Preached 1/29/23 [previous sermon]
1 John 1:8-9
INTRODUCTION
A few months ago we started a journey through the book of first John. We are continuing in the first chapter after having gone through the first seven verses, so let’s turn our bibles to the first chapter of this magnificent book. I confess that I was planning on preaching on five verses, but after making an outline and starting to put it together I found that I was being led away from a quick theological overview to something completely different. So I am only going to cover verses 8 and 9 of chapter one, and the purpose of this message will be to be a practical help for us as we follow Jesus Christ in this life.
So in review, I John is a powerful book for the Christian and while it seems hard it is actually a work of love and hope to us from the man sometimes called “the apostle of love”. How? It is designed to give us assurance of our salvation in Christ. John wants all believers who read this book to have confidence and joy! So he gives all believers a litmus test to be able to see the working of the Spirit in our lives. And as we discussed last time, the marks for assurance of our salvation in I John are these three:
· We BELIEVE – His Truth (the doctrinal test)
· We OBEY – His Commandments (the moral test), and
· We LOVE – His Children (the social test)
The first test we covered is found in chapter 1 verses 3-7: the fellowship test. So we say that we love God and his people – as evidenced by loving God for who He is and loving his people because of our common relationship to Him? The meat of the test is our walk:
The second test was in verses 5-7 – the “walking in the light” test. John asks ‘do we love darkness or light’? John tells us that the proof of our fellowship with God is that we are walking in light. If we are too attached to this dark world and if our church fellowship is no different from, or worse than, our fellowship with co-workers and other unsaved friends, well, then our assurance of salvation deserves a look.
These three verses gave us an introduction to our holy God who is holy and pure, without any taint of evil. Unlike Him we are sinners. We are born with darkness in us. As John says in his gospel, we loved the darkness rather than the light. The entire gospel story tells us how God has shone his light into our hearts and cleansed us from the guilt of our sins so that we can approach, and walk in, his light. But the point of salvation was not just a judicial act that will allow God’s holy heaven to be full of sinners. Christ did not die on the cross so that sin could be justified, but sinners. And all those sinners who are justified will actually be glorified – i.e., made pure and holy like Him! As Paul put it at the end of the “golden chain” in Romans 8:30
“…and those whom he justified he also glorified.”
This was always the goal and purpose of our salvation. Someday, as Paul wrote to the Philippians: (1:6) “he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” All Christians will be completely transformed to be like Him.
What takes place in between our justification and glorification? We have been given a new heart and a new purpose. Paul writes to the Christians in
The apostle John often uses simple pictures to illustrate spiritual realities, but there are three main concepts that he returns to over and over. We saw the first one in 1:5-7: light and darkness. Another concept John speaks about frequently is love. But one other concept was very important to him, which we will see in verses 6-10. Before we look at them, let’s look at John’s other two epistles. In 2 John 1:4 he writes
“I rejoiced greatly to find [some] of your children walking in truth…”
and in his third letter he echoes this thought:
“For I rejoiced greatly when brothers came and bore witness to your truth, [that is], how you are walking in truth. I have no greater joy than this, to hear that my children are walking in the truth.”
Truth was one of the most important things for John.
When we widen our focus over the entire first chapter, we actually see three verses where John talks about the truth. Note these three “if we say” statements:
- v6: If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness
- v8: If we say that we have no sin, and
- v10: If we say that we have not sinned.
In answer to these three statements, there are three responses about the truth:
- v6: we lie and do not practice the truth
- v8: we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us, and
- v10: we make Him a liar and His word is not in us.
The first test (v 5-7) is about our behavior and involves lying to those around us who can verify whether we are walking in the light. The second test involves our relationship to sin, both in attitude and doctrine. In that case we are lying to ourselves.
As the chapter progresses, each false statement increases in its sheer audacity and its danger to us and our assurance. Whenever we leave the path of light our testimony is muddied. But of our overall walk is characterized by darkness we are lying about what we are. The second case involves denying the truth by lying to ourselves. The old saying is true – we can’t get better if we deny that there is a problem. But the third case (which we will tackle next time I preach) involves denying tenets of the gospel itself. It is impossible to have assurance if we are still calling God a liar.
Today we will discuss the second test – what we say about our own sin. It is a very important challenge for us. Why is what we say about or own sin so important? Why is our relationship to sin now attached to our assurance of salvation?
Consider how we first came to Christ. If a person is redeemed, this is first of all true because God has convicted them of their sin, awakening their moral sense to his holy nature and just judgment. Once we were awakened, there came a holy fear that caused us to throw ourselves upon his great mercy. We received forgiveness of our myriad sins against Him through faith in the finished work of Christ. At this point we had fellowship with Him and a real desire to please Him. This fellowship inevitably becomes demonstrated in all our lives in the same way that a teenager experiencing their first crush will obsess over pleasing the object of his or her newfound devotion.
