BASIC TRAINING -- 1 John 1:1-4

Thank you all for coming. My name is James Sutton. I'm the associate pastor here at CTK. At least for one more day. After today, I'm going to fade into the bushes like Homer Simpson. This is my last Sunday before a three-month sabbatical for which I am incredibly grateful, and I just want to say a word of thanks to all of you.

First of all, thank you for the sabbatical itself—what a gift to have three months to commune with Christ and to refresh and rest. I feel like this is something everyone should have, but I'm really glad that I get one. So, thank you for that. Thanks for the party two weeks ago. Everybody thought I stopped two weeks ago. They're like, "What are you still doing here?" But what an incredible gift that was to me and my family—all the gifts, but chiefly, thank you for all the pranks. Whoever it was that made the business cards claiming that I paid pictures of pets—that truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

Announcements

A couple of reminders before we dive into a new sermon series this morning. We are moving to two indoor services next week—nine and eleven will be available indoor. I think we were doing that because we thought it was going to get hot this week, but it's pretty chilly. But I do think it will be very warm next week, and we will be having available indoor services, both services. The tent will still be available for those who are not comfortable coming inside.

We also will be beginning preschool-aged children being welcomed into our children's wing. That's next week. We still need volunteers for that. So, if you are comfortable serving, please contact Stephanie Massey. We need volunteers. It's a great way to serve Christ by pouring into the discipleship of our children. So, please contact Stephanie if you are available and able to serve in our children's wing.

Background to 1 John

This morning, we are beginning a new series. We're looking at First John. Before I read the first text, I want to give a little background to this letter.

The letter was written by the apostle John, or at least we believe it was. There's no explicit reference in the letter saying that he wrote it, but there's tons of evidence to where scholarship is almost unanimous in thinking that he did. It's probably written late in his life after his gospel, around 90 AD.

Here was the situation: There was a kind of church heresy that was arising in the early church. Some think it was an early form of what later became known as Gnosticism—this belief essentially that you couldn't know Christ unless you knew the secret, unpublished knowledge of him. And if you knew that, then you knew that Jesus wasn't really a human being, that he was purely spiritual. How could the spiritual and the human merge? Humanity and the physical is marred by sin, and God certainly couldn't interact with that. That was essentially the teaching of Gnosticism in this early form of heresy.

So John is writing to combat that. And nobody is probably better to combat that than the apostle John. Why? Well, he's one of the twelve. Not only was he one of the twelve, he was one of the three—the inner circle. If there was a secret knowledge about Jesus, John knew it. He spent more time with Jesus than perhaps anybody else. And what's more, his gospel emphasizes the divinity of Christ perhaps more than any other gospel. So if someone, if an apostle was to agree that Jesus was not human, it would probably be John considering how much time in his gospel he spends emphasizing his divinity. But of course, he doesn't deny his humanity. And in fact, that's the purpose of First John—to combat this teaching.

Reading the Text

So, with that, let's go to this passage. First John, chapter one, verses one through four. Let's read it together.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at, and our hands have touched. This we proclaim concerning the word of life. The life appeared. We have seen it and testify to it and we proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard so that you may also have fellowship with us and our fellowship is with the father and the son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.

Did I have a different version? Oh yeah, that happens. This is the second time. Alright, let's read the version you have together. I have that one too.

That which was from the beginning which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands concerning the word of life. The life was made manifest and we have seen it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the father and was made manifest to us.

That which we have seen and heard, we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us, and indeed our fellowship is with the father, and with his son, Jesus Christ, and we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. — 1 John 1:1-4

Alright, let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word. All of the versions of it and we thank you for the opportunity this morning to gather, to study it, to learn about your son, Jesus Christ. Lord, we pray we would learn about him. Lord, we pray that we would commune with him. We pray that we would worship him this morning. Lord, meet with us, empower our study of your word. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Basic Training: The Foundations of Faith

Alright, we're calling this series basic training. Essentially, we're using first John to take us back to the foundational fundamental elements of our Christian faith. This is something that we should never graduate from, right? Basic training is something that Christians need to do over and over again because the foundational elements of our faith aren't something that we ever exhaust. And this morning, John is calling us to study Christ, Jesus himself. There's nothing more foundational and fundamental to the Christian faith than Christ himself.

