If you put your trust in Christ, you will be united in fellowship with God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, and with all of God’s people for eternity.

Well, that was some Easter, wasn’t it? Wow. What a joyous and God glorifying time all together. Just as one big church family together. People keep coming up to me and thanking me for putting in so much extra work to make it happen. Full disclosure I did one third of the work that I normally do on a Sunday morning. The sun was already up when I got out of bed on Easter Sunday morning. That never happens for me on any Sunday. Okay, so I don’t have the ability to pull off a service like that. What I have and what we all have is a fantastic team of pastors, directors, support staff, and volunteers who can make all of that happen. So yeah, so thank them for making it. These people are administrators and artisans. They each use their strengths to make something special. So if you’re coming to me and you’re about to thank me, I want you to picture me lazily eating some eggs in my slippers and go instead to thank one of these outstanding servants who truly made last week happen. And also, I’ll tell you what really, really excites me about what happened last week. I believe that the overwhelming generosity of this church filling up J.M.’s Resource Center could be the start of an ongoing partnership of blessing and community impact.

We’re looking into other ways that we can come alongside the students and the faculty, because that’s how we create opportunities to share the love and the message of Christ. You will hear about some gardening opportunities that are coming up soon. Apparently, this is a school that gardens. I did not go to one of those. This could be a great opportunity for those of you who love to garden. Or it could also be a fun, shepherding community activity. We will bring you more opportunities as they develop. I believe last Sunday was a great combination of the two parts of our mission statement here at Calvary. Calvary exists to glorify God by making disciples of Jesus, who live out passion for Christ and compassion for people. Our passion for Christ was on full display last week. The collective voice of this congregation singing death was arrested and my life began was unmistakably a declaration of our dependence on the grace of Jesus Christ. And to do that at John Marshall High School, while also partnering with the school to help students, is an example of our commitment not to keep Jesus to ourselves. See, passion for Christ drives us to compassion for people. It has to. The love of Christ compels us to look at our city with a deep desire to see them know and love Jesus like we do.

We’re beginning a new series this morning in the letter of 1 John called Walk in the Light. It’s, in my opinion, one of the most transformational documents in the entire biblical library. And that’s because from beginning to end, the aim of this letter is to make sure that the faith in us that that we profess, this faith in Christ that we have, is demonstrated in the life we actually live, that there’s no disconnect between those two things. So, for example, we say we want to proclaim good news to our community, but are we actually doing that? Is that what we’re actually doing? We say we repent of our sin and that we trust in Jesus, but do we actually repent of our sin? Or are we just trying to avoid the appearance of sin. We say we love others, but is our scope of love limited in ways that skews the gospel of Jesus Christ and misrepresents Jesus love? Let me do something a little bit strange here. We don’t usually do this when we start a new series, but I’m going to go ahead and I’m just going to show you the last verse of this book. Seems a little premature, I know, but here it is. Here’s the last verse of this book. Little children, keep yourselves from idols. That’s how it ends. That’s it. That’s  the ending. There’s no greetings. There’s no sign off.

Just one final command that sums up everything that we have just read in the letter. Everything in this letter is from an older, wiser Apostle John who is pleading with us. He is pleading with us in this letter not to live an inauthentic Christian life. Don’t live inauthentic Christianity where we profess faith in Christ, but we actually spend our lives chasing idols. With all his might, in this letter, he will steer us away from idols that cause Christians to walk in darkness when we desperately need to walk in the light of Christ. And my hope for us, church, is that as we study this letter, the Holy Spirit will radically reshape us. Radically to our root. That’s what radical means. To our root. That it would reshape us. Painfully if necessary. Rochester doesn’t need a big group of casual, nominal, cultural, relatively silent, good people who go to church. It just doesn’t need that. What it needs is an army of people who have been powerfully transformed by the gospel of Christ, and who are willing to compassionately take that message of salvation in Christ to every corner of our community. That’s what we need. Okay, so that’s how it ends. So, right. This is where we’re going. Here’s how it begins. It starts with John making sure that we can completely trust what he says about Jesus. And it starts with an invitation.