This brings us to today’s text. In verses 8-9 John points out two things that will be true… if our faith is genuine:
· We will hate sin and examine ourselves to expose and renounce it,
· We will never excuse or minimize our sins, but will confess them to God as we progress in holiness
But specifically why do Christians have a strong hatred of their sins? Why should we?
1. We will hate our sins because they caused the suffering of our precious Lord and Savior, Jesus, when He bore the entire wrath of God for all of our sins on the cross. Seriously, how could we love that which caused Him such pain for us?
2. We will hate our sins because God has given us a new heart that is aligned with his and wants what He wants. Sin becomes odious and unpleasant as we grow in grace.
3. We will hate our sins because, as John puts it later in this letter – “we love because He first loved us” – in other words, He has loved us so much it is only natural that we would want to please Him, and we know how our sin grieves Him.
4. We will hate our sins because God’s word tells us how bad our sins are. (Rom 7).
5. We will hate our sins because we see the damage and pain and death that sin causes.
6. We will hate our sins because the Holy Spirit convicts us of sin and brings us to repentance, and last but not least
7. We will hate our sins because it draws us away from God and breaks our fellowship with Him.
If we are truly saved there will always be a tension between what our new nature desires and what the flesh (which is also called “the old man” in scripture) practices. Though the guilt of our sins before God has been forgiven, in this life we still stumble and fall in our walk. We have a new nature but during our sojourn on Earth (which takes place between our Justification and our Glorification), we must grow in holiness, we must present our bodies as a living sacrifice, we should not be conformed to this world but instead be transformed by the renewing of our minds, we should discard that which displeases our Lord and damages us. To do this, we must live in truth. We must be diligent should be practicing self-examination. We must say with Paul:
2 Corinthians 5:9b [LSB] … we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him.
Because of this, our prayer should be like that of King David:
Psalm 139:23-24 Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts; And see if there be any hurtful way in me, And lead me in the everlasting way.
In other words, we should care about sins. To rephrase that – if we have been redeemed and are a new creation, we will care about our sins.
So as we come to verse eight, we read the second “if we say” statement:
1 John 1:8 If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
There are two issues connected with this verse that will keep us from walking in the truth. One is practical and one is doctrinal.
I Denying Sins Doctrinally (v8):
First let’s talk about the doctrinal issue.
There are certain Christian churches and groups that teach that Christians can reach a state of sinless perfection in this life. Some teach that this happens at the moment of salvation, while others say that there is a second blessing that comes some time after salvation where a Christian becomes “sanctified”, at which point they are no longer able to sin. I have not personally spoken with anyone with this belief but I have known others – my wife included – who have. At some point those people who have told me about their encounters ask a simple question like “what about this thing that you did - wasn’t that a sin?” The answer is inevitably “no, it wasn’t”. J. Vernon McGee related a conversation that he had with a friend of his that had announced his total sanctification who had subsequently been angry and abusive to his neighbor. The man was a neighbor McGee’s church, so this conversation ensued:
“Didn’t you tell me that you got sanctified?”
“Yes”
“And when you got sanctified, you reached the plane of sinless perfection?”
“Yes, I think I have reached it.”
“Well, your neighbor is a member of my church, and he tells me that you really lost your temper the other day and told him off in a very unkind, un-Christianlike manner.”
He began to hem and haw. “I guess I did lose my temper. But that is not sin.”
“Oh, if it’s not sin, what is it?”
“I just made a mistake. I recognize that I shouldn’t have done it – so that’s not a sin.”
This matches the discussions that my friends have related to me. Hearing this account, it seems like it is partially based on a mis-reading of Paul’s words in Romans chapter 7. In verses 19 and 20 of this chapter Paul says “For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one working it out, but sin which dwells in me.” The problems with this are myriad, but even these verses wreck the interpretation that Paul thought he never sinned, but only had “mistakes”. First, if we read Paul’s words carefully, we see phrases like this all through the passage:
“sin which dwells in me”, “I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh” “I practice … evil”, “sin which dwells in me”, “in me evil is present”, and finally “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?”
Now to be fair, these people would answer that Paul is merely describing his state before he was saved. But this is belied by the other half of these verses, which describe a heart that is redeemed:
“I agree with the Law, that it is good.”, “the willing is present in me”, “the good that I want”, “in me who wants to do good.”, “For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man”.
These statements describe a person who is saved. Paul is describing his current state, not his pre-salvation state. As he points out just four chapters back in Romans 3: “THERE IS NONE RIGHTEOUS, NOT EVEN ONE; THERE IS NONE WHO UNDERSTANDS, THERE IS NONE WHO SEEKS FOR GOD” and "THERE IS NO FEAR OF GOD BEFORE THEIR EYES." The apostle John in his gospel similarly writes: "And this is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil.”
