As followers of Jesus, we have a new identity in Christ. If you trust Jesus, this is who you are.

There will not be a sing-along this week. I was asked if we could do the whole album this week. That would be something, wouldn’t it? I think the elders would want a word with me if we did the whole album. No, we will not be singing this morning in the sermon. But strangely, we will be looking this morning at the portion of First John that is most like a song. For the last four weeks, we have been carefully exploring John’s magnificent instructions for determining the state of your own soul. His statements on light and darkness have challenged us to think deeply about our true standing in the presence of God. He has helped us to expose our own hypocrisy, not to judge us, but because he loves us. It’s unloving not to tell somebody the truth, to let them just go on walking in spiritual darkness that ends in judgment. John wants us to know Christ and to know that we know Christ. He’s rattling our confidence so that we can establish our confidence. Friends, I don’t want you to just think that you know Jesus. I want you to know that you know Jesus. I want you to walk confidently in the knowledge that your sins are covered by Jesus sacrifice, and that you are in Christ and that Christ is in you. And then from that confident standing before God, you get to live for him. You get to live that out.

You get to find true joy in him. You get to love people the way he loves people. You get to share the gospel with him and help save their lives. Up to this point in the letter, we’ve been challenged to examine ourselves closely. That’s what he wants us to do. Today, John, is shifting perspective. This time, instead of calling us to question whether we walk in the light of Christ, he’s just going to speak to those of us who do. He’s going to talk to us directly. The churches that he was writing to were filled with people who love Jesus. He probably knew these people personally. It’s possible the original readers were in churches that John had either visited or perhaps even planted. He might have been the one who started these churches. We don’t know a lot about John’s ministry following the early chapters of the Book of Acts, but his letters show us that he was a major leader in the early church. So I think that he knew these people personally, the way Paul considered himself a sort of spiritual father to the churches that he had planted. So John knows these people. He has watched them confess Christ. He likely led many of these people to the Lord, which is why he knows the content of the gospel that they heard from the beginning. Remember that which you’ve heard from the beginning, right? You’ve known these things from the beginning of your walk.

He was probably there. So he knows the gospel that they heard. Beginning at this point in the letter, John starts talking to the true church community who walks in the light. And this is the perspective that he’ll carry through to the end of the letter. And he starts this part of the letter with six sentences that form a kind of poem, or song, or saying, or framework, or colloquialism, or something. Okay? Let me just bring you right into my study this week. Church. I’m not sure what our passage is today. I don’t know what it is. I know what it says. I know what it says. And that’s the most important thing. It’s a very encouraging passage filled with statements that build our confidence. I know what it says. I’m not sure exactly what it is. There’s some different ideas out there about the form of what we’re going to read. But I got to tell you, church, I’m not sure which one is correct or if any of them are correct. Here’s what I do know. John wants us to know who we are. As followers of Jesus we have a new identity in Christ. If you trust Jesus, this is who you are. We’re in First John chapter two, verses 12 to 14 today. I do encourage you to open your Bibles and follow along, because I’m going to read the passage all the way through here to begin with.

And then after a word about the form of this, we’re going to go back and look at each of these six lines that describe our identity in Christ. Here’s the full passage. I’m writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake. I am writing to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I am writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one. I write to you, children, because you know the father. I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the Word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one. You can hear how different that sounds from the rest of the letter. Can’t you? Is it a Limerick? It’s probably not a Limerick. It has poetic elements, though. There’s poetic elements in here. Things like parallelism, repetition, key words. So it’s likely a kind of poetic style that John happens to like so that he can help with memorization. Something along those lines. There are a few features that I want to point out briefly, because they’re obvious in this, and they may or may not be helpful. The first thing to note here is that it seems like John is speaking to three groups, but I actually think that he is speaking to one group with two subgroups within that group.

So children or little children is John’s name for the whole church, as we’ve seen already. And we’re going to continue to see this throughout the letter. If you if you go back to the very first words in this chapter, you’ll see what I mean there. He loves to call the church his little children. It would be odd if he meant something different here in this passage. He then breaks that down into younger people and older people. So he’s not here talking about the spiritually mature and the spiritually weak or new or anything like that. He’s talking, when he says this, he is talking about age. And as is my policy here at Calvary, I leave it to you to self-select into your category. Okay. I am not about to make that mistake this morning on Mother’s Day. Right. So he says, he says everybody, then he says fathers and young men. Okay, so fathers and young men here are used to address the whole church. So this would also include mothers and young women. It’s just he’s using the male words to talk about the whole group. That’s the first thing to note. The second thing that stands out to me as I, as I look at this, is that change right in the middle from I am writing to I write it’s a verb tense adjustment.

