On a cross-country flight many years ago, I took the opportunity to talk to the businessman seated next to me about Jesus Christ. He was rather unimpressed with most of what I had to say until I told him about my father and my father’s work in New York City trying to help teenagers get out of gangs. The courage, the goodness, and selfless service of my father to those far less fortunate than himself, really did impress this particular hardened New York businessman.
That is often the way of it. Non-Christians are seldom impressed by what we, as Christians, say; it is what we do that matters to them. John has a similar perspective on the Christian life. Hear what he has to say from 1 John 3:7-10 about who is a child of God...
Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. 8 The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. 9 No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God. 10 This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister.
Who is a child of God? John offers a four-part response to this very important question. First off, John suggests that the person who does what is right is a child of God.
John begins this section of his letter by warning his audience, “Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray.” John was probably thinking about the Gnostics whom we have talked about before. They claimed to have a secret “gnosis” or knowledge about Jesus. They claimed to be spiritually superior. Yet, in that superiority, some of them also claimed that it did not matter what they did with their bodies; spirit was all that mattered to some of the Gnostics.
John’s response to this is a resounding “No!” John insists that it does matter what we do with our bodies. “The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning.”
Once again, these verses raise a question we have asked at least once before in our study of 1 John. Is John suggesting that the Christian does no wrong? It sounds that way when he says, “No one who is born of God will continue to sin.” How does this fit with what John says in 1 John 1:8? “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”
I think what John is suggesting is that, yes, Christians commit sin; however, Christians do not live in sin, they do not commit sin habitually, as a way of life, as something they are satisfied with. That is the big difference: between the person who really knows Christ and the one who does not.
Len Sullivan tells the following story….
In the late 1920s my grandparents married and moved into Grandpa’s old family home. It was a clapboard house with a hall down the middle. In the 30s they decided to tear down the old house and build another to be their home for the rest of their lives.
Much to my grandmother’s dismay, many of the materials of the old house were re-used in their new house. They used old facings and doors, and many other pieces of the finishing lumber. Everywhere my grandmother looked, she saw that old house—old doors that wouldn’t shut properly, crown molding split and riddled with nail holes, unfinished window trimming. It was a source of grief to her. All her life she longed for a new house.
When God brings us into the kingdom, the old way of living must be dismantled and discarded.[1]
Paul puts it this way in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
That does not mean we will not sin and make mistakes as Christians. We do and we will until that day when Jesus perfects us in his presence. However, a new work has begun; a new house is being built with new material, and we are that house.
Now, let us examine what it is that really makes this difference in the life of the Christian. The second major thing John tells us is that the child of God is one who has Christ working in them to destroy the devil’s work.
The word for “destroy” literally means: “to loose, untie, set free”. This word is used of untying the donkey that Jesus used to ride into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. This word is also used of unwrapping the grave clothes that bound Lazarus before Jesus raised him from the dead. This word refers to breaking something down into its component parts or tearing down an old building and so destroying it. What John is telling us is that Jesus came to tear down the old, sinful life that the devil is constantly tempting us to live. Jesus came to set us free.
This raises a question for some people: why does God allow the devil to wreak such havoc in our lives anyway? I think the answer to this question is the same as the answer to the question: why did God allow humans to choose evil? The answer is the same, whether we are talking about human beings or angels. C. S. Lewis put the answer this way:
God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.[2]
So, free will is what has made the devil possible, and it is what has made our own evil choices possible. The good news is that God has given us a power that can counteract the evil force of the devil. That power is the Holy Spirit living in us.
John tells us that Jesus came to this world to destroy, to set us free from, the work of the devil. Jesus did that by living for us, by dying on the cross, by rising again, ascending into heaven, and sending us the gift of the Holy Spirit. Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit is like a sword that God gives us to fight against the devil (Ephesians 6:17). However you look at it, whatever words you use to describe it, the truth is that every child of God has the power of Christ’s Spirit working inside of them to destroy the power of the devil.