II Denying Sins Practically (1:8):
So what is the practical issue? It is the case of a Christian (or so-called Christian) who has let their conscience be corrupted to accept the world’s definition of right and wrong. This is due to several problems, of which we all have probably been guilty at some point. Here are seven examples of how “we say we have no sin”:
1. Keeping the Bible on the Shelf
First and foremost, those who do not saturate their minds and hearts with the word of God become dull to sin. There is a saying: “The Bible will keep you from sin, or sin will keep you from the Bible.” Psalm 119:11 says “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.”
Paul also tells that the law taught him of sins that he didn’t even know he had in Romans 7. He says: “… if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.”” So your conscience needs to think God’s thoughts about right and wrong. People who boast that various sins “don’t bother me”, their hearts are not enlightened, but darkened.
2. The Deadly Sins of Pride and Cowardice
We like to think that by tolerating sin in our lives that we are more sophisticated than our intellectually inferior, less enlightened brethren. Or maybe we feel we are more virtuous than the neighbor with biblical values because we have a sign in our front yard with meaningless tautologies that gain us the praise of the worldly-wise.
Cowardice is similar to pride as it also causes us to “sin to fit in”. We don’t want to stand out so we refuse to take a stand which will bring peer pressure down on us. Many people live in constant terror of being identified by friends or co-workers as (scary music): a Puritan or even worse - a Prude! So many people are terrified of being called a prude. How many times have we heard someone start a sentence with “I’m not a prude”? Well, they may earn points from their friends when they say that, but would they use those words to Jesus’ face when excusing going to see some sort of “adult entertainment” or maybe telling Jesus that about the dirty joke they laughed at at work last week? John warns us chapter 2: “Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” (1 John 2:15) You can’t love both.
3. Habitual Sin
Each time we ignore the gentle prompting of the Holy Spirit when we sin we grow duller of hearing. Paul commanded in 1 Thessalonians 5:19: “Do not quench the Spirit”. But it is really more personal than that. The Holy Spirit is God. He is a person. After telling the Ephesians to refrain from sinning (anger, lying, stealing, laziness and unwholesome speech) he wrote: “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.” (4:30) When we make a loved one cry we feel terrible and try to make amends. But does the grief of the Spirit who is saving us for the day of our redemption bother us in the same way?
The great danger of hardening our heart is that we are eventually relieved of even having to make excuses for sins – especially for sins of omission. James wrote: “…whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” (James 4:17). Remember as a brand new Christian, we felt God’s urging for the first time to participate in church. Every time we skipped church – even for work or mild sickness – we felt a twinge in our hearts. But many of the “more experienced” believers have moved from “I had to take care of a sick kid so I missed the prayer meeting” to the more advanced “oh, I don’t do the prayer meeting. That’s our movie night.” And years later, even after movie night has gone away, we are still left with “oh, I don’t do the prayer meeting”. And that part of the heart has a callus on it that will resist all invitations to pray.
4. Incorrect Self-Definition
By incorrect self-definition I mean labeling ourselves as other than what we are in Christ - a Saint! Let’s try this: on the count of three, let’s have every Christian here say “I am Saint _______” (insert your first name). I’ll join you. Ready? One, two three: “I am Saint Steven”. Did you feel presumptuous? You shouldn’t. What you just said it not an arrogant statement, but what God’s word calls you. And the Greek word translated “saint” all over the New Testament is a word that means “holy one”.
Does that mean that we don’t sin? Again, nope! But it does mean that we are set apart for God. It means that all believers have an amazing, irrevocable destiny. It means we are sure that “that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” (Phil 1:6) It means that Jesus is “able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy”. (Jude 1:24) It means that “he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.” (Eph 1:4)
This really shows just how much we short-change ourselves by self-defining as someone that is locked into any particular sin. We do this in two ways: On one hand, we might excuse sin in our lives by claiming that we were “born this way” - making our sin God’s fault and his disapproval unjust. On the other hand we might use the favorite phrase “it’s just the way I am”. All sorts of angry outbursts, rudeness, sexual sins or other bad habits or character qualities can be excused with a wave of the “it’s just the way I am” magic wand. It has many permutations. For instance, have you said “it’s just my personality”, or “it’s just part of my culture”, or “I guess it’s just my genes”, or “it’s all my parents’ fault.”
The actual fact is – when you say “it’s just the way I am” you are actually right, but for Christians that isn’t the whole story. The world says it offers us freedom when it tells us we are born with unchangeable sinful characteristics. “Be who you are”, they say. But that is really a prison. Jesus Christ comes to us offering glorious change. He plans to fix us. So OF COURSE you have a bad temper. But that is not the point. Jesus is remodeling you into “the new you”. All that is required is to admit and turn from your sin. If we are faithful to do that – He does the miraculous part! He does the heavy lifting.