It moves from the present tense things that are happening right now to a completed action. And John keeps that tense, that completed action tense throughout the rest of the letter. I think this is just a stylistic change. I think that’s all that is. There’s nothing really to glean from it because it doesn’t change the meaning of anything here. But I’m pointing it out to you because the repetition makes this so prominent. You might think, well, does that matter? Does that mean something? I don’t think so. I think it’s just stylistic. But that repetition is the third feature. Why does John keep repeating himself sometimes word-for-word in here? One person I read about this, thinks that John had two drafts of this part and couldn’t decide between them, so he just included them both. That doesn’t sound like a thing human beings do, though. Really? It’s not how we write. I think the simplest answer is the correct one. He’s doing it for emphasis. We do this all the time. We repeat things all the time so that we can emphasize. So we say something in a slightly different way than we said it before. And I believe John is telling us that what he’s saying in these verses is vitally important, especially for everything that he wants to say after these verses. So that’s the framework here. John is saying everyone, older people, younger people.

And then for emphasis, he repeats it. Everyone. Older people, younger people. So let’s look at what he wants us to know about who we are in Christ. I’m writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake. So first and foremost, John is writing so that we remember that our sins are forgiven because of what Jesus has accomplished. For his name’s sake means on account of Jesus. And so this is a reference back to the earlier in the chapter in verses one and two, when he described Jesus sacrifice, and that that is what makes us right with God. The whole list of sins that you have ever committed or ever will commit have been erased by Jesus, if you trust in him, if you follow him, there is no judgment waiting for you because Jesus has already taken your sins full punishment on the cross. When Jesus said it is finished from the cross, this is what he’s talking about. And we know that Jesus sacrifice fully exhausts God’s wrath and transforms our standing before God. Because as John put it in verse two, Jesus is the propitiation for our sins. And by not qualifying that in any way, John must be referring to all of our sins. He doesn’t just say he’s the propitiation for your past sins, implying that your future sins are not covered by it. He doesn’t say some sins, as if other sins are too awful to be covered by Jesus sacrifice.

Our sins have been forgiven, all of them, because Jesus paid for all of them. And we trust in Jesus. That’s what’s happening. Now the reason this is the first statement in this line of statements is because everything else that follows it is only true because the first statement is true. In other words, you can’t be an older or younger person in the next two subgroups until you are included in this large group. You must have your sins removed and that can only be done through Jesus. You’re about to hear me say some very encouraging things. I find this to be a very, very encouraging passage. And it’s so encouraging about our relationship with God and what that looks like. But if you have not trusted and given your life to Jesus, none of the affirmations I’m about to make are true of you. Okay. You’re outside the house right now. You haven’t trusted in Jesus. This first statement doesn’t apply to you. You’re outside of the house right now. You’re peering in. You’re looking at this group, but you’re not yet inside. But the door is unlocked. God is quite ready and happy to receive you into this group. If you will lay your burden of sin on Jesus through confession and repentance. And then you receive the good news of God’s gracious forgiveness to you in Christ.

And all of these next things become true of you at that moment. All of this can be true if you trust in Jesus and He forgives you of your sins. But there’s another reason. There’s another reason that this is the first line. I want you to notice something. It might be a little bit subtle, but notice this. He’s telling believers that their sins are forgiven. He’s telling people he knows are believers that their sins are forgiven. They already know this. They know this. They are little children precisely because their sins are forgiven by Jesus. So why does John start by telling believers the most fundamental thing about themselves? Well, it’s because we all need to be reminded of this all the time. We need this to be put in our eyes and in our hearts and in front of us all the time. Even as a man who has followed Jesus for 28 years, I need to be reminded of the gospel. I need to be reminded of what Jesus has done for me and who I am in Christ. Some of you have been following Jesus for 50 years of your life. Do you know what you need? You need the gospel. You need the gospel preached to you over and over again. You need to be reminded over and over that you are who you are because of what Jesus has done for you. Because the human mind is frail. It is very weak.

