Abide

Since God has anointed us with his Holy Spirit, we must remain obedient to the instruction of the Holy Spirit, as he leads us with the unchanging gospel, so that we’re not deceived by error.

Earlier this year, a leader in a progressive, theologically liberal so-called church denomination was speaking at an event for their group. And she made headlines because in her speech, she paused and said, this is a very dangerous thing I’m about to say now, which is helpful, because what she was about to say is near the top of the list of the most heretical things that can be said. It was dangerous. It’s nice when heretics give heresy a trigger warning, right? So it’s nice when the wolf doesn’t even attempt to put on the sheep costume. She lists off some things that she doesn’t like in the Bible and then says, “first, I’m of the opinion that we need a third Testament because the Bible has become problematic”. Yeah, that was her announcement. And then after that, after saying some things that are in the Bible that she doesn’t like, she says, “and people will say, well, it’s in the book. And I said, then we need to pull that page out”. Yeah. She then goes on to state plainly that the Bible is words about God, not the Word of God. She says, “no, it is not the Word of God”. Now, to clarify what she’s saying, there is that the Bible is not God’s word in essence, because, in the sense that it is breathed out by God as is described in second Timothy chapter three.
She’s saying that what the Bible is, is just dated words full of errors, in need of an update to suit the palate of the world today, which is why she’s calling for a third Testament, which I’m sure she would be happy to write. Now, I am firmly convinced that here this morning that the vast majority of us here at Calvary can hear how utterly ridiculous that all sounds. You probably aren’t here this morning at Calvary if you thought that sounded like a good idea. I mean to use her logic, if you wrote a Third Testament, wouldn’t that also just be words about God that would have no authority on what came before it, the first two Testaments, right? Just using her logic. I’m repulsed by false anti-gospel teaching coming from so-called leaders in the church. But this one rises almost to the level of parody in my mind. I laughed out loud when I heard this. Wouldn’t that be strange if I said, you know, those blank pages that always come in the back of your Bible? What if I had you turn there right now and just say, hey, everybody, we’re going to write another Bible this morning. The third Testament to add on. Right. You’d rightly leave. Even her own audience did not clap when she said this. They just stood there in stunned silence. These were her people. And they hadn’t even heard something like this before. That’s what happens when leaders start down the road of twisting the Bible and introducing errors into it.
People will follow for a time, but what happens is the cognitive dissonance that they feel in their hearts eventually becomes overwhelming. And so they either return to truth or they leave the church altogether, which is why the progressive churches are dying today. Let me say, if you do feel drawn to that sort of thinking, maybe not quite as shocking as that, but you are somewhat drawn to that sort of thinking. I’d be happy to talk with you about it. I would like to speak with you because there are really good answers to these sorts of thoughts. But since you’re here at Calvary this morning, I’m going to guess that you’re not tempted to write your own Bible. I bring it up, though, because of what I found to be the most intriguing part of the speech. Right in the middle, right before she says that the Bible isn’t God’s word, she says this. She says, quote, now I’m a believer. My whole heart. I trust God with my whole heart. I wake up in the morning talking to God and God talking to me. This is the one time in the whole speech that she tries to put on the sheep costume. See, look, I’m one of you. I’m with you guys. It’s far too late for that, of course. If you’re going to rob a bank, you got to put the mask on before you enter the bank, not after you’re already in the vault.
Right. We’ve already seen you. But she tries, and I want you to hear her argument, because there’s a very subtle deception within it that our passage today corrects. And while I don’t think that you’ll be writing your own Bible, this argument could be a bit persuasive. She says she wakes up talking to God and then God speaks back to her. What does she mean by that? Well, the truth is, I don’t know exactly what she means by it. But I do know what she doesn’t mean. She doesn’t mean that she hears God from the Bible. Because, as you’ve already heard, she doesn’t think that the Bible is God’s word. So what she’s saying is that fresh revelation from God, who speaks to her directly, comes each day. Now, most people who say things like this are just assigning their own thoughts and feelings to God, and then saying that God said them to themselves, so they’re basically preaching their own thoughts back to themselves. I don’t know if that’s what this woman is doing, but whatever she means, she thinks it gives her a license to create her own religion under the label of Christianity. That is what false teaching is. That’s why I bring it up with you this morning, because that is the definition of false teaching. False teaching is created when a person claims to have a new source of revelation from God that gives information that is contrary to the Bible.