II Denying Sins Definitionally (1:9):
The final and most deadly method of “saying that we have no sin” is to excuse sin by redefining it. We are adept at using euphemisms to redefine sins as “mistakes”, or “foibles”, or “diseases”, or “quirks”. But God uses words like “transgression”, “iniquity”, “rebellion”, “idolatry” and “wickedness”. Think about these:
- God says “immorality”, “fornication”, and “adultery” but we say “fooling around” or “free love”.
- God says “lies” or “bearing false witness” while we say “mis-spoke”, “Telling tall tales”, or “Spinning a yarn”.
- God says “steal” but we say “misappropriation” or “5-Finger Discount” or “borrow” or “involuntary redistribution”.
Another thing that we do is to minimize our sins by adding a special magic word. That word is “just”. When our boys were young we referred to it as “the J word” and pointed it out whenever it was used. We all know well how this is used since it is literally one of the most used words when discussing our transgressions. Consider
- “I just ate one of the cookies”.
- “I was just going eleven miles an hour over the speed limit”.
- “I just hit my little sister a little bit.”
- “I just slept with him/her once.”
- “I just told a little white lie.”
John, knowing how we love to disguise our sins behind euphemisms and excuses, wrote verse 9:
I John 1:9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
This verse describes the discipline that all of us, every Christian, must practice – daily, hourly, and moment-by-moment. Now. Today. Tomorrow. Whenever we sin.
But what does it mean, actually, to “confess” our sins? I mean, doesn’t God see everything? Surely He doesn’t need us to tell Him what we have done. Or maybe it is important that we theatrically grovel on the ground in abject shame, making a big show of wearing sackcloth and throwing dirt on our heads? Or is it about feeling bad and shedding long tears of repentance, flagellating ourselves with whips and sleeping on a board in a cold room with only bread and water for our food?
All of these are things that people do to try to prove to God that they are sincerely sorry and that they deserve forgiveness. But there are two truths that contradict these ideas:
1. As Christians, our sins are already judicially forgiven. We are justified by the blood of Christ and are bound for glory with Him forever.
2. Even as Christians, we will NEVER deserve forgiveness. We cannot add an iota to the salvation purchased by Jesus on the cross (which we will see in verse 2 of the next chapter). The thought that we can earn forgiveness by ostentatious displays of grief will earn forgiveness is an insult to his grace.
So if our sins are forgiven, and we can’t earn forgiveness, we are left with two questions. First of all, if all of our sins – past, present, and future – have already been forgiven when we were saved, why does verse 9 talk about forgiveness. The answer is that while we don’t lose any of our salvation when we sin, our fellowship with the Lord is affected. Remember the verse about grieving the Spirit? Think of a happy home. A child who breaks his or her parents’ rules might be reprimanded or receive some sort of penalty or punishment. Maybe a time-out, or a spanking, or going to bed without supper, or being on restriction. But the child is still a member of the family. There will be bad feelings as the trust of the parents is broken, but life goes on. And there is nothing more blessed to a child that has been in trouble getting a loving hug from their parents and a restoration of the relationship. The parents don’t (or shouldn’t) do discipline just to hurt the child. The desired result is that the child will grow in grace and goodness and wisdom.
That is the purpose and method for confession of sin in 1 John 1:9. And we see it clearly in the original Greek. The word translated “confess”, homologeĊ, means to agree with – literally it says “to say the same as”. Rather than saying that we have no sin, or downplaying our sin, if we say the same thing about it that God does, then we repent of it and remove it from our lives. We can become more like Jesus. We can experience close fellowship and his joy. And John reminds us that because of the blood of Christ God is not committing an injustice to forgive those sins. (We’ll have to cover that more in the next sermon)
So it’s not about sorrow, it’s about restoration. It’s not about carrying-on, it’s about getting back on the path. It’s not about ceremony, it’s about having the mind of Christ. There is a beautiful picture of what this looks like in Paul’s second epistle to the Christians in
2 Corinthians 7:9-10 As it is, I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting. For you felt a godly grief, so that you suffered no loss through us. For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.
That is what John is saying in verse 9. This is what we need to do. Examine ourselves, find the sins that we are tolerating, agree with God that they are sins, and repent. Stop doing them. Then rejoice in fellowship. Then rinse and repeat. Until we get to glory and are free from this body of death. It’s that simple.
III Conclusion
So in the end, these verses just show the practical side of our redemption. Being forgiven for our sins at salvation is just the start. Those who have been given new hearts will want to please the Master who saved them. If you are bothered by your sin and keep short accounts with God, constantly checking that there is nothing interfering with your fellowship with Him then John says that you can rest assured that your faith is genuine and that you have eternal life. Paul wrote “For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.”
So the question for all of us is – do we hate our sins? Are we agreeing with God about them? Do we care?