I am prone to forget God’s grace and to fall into temptation and become worldly in my thinking. And in those gaps of forgetfulness, worldly wisdom and false teaching and the work of Satan, they’re quick to fill in with doubt. Right? That’s what he’s coming with. Doubt about my true standing with the Lord because of Jesus. I don’t just need the gospel at the start of my spiritual journey. I need the gospel driven deep into my heart. I need the truth of Christ’s accomplishment on the cross to be brought to my mind daily. You know, there’s a reason that Jesus told us that every time we eat the bread and drink the cup, we should remember his death until he comes back, because remembering the cross is vital to the spiritual growth of a Christian at every age and every stage of life. Okay. So with that established, he now turns to the older crowd. I’m writing to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. Okay older folks, and again, you know who you are. No eye contact from me, right? Okay. You know who you are. John is writing this letter to you because you know Jesus. That’s why he’s writing to you. Him who was from the beginning is a reference to earlier in this letter, chapter one, verse one, which is a reference to the beginning of John’s gospel, which is a reference to the beginning of the Bible.

So, Jesus is the eternal God who was with God and who was God at the beginning of time. That God, the Word of God, took on flesh and came to live with us. He took on a human body. That’s Jesus. So when John says, you know him who was from the beginning. He’s saying, you know, Jesus, who is God. So what does it mean to know Jesus? What does that mean? Does it mean simply knowing who he is and what he’s done? Well, certainly not because Satan knows Jesus in that way, right? Satan knows about Jesus. Satan knows what Jesus has done. That’s clear. They met before when Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness. It cannot be just having factual knowledge about Jesus because plenty of people have that outside the church. People met Jesus face to face and still rejected him. People today have theological degrees. They are loaded to bear with Bible knowledge, but they don’t know Jesus the way John is talking about here. So what does it mean to know him who was from the beginning? Well, it’s pretty important because John says it twice. This is word for word the same thing he says about older people in the church in the second round of children, fathers, young men. Word for word, the same. So it’s very, very important. The word know here is sort of a loaded term.

John introduced it earlier in the chapter in verse three. All the way up to that verse he had been delineating between those in fellowship with Jesus and thus in fellowship with the Father. And those who didn’t have that fellowship, didn’t have that connection. And all of that, all of that connection is summed up in the word know. So if you know Jesus, you have all of that connection, all of that fellowship with God’s church and with Jesus and with God the Father. You have all of that. If you know Jesus, your life will emanate the light of Jesus. The love of Christ will come pouring out of you onto others. In other words, to know Christ is to have Christ at work in you. That’s how you know him. He’s residing in you by the Holy Spirit. Now, why does John direct this to older people? I mean, this is true of all believers, right? Of course it is. But the longer you walk with Jesus, the more you have seen this spiritual connection alive in you. That’s what it is. That’s why he says it. You’ve seen more stuff the longer you walk with Jesus. You’ve seen more. Your relationship with Jesus is more sweet. It’s more sure in your mind and in your heart, because you’ve walked with him much longer than the new believer. The younger believer simply doesn’t have the experience of a lifelong relationship with Jesus.

They haven’t put in the time because there hasn’t been time yet to put in. Now, this is not to say that all older believers are mature. Some come to faith as older people, so they’re actually immature in Christ, even as a mature person. But John is speaking generally here. Okay. Generally speaking, generally, older Christians will have walked with the Lord longer and thus have a more mature faith. And the point is, older believers need to remember this. If you’re an older believer, you need to remember this, especially in the face of changing times and false teachers and false messages that are that are proliferating our world. Remember the unchanging Christ that you have had from the beginning, from the time that you came to know, and that you came to walk with him. You have known this God who is from the beginning, from your beginning in him. The gospel hasn’t changed since mom read you those Bible stories at your bedside 60 years ago. We don’t have a different gospel now. It is the same gospel we know and serve the same Jesus that your grandpa read about in that dog eared paper Bible back when it wasn’t on our phones. Okay, it’s the same book. It’s the same Jesus. Nothing has changed. And you know Jesus. And you know, you know Jesus. That is who you are. Turning to younger people, I’m writing to you young men because you have overcome the evil one.