And as we’ll see in a moment, John walked very closely with Jesus. He is now inviting us into that relationship. He’s inviting us into a relationship with Jesus that is just as close as what he had. And if you put your trust in Christ, you will be united in fellowship with God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and with all of God’s people for eternity. That’s the invitation. Now you can keep your Bibles open to First John chapter one, verse one. I’m going to read the whole introduction to the letter, and then we’re going to go back and explain it a piece at a time. The whole thing, the whole prologue here is an appeal to us. Here’s what it says. 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 testified 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.

So his appeal starts with a very familiar phrase, the beginning. More than any other New Testament writer, the Apostle John is motivated to share with us the pre-creation reality and identity of Jesus. So when John says the beginning, he’s talking about the beginning of creation. He’s not talking about the beginning of his time with Jesus or the beginning of Jesus ministry. Let me get just a little bit grammatical on you. Okay. This is going to feel a little like English class, but I want you to see something here. Okay. The object in this sentence is fronted, so the object, the thing he’s talking about is from the beginning. So, he’s not talking about the beginning of the object, but that the object was present at the beginning. This is even more clear in John’s Gospel, which you heard read earlier. In the beginning was the word. When was this beginning? Well, John is getting this phrase from the opening verse of Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And just in case we are tempted to think that Jesus was created at the very beginning of creation, John says, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. So if you read Genesis 1:1, you have God, and you have his creation of heavens and earth.

And so is Jesus with God, or is he part of that creation of heavens and earth? Is he creator or is he creation? Well, John answers this emphatically. He is creator. In fact, he says, all things were made through him. The making of creation was done through Jesus. This is one of the more helpful phrases we have for understanding the Trinity. The word was with God and was God. With and was. And I know that’s mysterious, but a God who is one substance in three persons will be mysterious to us. I expect that my 3 pounds of brain which is created by this God, will not fully comprehend his entire nature. But for our purposes this morning, we don’t need to fully comprehend the Triune nature of the Godhead. What we need to do, what we need to see, is that at the beginning, Jesus was not part of the creation. He was with God because He is God. So, when John starts this letter, that which was from the beginning, he’s saying, I’m paraphrasing him now here, but he’s saying, I’m about to share with you about the God that made you. I’m about to tell you about your creator. And that’s quite a claim, isn’t it? That’s quite a claim. For some of you, that claim might put you on alert. How can this guy tell me about the God who made me? I mean, anybody can make up anything they want about God and say that’s who God is, or this is what God is like.

And that’s true, actually. That’s true. Anybody can do that. Lots of people have done that. So we have to explore this. Why is John so convinced? And why does he want to convince us? Well, it’s because of his conviction about Jesus that it’s rooted in his firsthand experience. See, in John 114, the apostle says, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. He says, we saw it in his gospel. Here he triples down on that. God became a man and lived with us. And not only did we see him, but we heard him. We touched him. Everything about his experience of Jesus left him fully convinced that he had physically encountered the Son of God, who spoke God’s very word. Now this has to be, as I mentioned earlier, an older John reflecting on his total experience with Jesus, because much of his time with Jesus in the Gospels is spent learning the nature and the full identity of Jesus was revealed to John over time, just like it was with the other disciples. And John failed along the way, just like they did at one point, along with his brother James, he asked Jesus to rain down fire from heaven on his enemies. Does that sound like Jesus to you? But that’s what John wanted, right? He’s immature. They also asked to be honored in God’s kingdom. Put us at your right and left hand in your kingdom. Right? they were prideful. They wanted power. John did briefly appear at the foot of the cross to be given responsibility to take care of Jesus mother. He was also the first disciple to connect the dots between the empty tomb and the resurrection, as we saw in John 18 last week. So, he was growing during that time, but it wouldn’t be until the resurrected Christ appeared to the disciples and taught them for 40 days that John would have a full understanding that Jesus was the Word of God made flesh. And here in our passage, he’s bringing us into that revelation. He wants us to share in the thing that he has experienced. All of us, by the way, have done this. You experience something remarkable, and then you try to tell the story, right? And you want people to experience it sort of the way you experienced it. So, you bring in all these details to try to help them to come into the story so that they can experience it too. It’s why the weather people go outside and stand in the pouring rain when it’s raining, right? They were probably doing it today.