As we saw last week, John is now warning the church directly about a coming wave of false teaching that has the potential of misleading the church away from the truth of the gospel that they already know. They are coming with a false message that will contradict what was taught to them by the apostles and confirmed to them by the Holy Spirit. And this is not just a first-century problem. This is an every century problem. This is an every year problem. This is an every moment problem. That speech that I just told you about that happened in April. False teaching can be found throughout our world and would be happy to make inroads into our gospel-centered, Bible-believing churches. So we need to know how to face it. What do we do? And that’s what John is going to begin telling us this morning. Since God has anointed us with His Holy Spirit, we must remain obedient to the instruction of the Holy Spirit as he leads us with the unchanging gospel, so that we are not deceived by error. We’re in First John chapter two, verses 26 and 27 this morning. Just two verses. We’re going to start with the goal of the false teachers. And we’ll then we’ll look at the way to prepare ourselves to identify and resist false teaching, which John describes in two parts.
The Holy Spirit abiding in us and us abiding in the Holy Spirit. So let’s start with the goal of the false teachers. I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you. Now, this is a standard transitional sentence that anybody might use to take a topic in a new direction. I’ve written these things to you for this reason, now let’s go here. That’s basically what he’s doing here. But there’s something in this little sentence that I find fascinating. He says he’s writing because these people who are coming are trying to deceive you. Is that what they’re doing? Is that what these people are trying to do? The phrase those who are trying to deceive is all one word in Greek. It’s a participle. You take a verb and you turn it into a noun, right? So it’s a verbal noun is what it is. And the verb is to lead or to deceive. So this is a correct translation, what you have here. And most of the translations do something like this. Those who would deceive, those who would lead astray. What I find interesting is that this can only be said from John’s perspective, or from the perspective of a person who’s faithful to Jesus. That the people who go out from the church do not believe that they are coming to deceive. They believe that they’re coming to help. Do you guys like card tricks? I’m going to show you a card trick here this morning.
Actually, no I’m not. Wouldn’t that be fun? Like, everybody lean in, I’m going to show you…pick a card. Right? That wouldn’t work very well, I suppose. But I do enjoy learning card tricks. I’m not really very good at them, so don’t ask for one later. But part of the fun of card tricks is that the illusionist is trying to trick the audience. He’s trying to do that. He wants to trick them. He wants the audience to think that a card magically appeared or that these cards magically ordered themselves or that he accurately predicted your card. But here’s the thing. He knows that’s not the case. He knows it’s not the case. He wants the audience to think something that he knows is not the reality. False teachers are not trying to deceive in that same way. They’re not trying to lead somebody into a reality that they know to be false. Now some do, okay? Some do. There are people in the world of Christianity who prey on weak people for their own benefit. Frauds do exist in ministry. I think they’re usually pretty easy to spot. Far more dangerous, though, in my opinion, are the false teachers that John is warning us against, who in a sense believe the trick. They believe it. They’ve bought into the lie. They have a worldview that has taken parts of Christianity but gone in a new direction with them.
You’ll remember last week, John gave us some insight into the false theology that he was dealing with there in the first century. He said, who is the liar, but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? So these false teachers are coming and they have bought the lie. They believe the trick, and they are now bringing you the lie that Jesus is not the Messiah that we’ve been waiting for. That he’s not the Savior. He’s something else. They are deceivers, as John says here, that is accurate. But the reason they are deceivers is that because they are themselves deceived. They’ve put their own confidence in a worldview that contains lies, and they’d be glad if you adopted that worldview, too, because the more people who believe it, the more confident they can feel in it. There’s a book I love to give graduates. This graduate season here now, and I love to give graduates a book that was, if you’re heading off to college, it was written by a guy named Michael Krueger, one of my favorite New Testament scholars, and it’s a book called Surviving Religion 101. And the book is about how to make it through religion classes that are taught at secular universities, where Bible scholars try to undermine the Bible. That’s their whole goal, is to undermine what the Bible has to say. And he’s basically writing to say, how does faith survive and flourish in an environment like that? One chapter is entitled, my professors are really smart, isn’t it more likely that they’re right and I’m wrong? This is a good question, actually. In that chapter, he does a great job of describing how these professors can have so much knowledge about the Bible, but also come to the conclusion that it can’t be trusted. And he argues in that chapter, I think very effectively, that it’s not about facts. It’s not that the professors need more information, that they’ve missed something, that there’s just more facts that need to be shared with them. He says it’s not about the facts. It’s about the preconceived worldview that you bring to the Bible when you read it. And what that worldview allows you to accept as a fact. For example, if your preconceived notion is that there is no God, you will read the Bible as a skeptic. You will just dismiss all those parts that talk about God. If you believe that there could be no miracles, then you’ll dismiss anything miraculous. Even if it comes from eyewitness accounts, you’ll dismiss it as fiction. Or as in our earlier example, if you decide that the Bible is just words about God and not God’s word, then you’ll treat all truth about God as something man made, including your own ability to make God into whatever you like. And that’s what these professors have done, Kruger explains. They pick and choose the facts that they accept based on their own pre-decided worldview.