I want you to think about this series in this way. Sylvester Stallone is working on a director's cut of Rocky IV. I know all of you are waiting in eager anticipation for the director's cut to come out. I remember Rocky IV because it was a movie that just looms large in the mind of my childhood. Rocky four is about the Cold War really—it's where he fights the big Russian. You remember this one? It begins with the two boxing gloves, the American one and the Russian one, and then they run into each other and explode. In Cold War America growing up, this was a movie we paid attention to. And not only that, but Rocky is this character that our culture has come back to again and again. There's just something kind of winsome and unassuming about him and we just love the story of Rocky, this unassuming guy from Philly who came up and who wins the championship belt.

When Rocky IV the setting is such that he's done it, right? He beat Apollo. He beat Clubber Lang. He's wealthy. He even has a robot in the eighties, right? He's succeeded now he's gonna have to fight this Russian. And the reality that dawns on him is that really if he's going to be at his best, if he's gonna beat this guy, he can't train in the luxurious accommodations of his robot-lined pleasure mansion. He has to go to Siberia, right? He goes to the frozen tundra. He starts chopping wood and doing sit-ups in the barn. He's essentially getting back to his roots, the hard reality of working out without any of the extras. That's essentially what we're trying to do. We're trying to get back to the basics, the foundations of our Christian faith without all the distractions because these are the things that actually fuel and keep us moving in a Christian life.

This morning, we start with the very basic. We start with Christ and I have three points. First point is the very public, incomprehensible, and inexhaustible truth about Christ. Second point is the gritty experience of Christ. And the third point is the joy-filled worship of Christ. We're moving through the text in that order: the truth about Christ, the experience of Christ, and the worship of Christ.

The Incomprehensible and Inexhaustible Truth About Christ

Alright, first of all, the incomprehensible and inexhaustible truth about Christ. You do realize that we worship a savior who is very public and whom we will never fully comprehend? That was the problem of the Gnostic Church. They subjectively defined their savior. They didn't need a savior who didn't fit their categories. They needed one that did. They needed a savior that made sense to them. And so they created a savior who was apart from public record, who essentially only existed in secret, whom only they could know through their secret techniques and secret whispers. So they could feel like they had achieved something that was understandable—and what was understandable was a ghost. A figure whom they could not touch because essentially that fit their category of a man cannot be god. And that was what they were teaching.

And John comes and combats that and he says, he is god. He didn't deny that. Do you notice in verse one, he was the divine word of life and he came. And secondly, we not only saw him, we heard him. And do hear this? This is a weird thing to say—I touched him. Right? That's just a very interesting way to begin a letter.

I not only saw him and heard him but I also touched him. This is in direct contrast to what they were teaching, essentially that he wasn't physically there. John's like, No, I touched him. I held his hand. I embraced him. He was my savior, right?

And notice also that John says he refers to this as his testimony in verse two. John is not coming up with teachings about Christ. This isn't something that he invented. This is not something that he discovered. He's simply relating facts that he has witnessed about Christ. And so I want you to see that there is something very objective about what John is doing. He's saying, I had nothing to do with him. I am not in charge of who he is. In fact, John might say, if we were talking to him, we tried to be in charge of who he was. Do you remember? There are several conversations that Jesus has with his disciples where his disciples are kind of like, hey, Jesus, aren't you supposed to be doing this? Aren't you supposed to be that? And what does Jesus say to statements like that? Get behind me, Satan. He says, I am in charge of who I am, right? That's what Jesus says.