A third thing John tells us here is that the child of God has God’s seed in them. What is God’s seed exactly? What is it that causes us to be “born of God”?
At least twice in the New Testament, we are told that the word of God brings about the new birth. James 1:18 says that God “chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of first-fruits of all he created,” and 1 Peter 1:23 says, “For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.” Furthermore, Paul tells us in Ephesians 6:17 that the sword of the Spirit is the word of God. Therefore, I believe we can conclude that it is the Holy Spirit, using the word of God, who brings new life to our souls. The child of God is the one in whom the Holy Spirit is doing this work through the word of God.
Does transformation through the Spirit and the word happen all at once? No, it is a gradual process. I like what Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 says about this:
Your nature is a hard thing to change; it takes time…. I have heard of people who have life-changing, miraculous turnarounds, people set free from addiction after a single prayer, relationships saved where both parties “let go, and let God.” But it was not like that for me. For all that “I was lost, I am found,” it is probably more accurate to say, “I was really lost. I’m a little less so at the moment.” And then a little less and a little less again. That to me is the spiritual life. The slow reworking and rebooting the computer at regular intervals, reading the small print of the service manual. It has slowly rebuilt me in a better image. It has taken years, though, and it is not over yet.[3]
I love that—reworking and rebooting the computer at regular intervals! That is the work of the Holy Spirit. Every day we can choose to let the Holy Spirit have his way with us, to rework and reboot us, and one major way we allow him to work on our souls is by “reading the small print of the service manual”—which we find in the Scriptures.
A final thing John tells us here about the child of God is something he is going to say a lot more about in the remainder of his letter, but he gives us a little preview here. John tells us that the true child of God is one who loves his brothers and sisters.
This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister.
A Sunday school teacher was discussing the Ten Commandments with her class of five and six-year-olds. After explaining the commandment to honor thy father and thy mother, she asked, “Is there a commandment that teaches us how to treat our brothers and sisters?”
Without missing a beat, one little boy answered, “Thou shall not kill.”[4]
It is true that we sometimes have great difficulty truly loving those closest to us—our brothers and sisters. However, loving our brothers and sisters involves more than just “not murdering them”. We need to do positive good unto them as well.
David Jackman writes,
The righteousness that demonstrates our membership in God’s family is not cold and clinical. It is inseparable from love. The God who is light is also love. Love is righteousness in relationship with others—not primarily an emotion, but an act of will. It is not feeling warm toward people in a general way, but doing good to specific individuals. Love as a feeling only is useless. No marriage can survive on feelings. Love has to be expressed in caring and sharing, in hard work and loyalty, in generosity and long-suffering. That’s the love without which we have no right to claim to be God’s children. Of course it is superhuman. It does not grow naturally in this world’s soil. It is the gift of God. But where it exists, there is positive proof of the life of God in the soul of man, and so of authentic membership in God’s family.
Who are the brothers and sisters whom we are to love? Certainly, our fellow Christians are our brothers and sisters. However, in a larger way, our fellow human beings are our brothers and sisters as well. We need to always remember Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan. We should not ask, “Who is my neighbor?” but rather “How can I be a good neighbor to everyone I meet?”
Of course, loving another human being, whether it is our brother or sister in Christ, or if it is simply someone we meet along the road, loving another is the greatest thing we can do in life.
Not long before his death, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the congregation at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. On that day he said:
If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. Every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize; that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards; that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school. I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody.[5]
Simply loving another human being is the greatest thing any one of us can ever do.
[1] Len Sullivan, Tupelo, Mississippi, preachingtoday.com
[2] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, New York: Macmillan, 1984, p. 52.
[3] U2 (with Neil McCormick), U2 by U2 (HarperCollins, 2006), p. 7
[4] Bill White, Paramount, California, submitted to preachingtoday.com
[5] William Willimon, Pastor: The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry, (Abingdon Press, 2002), p. 53; submitted to preachingtoday.com by David Slagle, Wilmore, Kentucky
Comments