So in in their case, no appeal to the message of the Bible is going to change their minds. But here’s the thing, church. According to Scripture, we are all born with a sinful nature. As Kruger puts it, we are all hardwired to reject Christianity. That’s our natural human state. We are born as rejecters without any intervention from God we are all like those professors. We are simply sorting facts into categories based on our preferences. We would be like these false teachers that John describes, who pick and choose what we want to believe about God, twist the gospel into something that we prefer and then hand that onto other people. So what makes the difference between a person who believes the truth that God has revealed about himself, and a person who is deceived and then becomes a deceiver? Well, John says the difference is the mutual abiding that we have with the Holy Spirit, where the spirit abides in us and we abide in him. But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. Now, if you want to know why I felt that an entire sermon should be dedicated to two verses in this letter, this sentence is the reason. Okay? This is the reason here. We have arrived at the anointing. What is the anointing? Is John opening up some new mysterious concept within Christian experience that stops us from even needing teachers in our lives? And if he is, I’m not sure why you’re listening to me right now.
What’s the point? In fact, I’d go further than that. I’m not sure why you’d listen to John, who’s teaching you about the anointing. What is he talking about? Well, some branches of the church have run wild with this word. They’ve gone crazy with this word anointing. Some think that it refers to a second filling of the Holy Spirit. Some think it refers to special gifts so that we can say that’s anointed preaching, that’s anointed prophecy, that’s anointed prayer. They’ve created a kind of two-tier Christianity where some Christians have the anointing from God, and others don’t have the anointing from God. One online guru that I read this week gives instructions on how you can increase your anointing, which is a concept so foreign to scripture I’m not sure how anybody would fall for it. There’s nothing about that in there. So what is John talking about here? What does he mean? Well, if you were hoping for something mystical this morning, you will be sorely disappointed. What John is saying, though, is very vital to our spiritual growth. This word anointing is used as a noun only three times in the entire Bible. Two of them are in this verse. Okay. And the other? The other is in verse 20. Just a paragraph before this. So all of the uses of anointing are within this tight little passage of scripture.
I know it looks like a verb. If you go up to verse 20 and you look at verse 20, it looks like a verb there, but it literally reads, you have an anointing from the Holy One. Now in verse 20, the anointing from God separates the true church from the false teachers, right? That’s what it’s doing there. It’s a reference to those who have received the Holy Spirit and are now therefore in Christ, as opposed to those who are anti-Christ, who are against Christ. The anointing is short for the anointing of the Holy Spirit, which is what a person receives at the beginning of their walk with Jesus. Second Corinthians chapter one clarifies this for us quite a bit. Let me read this for you. This is verses 21 and 22. And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us, and who has also put his seal on us and given us His Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee. So the anointing of God is being saved and filled and sealed with the Holy Spirit. It’s not a special second thing that happens to you, okay? Anointing comes at the moment of conversion. So when when John tells his readers that the anointing that they received from the Holy One abides in them, he’s saying the Holy Spirit remains with them, and he will not leave. He will not leave you.