And John's saying, I'm just testifying. I'm not adding. I'm not taking away. I'm just telling you what I've seen. And so the first piece of basic training is for us to look objectively at who Jesus is, to study him, to learn from him, to learn about him. And I realize that in our context, right? In the South, in a church like this, in the PCA, we sometimes feel like we've done that, don't we? We sometimes feel like we've graduated from that. I in fact graduated from a seminary. It's such a weird thing. We sometimes feel like it's time to move on from the objective truth about Christ but it's inexhaustible. Do you notice John referring to him as the word of life? Right?

Two Objective Truths About Jesus

The first thing that I want you to see, some objective truth about Jesus that exist in this passage that I would encourage you to wrestle with as a part of your basic training is first of all, Jesus isn't playing hide and seek. We're asking 20 questions. Do you notice that he loves to reveal himself? Jesus isn't hanging out in heaven, sending memos, letting us know objective truth about him, right? He actually comes in the form of a person as the word of life and he's three dimensional. Smell him. Touch him. Hear him. See him. He's not a savior who wants to hide.

Oftentimes, I think there is a sense in which we kind of expect him to be like that because of course, he is mysterious, right? There is that inexhaustible sense to the knowledge of him. There's a sense in which we'll never fully understand him but note the heart of our savior. He comes in person to communicate truth about himself, right? He's not hiding. He's not sneaking around waiting for us to discover him. He's out in the open. I think a lot of times we sometimes give up on plumbing the depths of who Christ is because we kind of think he doesn't want us to discover anything else. Do you ever get there? Sometimes I think I get there from a sense of rightly recognizing the sovereignty of our savior and he's going to reveal himself when he chooses to reveal himself but then I assume that he's revealed to me everything that he wants to. That's a lie. That's not true. Jesus loves to reveal things about himself.

And the second thing that I think John is trying to teach us that I want to encourage you to wrestle with as a part of your basic training is that he doesn't play by the rules, right? The Gnostics wanted him to play by their rules. They wanted to box him in to their theological category. They told Jesus, hey, go to your divine room and stay there. Put a lock on the door and shut it and then they in whispered tones told people about it. But Jesus doesn't do that. Jesus doesn't stay in his room. Jesus is constantly breaking through the categories that we set up for him and revealing himself to be much more than we could possibly imagine.

And notice that the Gnostics had good intentions. They were trying to protect his divinity, right? They're trying to protect that. Oftentimes, we do too. We have all these good intentions for why we would maybe categorize Jesus as something and lock him away. But here's how I want you to think about Jesus. Do you remember the Kool-Aid man? Yeah. Thank you. The Kool-Aid man, right, in the eighties Kool-Aid commercials, there was this big guy shaped like a pitcher with red Kool-Aid in him and what he loved to do is when people were thirsty, he would just kind of burst through a concrete wall and he'd say, oh yeah. That's what Jesus does to our categories. That's who Jesus is. He's not going to be controlled by our expectations or what we think we know about him.

There's one thing that I have learned from graduating from seminary is that I have had more Kool-Aid moments after graduating than before.

I have learned more about Jesus as I have continued to study his word and his spirit has applied that to me. I have never reached the depths. The other day, I was watching a video from the Bible Project which was for my kids in their devotional time about the atonement of Christ. There was something about the presentation where this little aspect of what Jesus's atonement has done for our world sunk deeper into my heart for the first time. I learned something about Jesus from a Bible Project video designed for children.

The word of God is rich. That's why John calls it the word of life. It is something that is basic that you never move on from because it keeps going in terms of its depth and the power of what you might learn about Jesus Christ himself. I want to encourage you that you probably have categories where you have assigned Jesus to his room. I want to encourage you: spend some time in his word. Spend some time in prayer. Spend some time thinking and meditating about the objective reality of who he is—the simple truths.

There is something that you could go round and round on about the fact that he is a divine and human person. That you could spend the rest of your life meditating on that. In fact, you are designed to spend eternity discovering new depths to who he is. That's how amazing and deep he is, and that's how many categories he's going to break. So what are you going to do this summer as you study your basic training? What walls is he going to break down? What ways is he going to be like, "Oh yeah"? I love that picture.

