which says that we are to “fear, love and trust in God above all things.” Before God ever gave the Old Testament Israelites one commandment He first reminded them WHO HE IS. He said in Exodus 20:2, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” He wanted the Israelites to first of all know that He is a God who rescued them from slavery with His mighty arm. So God commands us to believe in the NAME of his Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus means “the Lord saves.” That’s what the angel predicted His name would be, and that’s what Jesus came to do. He came to save us from our sins on the cross. He promised that He would die for the sins of the world. He said, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.”
I love the Old Testament story of Naaman the commander. He went to Elisha to be healed. So Elisha gave him a simple command. “Go wash in the Jordan seven times and you’ll be healed.” Naaman didn’t want to. He didn’t think it was a difficult or flashy enough thing. His servants told him, “Go do it anyway.” They weren’t usually in the business of telling their master what to do. But in this case, at their command, he did it. It was a loving command; a firm command; with a promise of cleansing. Out of love for their master they stepped out of their roles as servant and became his master; telling him what to do; in order that he would receive cleansing. They had to be firm with him, otherwise he would not have listened and taken the command seriously.
This is the way God deals with us when we are afraid to believe. We wonder to ourselves, “I don’t know how or why God could love me! I don’t think He should. I keep on failing as a father. I haven’t given to the poor as I could. My faith is so weak!” Then Jesus says to us, “What do you think I was baptized for? I was baptized to take your place! I was anointed to die!” He cries from the cross, “Who do you think I’m hanging here for, you dolt! I didn’t come here for good people. I didn’t come here for strong believers. I came here for sinners. Forget about what your heart tells you. Don’t concentrate on your weak and flimsy works. Forget about how STRONG or WEAK you think your faith is. Look here! Who am I dieing here for? I’m dieing here for you; all of you; even your sinful works. Listen to what I’m telling you. I have died and been crucified to PAY for your sins. They have been paid for. You are forgiven. Stop doubting and believe!”
Think of the confidence that God commands in the Word when He says in Hebrews 10:10 “we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” Listen to Paul try to encourage you in Galatians 3:26-27, “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” This wonderful Word is like a command of faith that is meant to break through the doubt and grab hold of your heart. It removes the doubt and the fear and gives you comfort to know you have a God who loves you in Christ alone.
It is only when this first command is met by the work of the Holy Spirit that the second command can even begin to be met, “to love one another as he commanded us.” When we grasp that we are forgiven and when we truly have His love; with as weak of a faith as we may have; it is then that we start to see that we can love others.
It’s really an odd and completely alien way that God works in us. Imagine if God came to you in a vision and said to you, “Build a stone house for your neighbor. He would help you. So you went to a quarry that you owned and asked Him to start taking stones from the side of your hill. He dug a hole into the side of a hill and kept on taking stones out, piece by piece. You took each stone, placing them together in what you thought would work well. But every time you started getting progress, you ran into another problem. A stone would fall out. A wall would be crooked. I crack would leak. Finally, after years and years of trying, you ended up with a broken down home and nothing to show. You went back to your hollowed out quarry and said to God, “This is impossible. I give up. I have failed.” Then God said to you, “Look around you.” You looked up, only to find that He had emptied out a perfect space that would serve as a great home for your neighbor. And that pile of rubble? Well, that even served as a good home for the neighboring rabbits. John writes, Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.
Imagine that cavern to be the tomb of Christ. This is where our hearts find rest. In all of our efforts to love our neighbor, we find ourselves failing again and again. The harder we try, the more we fail. Yet throughout our failures, the Holy Spirit drives us further and further into Christ. The further we are driven into Christ, the more we fail, the further our hearts are at rest. This is how God calms our hearts, through failure and through faith. It doesn’t come without effort. It doesn’t come without failure. It comes through failed effort. It comes through the name of Jesus Christ alone.
You might have wondered, “What does all of this have to do with Easter?” I wondered about that myself. When God unites us to Christ, He doesn’t unite us to the dead but to the Living Word. He expects us to live to His glory. He expects there to be living works. He expects you to want to live for Christ. This is what Christ redeemed us for and what we are baptized to do.
God doesn’t produce works in you by pampering you and telling you to do easy things. He tells you to do impossible things. Initially, this doesn’t really set our hearts at rest. It makes our hearts feel uneasy as we fail to love as He commands. Yet it’s through this failure and this terror of failure that God wants to constantly drive us back to Christ. The Holy Spirit says to failing Christians, “Crawl back into your baptism. Die here. Crave His Supper. See His need to cover you from head to toe in your best and worst of days.” It is then, and only then, that you will feel free to fail. Your soul will feel comfortable to live. Your heart will feel confident to love and to give your all for others, all when you obey His command to first and foremost BELIEVE. It is only then that you will be fully alive in the deadest sense of the Word. Amen.