That’s what the word abide means, by the way. If some if something abides, it remains connected. It does not leave. No matter what comes, it remains with you. That’s abiding. And the same is true of us. If you put your trust in Jesus, church, if you put your trust in Jesus, if you have been transformed in your heart by the gospel of Christ, then the Holy Spirit indwells you. And he’s not going anywhere. He’s not going to leave or forsake you. There will never be a moment when the Holy Spirit leaves you. This is the most foundational thing about you. If it is true, you are a new creation in Christ. You have been anointed by God’s Holy Spirit, who will remain with you always. And that means, according to John here, that means that you have no need for anyone to teach you. Now, before I preach myself right out of a job this morning, let me explain this. Okay. As I mentioned earlier, John is teaching them these very words, right? This whole letter is instruction to the church. So he’s not saying to Christians, no one can teach you anything if you have the Holy Spirit. That’s not what he means. The Bible is filled with passages that tell us to find good teachers and to be good teachers of the gospel. That’s what I strive to be for you. Here’s what he’s saying. He’s saying church, here comes a whole wave of false theology. It’s on its way towards you. Guys are about to show up at your door with new insight, new insight that says that Jesus isn’t the Messiah, and that you can walk in sin and still be in the light and things like that. They’re going to claim authority that they don’t have. They’re going to they’re going to have a new way of relating to God that you haven’t heard about yet. And they’re going to try to teach you this as if you don’t have enough information. That’s the teaching that you don’t need. You don’t need that teaching, church, because we already have the gospel in full. We have the whole thing. Now we need to plumb the depths of this gospel that we have received. There’s more to learn about it, but we don’t need to be taught another gospel. And the beauty of being saved and filled with the Holy Spirit is that he will give us discernment to know when we are hearing gospel truth and when we are being peddled a third Testament. As John says in chapter four of this very letter describing the same truth here, he says this, little children, you are from God and have overcome them. For he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. Right? God is at work in you. He has given you the gospel. He has filled you with the spirit.
He is greater than all of those false gospels that are going to be coming at you. So first of all, how do I know I can confidently stand up to all the deception that the world wants to offer me? The first thing I need to remember that I’m in Christ. I got to remember who I am. There is no additional, hidden, mysterious truth about God out there that I need other people to come and to teach me about. I have everything that I need in the gospel that I already know. And the Holy Spirit will help me to discern the difference as I listen. That’s the first abiding. Okay. That’s the first. Here’s the second. But as his anointing teaches you about everything and is true and is no lie, just as it taught you, abide in him. One of the earlier readings we had today in our service was from Jeremiah 31, where the prophet tells God’s new covenant that’s coming. God will have a new way of relating to his people once Jesus comes and fulfills his ministry and saves us by dying on the cross for us. Instead of knowledge of God being passed from person to person, and then relating to God only through a system of priests and sacrifices, God is going to fill each of his people and write his law directly onto their hearts. That’s what Jeremiah explains, and it’s an allusion to the coming of the Holy Spirit.
See, in the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit did fill people, but only on occasion. Certain people, certain leaders for certain moments, certain times. But under the New Covenant, he’s going to be with all of his people all of the time. As the Lord puts it in Jeremiah 31:34, no longer shall each one teach his neighbor, and each his brother, saying, know the Lord, for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. That is the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and that anointing is true, John says. It’s not a lie that took place. It is the reality of God’s relationship with us. And so if you trust in Jesus, your primary teacher is not me. And it’s not the books you read and it’s not the videos you watch. Your primary teacher is the Holy Spirit actively at work within you. Now, does the Holy Spirit give us new, fresh information about God when he teaches? Does he talk to us every morning apart from God’s Word? I want you to listen to Jesus explain what the Holy Spirit will teach. Okay, we have great scripture on this question, and this is Jesus telling us what the Holy Spirit is going to do. He says, this is John chapter 14, verses 25 and 26. Jesus is speaking.
He says, these things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. So Jesus says this to his apostles. Then the apostles wrote our New Testament, which contains both the teachings of Jesus and the application of Jesus teachings to the church. So when John says that our anointing, the Holy Spirit teaches us about everything, he means what Jesus meant. That the Holy Spirit is going to point us to all the truth that comes from God’s Word. God’s unchanging word can be fully trusted and the Holy Spirit will teach it to you. He will illuminate what it says. When you’re reading your Bible, you’re going to see the scriptures through the lens of one who’s been transformed by Christ. You’ll be hearing your shepherd speak to you, and the Holy Spirit will help you discern other sources in the world, whether or not they should be trusted because it matches up with, or does not match up with, what God has said. In other words, the Holy Spirit will help to shape your biblical worldview. Have you ever been listening to a sermon or some teaching? Who someone is teaching and they claim to be teaching from the Bible, but you get the sense that what you’re hearing isn’t actually in there? Hopefully you’re not getting that sense right now.