Jesus Controls Your Knowledge of Him

Another thing that John is trying to teach us is that Jesus controls what you know about him. Oftentimes, I think we believe we're in charge of that. But he's in charge of that. One of the first books on systematic theology I ever read was a book by Louis Berkof called Systematic Theology. In the introduction it says that theology is the only science in which the object being studied controls the experimentation. That is the exercise of us studying Christ. We're not in charge. The disciples wanted to be in charge with Jesus, but they weren't. John had experience after experience of that.

The reality is that what they discovered through that experience is that when we're in charge, we worship a lesser Jesus. Remember, every time Jesus shows up, everybody just wants him to free them from the Romans, but he wants to free them from their sin. Jesus is always so much more than we can imagine. It is so good that he is in charge of who he is and he is in charge of our discovery of him.

The end of 1 John seems really random. I want to read the end—this is the preview, I'm spoiling it. I won't be here this summer, so this is the danger of giving someone who's leaving for three months the mic. Here's 1 John 5:20-21:

He says, "And we know that the Son of God has come and has given to us understanding so that we may know whom who is true. And we are in him who is true, in his Son, Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life." And then it just says this: "Little children, keep yourselves from idols." — 1 John 5:20-21

It's such a random sentence at the end of that statement, right? But notice what John's saying. He's saying he's true. Objectively, he's true. He's who he is. He's in charge. Everything else is just idols. Don't worship an idol. The idols are so much less than who he is.

So this summer, spend some time allowing him to be in charge. If you have a Jesus who you figured out, you're not worshiping God, you're worshiping an idol. Spend some time objectively knowing him, plumbing the depths, embracing all of the knowledge that you can possibly have about him. Know him. It's inexhaustible. It's beautiful. It's majestic to study the person of Christ. But as GI Joe says, knowing is only half the battle, right?

The Gritty Experience of Christ

I want to move to our next point, which is the gritty experience of Christ. Knowing him—knowing facts about him, objectively looking at who he is—will only get you so far. Notice, the Gnostics taught about a barrier between the spiritual and the physical. There was no real relationship until you became a master guru of who Jesus was. You had to earn it, and once you earned it, you got relationship. There was no relationship before that. You had to break through the physical barrier. You had to deny your physical existence. You had to earn the spiritual existence in order to have a relationship with Jesus Christ.

That's what the Gnostics believed, but John is clear that the offer of relationship with Jesus is an immediate reality and one that he initiated. If you want it, you get it right away. And not just he got it as an apostle—he's saying we get it. We get it.

Notice, we proclaim what we saw and heard so that you may have fellowship with us. And by us, he means Jesus and the Father. He clarifies that in the next line: Jesus and the Father and the saints. You can have fellowship with us. Relationship is for you right away if you believe the subjective truth. If you enter into this relationship through objective truth, you have a subjective relationship right away. It's not something that's withheld until you master it. You get a little bit of it and you get the relationship. Do you notice that?

How can that be? John watched Jesus go up into heaven. Jesus in bodily form is in heaven, right? So, how can I enter into relationship with him subjectively, immediately by believing this objective truth? Simple. He's inside me too. And he's inside you. We have fellowship with him through the Holy Spirit. He comes into us. That fellowship is ours immediately. There is a gritty, subjective reality.

Fellowship with Jesus and the Father

First of all, fellowship with Jesus and his Father. What does it look like that we get that? We don't just get memos. We get him. We get him in our hearts and I think for many of us, we approach our relationship with Christ as though that's not true. As though he's up in heaven and we're pen pals. We pray, right? We write to him. You read the word, he writes back, right? That's our relationship, back and forth. There's no real present reality that he's in us.