So to the younger believers in the church, John says, I’m writing you this letter because you have overcome the evil one. The evil one here is undoubtedly a reference to Satan and all that Satan is attempting to do in the world. First Peter chapter five tells us a little bit about Satan’s tactics and desires toward believers. It says that he prowls around like a lion looking for someone to destroy, somebody to devour. And Peter says that our response to that should be to resist him firm in our faith. And we should. We should do that. But John says something just a little bit different here. He says to the younger believer, you have overcome the evil one, right? It’s a completed action. So Peter seems to suggest that the battle with Satan is still being waged. And John is saying that the battle is over. How can both of those be true? Well, this is not a contradiction. Here’s how it works. Peter is telling us what to do. John is telling us why we can do it. Peter is saying, here’s the battle you need to fight. And John is saying, here is why you will win that battle. Why will we be successful in our resistance of Satan and his temptations? Why will he fail in destroying any true believer of Jesus who is firm in his faith? It’s because Satan has already been defeated and sin has no power over the person who trusts in Jesus.

Let me say it again sin has no power over the person who trusts in Jesus. Now you may be sitting there as a young believer and saying right now, but I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that’s true. You look at your struggles with sin as proof of sin’s power over you, or as evidence that it’s still alive and at work in you. And you say, well, I can’t help it. I feel defeated. Listen to me. You are not defeated. You are not defeated in your sin. On the contrary, sin has been defeated. Romans six 9 to 11 says this. We know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died, he died to sin once for all. But the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. So sin has been defeated by Jesus death. It has no power because Christ has conquered it with his resurrection. And if you are in Christ, Paul says that you now must consider yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. And you’ll say to me, well, I can try to consider myself that way. But is it true? Is it true? Am I just considering myself that way? Or is it true that that’s the case? Does sin truly have no power over me? And I say to you, absolutely. Absolutely it doesn’t. Skip down to verse 14 in chapter six of Romans, Paul writes this. It’s just a little further down. Same argument. He says, sin will have no dominion over you since you are not under law, but under grace. Dominion is reign. Okay? It’s like a kingly reign. You are no longer under Satan’s reign and compelled to do his bidding. You are under new management. Okay. Have you ever been to a restaurant that is under new management? You walk in there, right? Old building. Totally different experience. They don’t serve up the same old slop out of the kitchen that they served before, right? It’s completely new inside. Old management has no authority to do anything under the new management. Why do the young people in the church need to be reminded that Satan is defeated and has no real authority over their lives if they know Jesus? It’s because newer Christians are just starting out in the process of being sanctified and they need to remember that sin has no real power in their life anymore. Of course there’s temptations. Of course there are. Before Christ you couldn’t help but sin. You could only sin. Now that you are in Christ, you can truly walk in righteousness. That is available to you.

But younger people don’t have the mileage with Jesus. And so they’re prone to think that the sins that they’re struggling with can’t be defeated. That maybe their confession of faith in Jesus didn’t take root or something. Or maybe it didn’t take or it’s not true of me somehow. And I see this a lot. I see a lot of this struggle with young people in areas, things like pornography or sinful relationships or ways of joking or and ways of treating people. And a younger believer claims Christ but sees defeat in these various areas and starts to question whether their sin is truly defeated and whether they are truly forgiven by God’s grace. Listen to me, young people. Listen to me. Satan would love nothing more than for you to walk around discouraged, thinking that you’re not good enough for God. He would want nothing more than for you to walk around down on yourself, feeling discouraged all the time because you think you’re not good enough for God. Let me be clear for you. You are not good enough for God. You’re not good enough. Good enough isn’t the gospel. Good enough isn’t the standard by which God accepts you. Good enough isn’t your status before God. I welcome the thought that I am not good enough, because I can immediately flip that thought judo style into remembering the one who is truly good, right? I can remember the one who was good enough for me, whose righteousness covers me.

Not my own righteousness. Not my own way of building myself up to try to be good enough for God. Jesus was good enough. When Satan tempts me to despair and tells me of the guilt within, upward, I look and see him there who made an end to all my sin, right? Young people, newer believers, John is reminding you that you are not captive to the power of your sins because your enemy is defeated. You’re set free. You’re set free from the power of sin and death. You serve a new master who saves you by his grace. And the more you remember this, the more victory you will see as you punch Satan in the face and walk in righteousness. This is who you are. Okay, second time through, a little faster. This time we’re in the emphasis round. I write to you, children because you know the Father. Everyone. Everybody. We know the father. If you have Jesus, you know him. Remember what John said in First John 2:1, beginning of this chapter, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. So because we know Jesus, we know God the Father as well, and Christ is our connection to him. We have fellowship with the Triune God because we trust in Jesus. Someday we will stand before him, but not as our judge. He won’t be our judge in that moment because our sins have already been set aside.