Some poor guy just standing out there going, look everybody, it’s raining. We’re like, yeah, we can hear you probably didn’t need to do that, right? They could just say, it’s raining really hard out there. Don’t go out there. But what do they do? They go and they stand in it so they can say, trust me, I know, I’m wet. It’s raining out here. John is saying, trust me, I know. I was in it. I walked with Jesus. Think about what John took in with his senses as an eyewitness. What did he see with his eyes? He saw a sick people healed when Jesus touched them. He saw Lazarus, who he saw die, right? He was dead. He was in a tomb. He saw Lazarus walk out of a tomb when Jesus called to him. He saw Jesus get out of a boat and walk on the sea. What did he hear? He heard Jesus teach with the authority of God. He didn’t hear Jesus say, you know, God says this or God says that. He heard, I say to you, your sins are forgiven. He heard Jesus say, I am the way, the truth, and the life. Nobody comes to the Father except through me. It’s the only way. What did he touch? He embraced and touched Jesus during his ministry.

But listen. He also touched the resurrected body of Christ. The one he saw die. He touched the resurrected body of Christ. He felt the breath of the resurrected body when. When Jesus breathed on the disciples. You’ve probably noticed how much John repeats the senses in these first four verses, he is effusive about what he experienced, how visceral it was to him to experience all of this with Jesus. We have seen with our eyes, we looked upon, we have seen it. That which we have seen. We have heard. That which we have heard. We touched with our hands. That’s four references to seeing, two to hearing, and one to touching in the span of four verses. You might struggle to be convinced of what John has experienced with Christ, but understand John is not struggling. John is not trying to sort this out. He knows what he experienced. He is fully convinced of what he knows about Jesus. And he’s not just excited about what he saw and heard and touched. It’s also what it means for us when God the Son became a man and entered this world, eternal life came with him. Verse two is an elaboration of the phrase word of life that we see at the end of verse one. John saw and heard and touched the life giving word of God. And so he gives us the details of this.

He says, this life was made manifest. To manifest is to reveal something, something that was previously that you couldn’t see. It was invisible. It’s made visible. That’s what manifest is. And so God’s word of life, his plan of salvation that was unveiled in pieces throughout the Old Testament comes together and is now revealed in one man, Jesus Christ, Prior to Jesus coming. The full plan of salvation for God’s creation was shrouded in mystery. It was hidden in a series of promises and visions, signs, symbols, prophecies of the future. And John is saying here that God’s ordained path to eternal life has come to us in Jesus. That all of that was about Jesus. Now, if you and I were looking for what we would expect that God would, God’s pathway to eternal life would look like, right? If we were going to get together and brainstorm and determine what it should look like to have a path back to God, we would probably look for a series of steps. Steps that we have to take to make our way to him. And I feel fairly confident saying that that is what we collectively would come up with, because all man-made religions and worldviews have that in common. Actually, they are all some sort of a personal improvement project designed to impress God. Whenever people get involved in creating a path to God, it always becomes some form of effort to obtain enough goodness, to gather enough merit.

We think that we build a ladder up to God. And if you think that, if that’s sort of the way you approach God, if you’re sort of building a ladder up to him. Let me let me ask you something. How do you know when the ladder is high enough? How do you know when you’ve done enough? At what point would you say, I have completed this project? I mean, let’s be honest. You know yourself, right? You know yourself. You know your sin. You know even the secret sin that nobody else knows. That stuff that you hide. You know that too. How do you know when your goodness opens God’s heart to you in the project of your creation? See, the gospel is very different from that. Very different from that. It’s gloriously different from that. The good news is that the word of life isn’t a project of personal improvement. It’s a man. It’s not personal improvement. It’s a man. Jesus came and performed all the good works that we can never do because he’s perfect and we’re not. He’s righteous and we’re not. So when he died, he was free to take our sin burden onto himself, having no sin penalty of his own. And then he rose and he secured our eternal life by rising from the dead.