Right? But you experience that before where you get that sense. That’s your teacher, the Holy Spirit, actively guiding you. You shouldn’t ignore that. It should drive you deeper into the Bible. Now, it might be that you get into the Bible and you find out that that is what it says, and you need to change your mind about it. That’s also the Holy Spirit at work in you. Either way, you should not ignore that sense, right? But you can ignore it. And that’s what John is writing here. You can ignore it. You can become spiritually lazy and undisciplined. And if you do that, you’re going to wander off into all sorts of nonsense. And this is why John explains that while the Holy Spirit remains in us, we must also abide in him. We should, as Paul puts it, walk in step with the spirit. There should be a very close partnership with the Holy Spirit within each of us, so that the Word of God shapes and directs us. Now, we don’t struggle today with claims that Jesus is not the Christ. It’s not a typical Midwestern evangelical Christian threat to be vulnerable to the lie that Jesus doesn’t fill the office of the Jewish Messiah. Okay. That’s not a big thing for us. But that would have been a very big deal back in the first century when Jesus identity was still being learned. You have to understand this lie that’s coming at them.
They are vulnerable to this lie. It would have been a very new development for Jewish people to have made the connection between the Messiah that they had been waiting for and the man, Jesus Christ. Right. And so these false teachers were bringing deception that could potentially have a big impact on this particular body of believers. We’re not so vulnerable to that lie. But what lies are we vulnerable to? See, that’s what we have to ask. What lies could be heading our way that are so tempting that it would prompt the Apostle John to write us a letter, to remind us to abide in our Holy Spirit anointing, and to listen carefully to us as he teaches us God’s Word. I suppose the answer to that question would be slightly different for all of us, given that we are all different people, we have different vulnerabilities. We’re uniquely vulnerable to a different set of lies, different ideas that are out there. But I can suggest a few that might be coming our way. And let’s stay highly theological here at first. How about the lie that Christ is a way to God, but he is not the way to God? This has been quite a popular way of seeing things in the last 20 years, especially as globalization has impacted our world and brought a lot of different ideas from all over the world together. Or how about the doctrine of eternal judgment that’s been softened within the Christian church? It really has been.
I dealt a lot with that one about 15 years ago, when Rob Bell started writing all of his materials and had a lot of Christians searching for the truth, or turning to cultural influences. How about the way that society’s view of sex before marriage or cohabitation and divorce have impacted how Christians engage in relationships? Or how about the way we are being encouraged to elevate our political views above the gospel so that we openly champion those parts where our politics match the gospel, but we refuse to be critical of our own team when they don’t. And that’s both sides of the aisle, by the way. There are so many lies. There are so many lies. It would be highly naive of us to think that we’re not vulnerable to deception just because we don’t feel vulnerable to the kind of deception that we see in First John. But the mutual abiding that we have in the Holy Spirit, this this mutual spirit in me and me in the spirit, this mutual abiding who points us to God’s unchanging word, should see us all the way through those lies. That’s what we’ve been told. It’ll see us through the lies. I want to leave you with an image that comes to my mind when I think about the mutual abiding that we should have with the Holy Spirit. This spirit in me and me in the spirit.
When I think about that, I like to think of pickles. If James can bring a chainsaw on stage, I can show you pickles. Okay. I like to think of pickles. Right. You have the brine and you have the cucumber. Nothing salty or tasty about a raw cucumber. I don’t know why you people are eating them. Doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Disgusting. But when you put it into the brine. Right. Eventually it becomes fully saturated. The brine is in the cucumber because the cucumber is in the brine. The brine infuses itself into every part, so much so that you cannot eat any part of it that doesn’t taste like the brine. Now one does not become the other. They are still different, but they’re so interlaced, they’re so thoroughly infused together that they can no longer be separated. That’s mutual abiding. Church, I want you to be pickled in the Holy Spirit. I do, I do. We need to be soaked in. We need to be soaked in the gospel of God’s Word by our teacher, the Holy Spirit. We need to be saturated with his leading. We need to be attuned to his guidance at every step, because as he abides in us, which is a promise from God, and as we abide in him, which is a command from God, we will be able to handle any lie, any deception that comes our way. Would you pray with me?

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