Some of you might think of it like your Facebook friends or Instagram friends. We're keeping up with the updates, right? In his word on what's going on with him and he's watching our feed from heaven but he's not in it with us. That's not Christianity. Christianity is that he's in the trench. Our relationship with Jesus is one in which he is in lockstep together. He's here with us, inside of us.

You don't have a relationship that's just on Facebook. He is in your heart every day going everywhere with you, carrying you, loving you, walking alongside of you, encouraging you, challenging you, nudging you forward. That is the relationship of our Savior with the believers, right?

And here's the thing, knowledge just isn't enough. Facebook friends isn't enough, right? Being pen pals isn't enough. You have to have that personal subjective relationship. You have to be in lockstep because here's the deal: basic training. You go into battle without Jesus Christ and you have already lost. Know all you want about him. Know everything about him if that were possible and go into battle without him and you still lose. Do you see? It's not just about objective truth, it's about subjective relationship as well.

James put it this way: demons know more than seminary professors and they still go to hell, right?

Fellowship with the Saints

Second thing that I want to pull out is that you also have fellowship with John and the saints. It's not just fellowship with Jesus and the Father but it's also fellowship with us, with John, and the saints. Why is that important? There's all kinds of theological reasons why that's important, right? Jesus didn't just come to restore relationship between you and the Trinity, right? It is Trinity Sunday by the way. You know that, right? For those of you who are tied to the liturgical calendar, there's your nod. Presbyterians have kind of a flirting relationship with the liturgical calendar. We kind of like it sometimes when it suits our purpose but this is the Sunday where traditionally the church has considered the Trinity.

Trinity is all about diversity and unity, right? The Father, Son, Spirit—individuals, one God. And what did Jesus pray in John 17? John tells us about this prayer that Jesus prays. He prays that, hey, Lord, let them be one like we are one. There's this huge theological theme throughout all of Scripture that salvation isn't just about us going to heaven. It's about unity, right?

Acts chapter two, right? Is the reverse of the curse of Babel. Instead of speaking different languages, the apostles come out. They're speaking in their own tongue but everybody hears them so that the gospel can go forward and everybody can become one in Christ, right? That's the picture. Ephesians three, the dividing walls brought down between Jews and Gentiles, people of radically different ethnicities, backgrounds, whatever. They're all coming and becoming one in Christ. God is creating a Trinity-like unity with his people through the gospel.

And so, this picture of us having unity with each other—fellowship with the Father is also fellowship with each other. We're all together unified in the gospel.

Now, I've heard this said and I agree with it to some degree: our relationship with Christ is primary. Our relationship with the church is secondary. But let's unpack that for a second.

If our relationship with Christ is primary, then shouldn't we value the relationship that we have with Christ in our fellow brothers and sisters, right? Part of my relationship with Christ is my relationship with you and you and you. I understand more about who Christ is as I learn from your perspective, your experience of him which I have not had. So, if I value the primacy of my relationship with Christ, I should value the primacy of the relationship that I have with the church.

If you want to learn more subjectively about Christ, you want to experience him in the trench, then I encourage you to plug into the church, mix it up with his people because as you rub against them, you start to experience the gritty reality of what it looks like to actually be in relationship with Christ. You see more of him and here's the thing, some of you are pen pals with the church. Some of you are Facebook friends with the church. Your commitment to this body or to the body of Christ is the kind of thing that you feel like you can click a button and unfriend. That's not the kind of relationship that we're called to.

We're called to committed relationships that have to work through things like conflict. It's a gritty, hard kind of relationship and through that process, we learn more about Christ. And here's the thing, basic training. If you go into battle by yourself thinking you and Jesus, you got this, you're missing the call of the fellowship that we have through him. You should be going into battle with brothers and sisters, lock arm.

So, basic training, we have fellowship with Jesus and the father through him but we also have fellowship with John and all the saints through him. And here's the last thing that I want to see and I'm wrapping up. We testify. We write these things to the objective truth and invite you into this subjective reality so that what? Our joy might be made complete. That's how this passage ends, right? The purpose of learning more about Christ and entering into subjective relationship with him and his saints is so that joy may be made complete. He's talking about his joy and your joy.