The path to eternal life is simply trusting that he did that for you. You just reach out and you take hold of that gift of what he’s done for you. It’s putting your full hope and confidence in his project on the cross, not in your personal merit project. God’s plan is a man. Your personal improvement will never achieve what Jesus achieved, what he secured once for all on the cross. Knowing this is where life is found, John says we have to share this with you. That which we have seen and heard, we proclaim also to you. You know, I’ve talked to a lot of people over the 26 years that I have been a Christian who cannot seem to figure out why Christians are so keen on pushing their religion on other people. They just can’t understand. Why? Why are they…why are people so…why are these Christians so pushy? Why do they keep talking about Jesus so much? That’s how they see it, by the way. That’s their words, pushing religion on other people. Why are Christians always trying to convert and proselytize or evangelize everyone else? Why? Why can’t we just keep our religion to ourselves? Let everybody else go about their business? Once back in my early church planting days right out of seminary, I was trying to book a rental on a couple of pavilions in a public park in the town where I was.

Because we were going to have this big free, authentic Mexican taco cookout, we had some Hispanic friends that were going to come do this. I don’t have any authentic Mexican skills. Okay, I know that’s a surprise, but I don’t have any of those. So these friends were coming to town, they were going to do this, and we were going to make it like a just a great big party in the park. And I went to sign the paperwork, and the lady at the park office was very hostile to me. She said, it’s a public park, and we weren’t allowed to share our religion because of the separation of church and state. I suppose that she was hoping that I was some sort of idiot. I informed her that we were allowed to share our religion precisely because it was a public park. We can talk to anybody about anything we want. Check out the Constitution. You won’t have to read very far. It’s right near the top. Right? There’s this segment of the population that can’t understand why people who love Jesus feel compelled to talk about him. It doesn’t make sense to them. And not only that, they don’t get why we feel compelled to call others to follow him, too. Well, John is explaining why here.

He’s explaining why. You cannot experience what John has seen and heard in Jesus and not be overwhelmingly moved to tell other people about him. If Jesus truly is the only way to have eternal life with God, then that is the most important truth for every single person in the world. That is the most important truth. If that is true, that is the most important truth for every single person, no matter where you’re coming from, no matter what time you lived in, no matter what country you’re in. That is the most important truth in the world. And if Jesus is not the manifestation of the eternal life from God to save us, then he is of no importance. We should stop immediately. But he is, But he is. And John knows this. That’s why he’s so convinced. He knows this because he was there and he experienced it. And so he is compelled to share it. I said last week when we looked at the resurrection, and I’ll say it again, you can’t have Jesus without giving him away. You really can’t have a new life in Christ without being compelled in your heart and your mind and your soul to give him away. The moment you experience salvation in Christ is the moment you join the mission to share him with others. It’s because we now see people as spiritual beings. We see people rightly, how they’re created, who they were made for, why they were made.

And we see the problem of sin. We see the struggles. We know what sin has done to them, and we want them to experience the joy of being set free and having a a relationship as a gift from God. Have a relationship with their Lord. Evangelism is motivated by the deepest love for people. And if it’s not motivated by that in you, you probably shouldn’t do it. But if you love Jesus, then you love people and you want them to have what you have. Listen again to what John says happens when you experience eternal life in Christ, so that you too may have fellowship with us, and indeed, our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. John says he wants his reader to have fellowship with us, meaning God’s people, meaning the church. But that fellowship isn’t just with other people, it’s also with God the Father and with God the Son, Jesus Christ. Now, fellowship is not just friendship, okay? At least not when it’s used to describe Christian theology. It’s not just a heightened form of friendship. I don’t know when quite in church history, the word fellowship picked up the meaning, drank coffee and talked to each other. Okay. Somewhere along the way, that’s what it became. And that’s nice. And we should do that. And you hopefully did that before service, and maybe you’ll do it after service. No problem there. We should do that. But that’s not the biblical description of fellowship. See, fellowship is spiritual unification. It’s what Paul calls the unity of the spirit. Faith in in Jesus unites us together because we are filled with the same Holy Spirit. The third person of the Trinity indwells all of God’s people. And this is what, this makes us one with each other. But it also connects us to the Father through Christ. This is why when we talk about our relationship with God, we. We don’t just say that we listen to Christ. We say we are in Christ. That’s Paul’s phrase, right? Fellowship is a spiritually bonded family. As a side note, this is one of the many places in Scripture where the church is described in such a way that it makes me concerned for people who don’t take church seriously. This is one of those places. Many American Christians have a very low view of the theological importance of the local church. They see it as kind of a like a religious club or a tool for growth, or a place you go to when you have the time or when you need something. The Bible says it’s a spiritually bonded community connected to the Father and the son. It is the body of Christ of which each of God’s people is an indispensable part.