They’ve already been paid for. We will come home to God, like a father, because he’s our Heavenly Father, and you know him, and you know that he loves you in that moment. Do you remember coming home to see your dad? I know this is a difficult thought for some of you because of your relationship with your parents, and it’s strained or terrible or in some cases, non-existent. But in the same way that marriage is an imperfect picture of the relationship between Christ and His church. Our dads are imperfect pictures of the relationship that we have with God our Father. God is perfect in his love toward his children. He sacrificed himself. He prepares a place for us. We get to spend eternity in God’s family if we have Christ. And John is saying to all of us, all of his children. He’s saying, don’t forget that. Don’t forget that. I’m writing you this letter because you are all in the family of God. This is who you are. And then he goes back to the two subgroups. I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. Okay, we’re back to the older folks here. If you are younger, turn to an older person right now, give them a high five and say, this is who you are. Go ahead, do it. Come on.

High fives all around. Chaos. Mother’s day chaos. Same exact wording here. Okay. Same exact wording. Why double down without elaborating? I don’t know. Back to the young people. I write to you, young men because you are strong and the Word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one. Older people turn to a young person right now, pinch their cheek and tell them this is who you are. Go ahead, go ahead. You can even use your spit to fix their hair right now. I give you permission to do that. I know you moms are wanting to do that so bad and it seems fair in this moment. So here John does elaborate. Okay, here he does elaborate. But we’ve already talked about it. He’s writing them this letter for three reasons. But it’s all really one reason. First of all, they’re strong. They might not feel strong, but they are strong. Why? Because the Word of God is strong and they abide in the Word of God. Here, the Word of God is not referring to the Bible. It’s a stand in for Jesus who is the Word of God made flesh. So Christ abides or is spiritually connected to them in their heart and their mind. And that’s what makes them strong in their faith. And because of the strength of their tie to the abiding Christ, John says that they can be confident that they have overcome the evil one.

They don’t need to be overcome by their own. You know, they don’t need to be overcome by Satan anymore. They have overcome. Their status is with Christ. He’s connected to them. In other words, because they have Jesus, all these other things are true of them as well. This is who you are. Church, when I bring all these statements together, when I consider all six of them together as one, one concept jumps to mind, that I think is very important for us today, especially for us today. And that’s the concept of identity. Who am I? Who am I on my own? And now who am I in Christ? The social landscape we live in has left people with something of an identity crisis today. People long to know who they are. Because if they can figure it out, if they can figure out who they are, well, then they can make some sense of this world. Because if you have an identity, you can rest in it. You can rest in your identity. You can say, I found my people and my place and my values and my way of thinking. The problem with that search, and by the way, that’s a search everybody does. Everybody’s trying to figure out the world they’re in. The problem with that search, though, is that it depends on some truth. And that truth has to be external to that person that’s out there for them to discover.

It’s inadequate to ask, who am I? And then go about constructing something out of your own ideas and passions. I mean, what is that? That’s just wandering around in the dark. And deep down, every person knows that a self-made identity doesn’t answer the big questions. What is this world, really? And who am I really in it? What we need is for the God who made us to tell us who we are. And here in this passage, this is what he has said to us. You are sinners, but I have forgiven you if you have Jesus. You don’t know me, but you can know me if you have Jesus. There’s evil in this world, but you will overcome it, not in your own strength, but through the resurrecting power of Christ at work in you. Church. That’s who we are. That’s what we are. As Gerald Bray describes it in his excellent biblical theological work, God is Love. He says this: we know God because we are the sheep who have responded to our shepherd’s voice and have experienced his love at work in us. That’s who we are, church. And if that’s not who you are yet, if you’re listening to this saying, I don’t think that’s me, I’m not part of that group. The invitation for you is there. All of these things can be true of you as well. The door is unlocked. Just put your trust in Christ and come inside. Would you pray with me?

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