So there's just to conclude, there's three things that I want to tease out. Three reasons we need you at CTK in order to produce joy. Three reasons why we need others in order to produce complete joy.

Basic Training and Celebration

First thing that I want you to see is basic training. Here's the basic training, right? In Christ, we've already won. Do you see that? His joy is already there. It's just not complete. His joy is already there. It's just not complete.

What's the joy that's already there? The battle's been won. We are not soldiers who are fighting in a war that might not turn out well for us. We are soldiers fighting in a war where our champion Christ Jesus has already won the battle and so in a sense, our battle is an act of celebration. We're moving through this war knowing the outcome that victory is ours. Okay? And you know what? A good celebration needs celebrators.

You know, my favorite pastor joke and I'm going to apologize in advance for telling this one, is one in which there's this pastor and he decides to skip church on Sunday to go play golf. He's going to skip church and all the responsibilities, calling in sick. He gets his associate pastor to preach and he hits the golf course. And up in heaven, God's hanging out with one of his angels and he says, Watch this. I'll fix this guy. So he winds back and he hits the golf ball off the first tee. He kind of tops it, but it bounces off the cart path into the air. Some eagle comes by, grabs the ball, carries it further down the course, drops it by the creek where there's an alligator. The alligator swishes its tail, kicks the ball onto the green, right? And somewhere in Japan, a butterfly flaps its wings. And a breeze comes by and just gently blows the ball right into the hole. An angel says to God, What? What does that teach him? He says, well, he can't tell anybody about it.

Here's the thing. In order to make our joy complete, we need each other to celebrate. If this pandemic has taught us anything, it's that. Every week, one of you has come into this building and you have just wept as we've sang together. Every week, we get somebody new who's coming back for the first time. It's been a year and I'm here with the saints celebrating the beauty and glory of who our savior is and what he's done for us. You can do it alone but your joy is not complete if you're alone.

The other thing is that Christ is such a big reason to celebrate. You actually need other people to do it right because they see things you don't. Like I said, there's a reason why there are four gospels, why there were 12 apostles. It's because one person's perspective on Jesus Christ wasn't enough to communicate to us. Even the essentials of who he was, right?

And as we come together as a body with a diverse group of people who have experienced Christ differently, we learn more about the glory of who he is. That's why we read testimonies when people join the church. It's because I need to hear about what Jesus is doing in your life so that I can celebrate it. There are stories in this church that are going on right now with the person sitting next to you that they need to tell you in order for you to really understand more about who Christ is and to celebrate him properly.

And then finally, the third thing is not only do they see something about Christ that you need but you see something that they need. That's why we need you here. If you are hanging on to some of the beauty of who Christ is and you're not sharing that with non-believers, with believers, then essentially you're sitting on something that is glorious and you're hoarding it just like the Gnostics claimed that they were. Like, I've got this secret knowledge but I'm not going to share it. I'm going to keep it for myself. The stories of Christ's work in your life are meant to be shared with the body. That's why we come together to worship so that we can all share our perspectives and we can glory and richly worship him for who he is fully.

And in conclusion, I just want you to think about the ultimate expression of that. In Revelation, it talks about every tongue, every tribe, every nation coming together and surrounding the throne. Can you imagine what that is like? You come into this place however many people we have in here and you sing for the first time after doing it on your TV for a year. And you weep. Imagine being in glory when every tongue and every tribe and every nation is there praising God for all of the diverse and amazing things that he has done. What an incredible moment of worship.

CTK, this is our basic training. Our focus on our savior. He's all we need and his salvation will bring about change in our lives that is beyond anything we can hope for or imagine. While I'm gone for three months, I will be undergoing basic training. I'm not skipping out on this series because I've graduated from it. I'm going into sabbatical so that I can focus on this material. My prayer and hope for you is that while I am doing that, you will be too.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Amen.