The Western conception of the local church has drifted a long way from what the Bible actually describes. Next time you’re reading the New Testament, and especially when you’re in the letters that are written to the churches. Okay, next time you’re in there and you’re reading, just note how much of the instruction is on maintaining a spiritually unified community. Okay, it’s nearly all of it. All of it is saying, this is how we are the church together. This is what we must maintain. This is what we have to strive for so that we can be this united church. And yet so many people in the West treat church like this thing that you might do if you’re not doing anything else, or a place to check in once in a while if you’re feeling especially religious or festive. And I know that’s a tough thing to say the week after Easter when so many people did just that. I know, and if that’s you this morning, thanks for coming back. I’m glad you were there. I’m glad you’re here this morning. You’ve been doing it wrong, but I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re here. The church is a living spiritual organism, not a special weekend event. Okay, I’ll end the rant there. All right. John is inviting you. He’s inviting. This is an invitation. He’s inviting you. And I am inviting you into something so much more Life giving. Eternal life giving. And he’s not just doing it for our joy. He’s doing it for his joy. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. That seems like an odd thing to say, doesn’t it? That his joy would be complete. He’s writing so that he’s happy. What I would expect here is that John would care about my joy being made complete, that I would accept Jesus and my joy would be complete. But here he’s talking about how his own joy is completed by writing this letter and sending it to people like us who need to hear it. This is actually quite a remarkable little verse because of what it says about a Christian’s experience of joy. Flip it around. Turn this thing around for just a moment. John’s joy is incomplete if he doesn’t share this testimony about Jesus. Something is missing from John’s own experience of the joy of fellowship with God if he stays silent. If he keeps Jesus to himself. Evangelism, which is the sharing of the good news of Jesus with other people, isn’t just important for others. It’s important for you as a Christian. Your own relationship with Jesus will be stunted if you don’t talk about Jesus with other people. It will be. And that’s because of the nature of the gospel itself, the very nature of the message of the gospel.

The good news is a message that is designed to be shared. Do you like Kit Kat candy bars? Do you like Kit Kat? Somebody stole 400,000 Kit Kats back in March. You know, like one truck of Kit Kats is like, 20 tons of. That guy really likes Kit Kat. Okay, but you know, Kit Kat, I looked up the history of Kit Kat candy bars this week. Sometimes I can’t believe what my job includes. So I’m researching the history of Kit Kat. Kit Kat was developed in 1935. It was intended to be a snack you could easily carry in a lunchbox and could be eaten on a break, which explains their slogan have a break, have a Kit Kat. And as I expected, this is why I did my research, as I expected, the reason it comes in four bars that you can break apart is that it was originally designed to be shared. That was the reason for its design. It is designed to be shared. You can hear it in their later jingle, Break me off, a piece of that Kit Kat bar over there. Right? Break me off a piece of that. Right? It’s supposed to be obvious. It’s supposed to be obvious to us, right? It looks like one bar on the outside, but once you unwrap it, you can see it is clearly designed to be given away.

Now, I know that’s not how you monsters eat them, right? It’s like, oh, that’s four bars for me. Look at that. I’m going to eat it at a diagonal so nobody will ask, right? That’s how we eat them. But it was designed for you and three of your friends. Church the gospel that we enjoy. Okay. This gospel that is for us, we enjoy this gospel. It was designed to be shared. So you see, when you unwrap the gospel, you can clearly see it was designed not only for you to have it, but for you to give it away. To be a disciple is to be a messenger of this gospel. If we don’t share it, we’re actually not functioning as disciples of Jesus. It makes all the sense in the world that if our discipleship is incomplete, then our joy in the Lord will also be incomplete. John wrote this letter so that we will see and hear and experience Jesus the way he did. He’s he’s sharing Jesus with us. He’s inviting us. He’s inviting us through this letter into that community. And this letter is going to be challenging, I’ll tell you that right now. This is a challenging letter, deeply spiritually challenging in the best sense of those words. But if we will receive these challenges and then give this gospel to each other and to the people in our lives, our joy will be complete too. Would you pray with me?

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