Series: On Being a Christian
#2: Obedience - Walking the Talk
What does it mean to be a Christian? In this first letter John is attempting to clear the air to this question because false teachers had come onto the scene playing mind games and messing with the early believers.
We discovered last week that there are 3 essentials that form the foundation of the gospel and Christian experience: obedience, love and belief. Like a 3 legged-stool each one of these is necessary and of equal importance. You can’t have one without the others!
If you were endeavoring to answer this question where would you begin? Most of us would begin with either love or belief. Love is the motivator while belief is the intellectual assent to truth. John however begins with obedience.
As we indicated last week, Christianity at its core is a relationship with Jesus resulting in our taking on God’s character. This relationship rests of the legs of obedience, love and belief. The purpose of the legs is to hold up the seat. The purpose of obedience, love and belief is to hold up the relationship. You can rest on the 3-legged stool and you can rest on the relationship with Jesus. You put your full weight on the 3 legs of obedience, love and belief.
Words help to describe concepts and both concepts and words can be problematic. Such is the case with the word and concept of obedience. Given our fallen, human nature obedience is easily translated into performance. Obedience is a result of requirement and expectation. The image of God as King reinforces this concept. As God’s servants when He commands something we dutifully obey and if we don’t we will be severely punished. Many have this image of God as King as their only image of God. Keep in mind that the Bible also includes the image of God as father, husband, shepherd, physician, priest, creator, Savior, sustainer, and a myriad of other images.
So John is saying that to be a Christian is defined by your relationship to God as revealed in your conformity to God’s character. The Bible is clear in that God wants to live His life in and through each one of us. We are called to be like Jesus and the longer we are Christians the more we should be like Jesus, or else something is critically wrong somewhere. In the obedience leg we have the dilemma of the “have-to” and the “want-to” tension in Christian experience. I liken the tension with the tension between law and grace. Law is have-to. Grace is want-to. Unfortunately in our culture and language the word law carries with it the idea that law limits my freedom, law is negative, law shuts me in and constricts me. In the Bible God’s law is found in the context of the covenant, a relationship in which He gives himself to us and invites us to give ourselves to Him. The Bible describes this relationship as “a walk.” God says to us, “Come, walk with me. Share my goals, my direction, my fellowship, my walk.” And so John begins and asks, “Are you a Christian?” “Oh, yes” you answer. John says, “Then let me see your walk.”
There is a story about Alexander the Great. A young soldier was brought before this great general with the charge of desertion. The young teenage soldier was clearly terrified. Alexander asked him, “Has this ever happened before?” “NNNNNNo sir,” he replied. “Is it ever going to happen again?” “NNNNNNNo, sir,” the young soldier stammered. “All right. I will let you go this time.” As the terrified young soldier turned to go in abject relief, Alexander the Great said, “Wait! What’s our name?” A look of horror crossed the soldier’s face and he stammered as his lips stumbled out his name. His name was Alexander. In a flash that great general was out of his chair. He grabbed the young soldier by his tunic, pulled his face closed to his and through clenched teeth said, “Young man, you either change your name or change your ways.”
Perhaps God needs to do some of that to some of us who claim Jesus’ name. Either straighten up or don’t call yourself a Christian! Somehow we have gotten this idea that we can be Christians and live however we want to, do whatever we want to, and say whatever we want to and God is okay with that. I want to let you all in on a bit of truth—God is not okay with that. Quit your sinning or change your name.
This is what John is talking about. Are you are Christian? “Oh, yes.” Then why are you living ‘like hell?’ Why are you not living like Jesus? John says, “God is light and anything contrary to His character is darkness. How can we have fellowship with the light and live in darkness?” God’s holy character, his moral nature, is one of light. Lies are darkness. Adultery is darkness. Theft is darkness. Self-serving is darkness. Pride is darkness. Jealousy is darkness. Deceit is darkness. Gossip is darkness. They are sin and they result in broken relationships and fractured fellowship with God and one another. God calls us to live lives in the light, not in darkness. We call this obedience.
We are not talking about commands here when a tyrant makes certain demands because he can do it. We are talking here about God inviting us to share His character, to let the light of God shine through us in our behavior so that we bring light into every circumstance in which we find ourselves.
God is not only light, He is life. Our relationship with God does not destroy but is productive and prosperous. No relationship can survive if one partner is constantly offending the other, constantly doing what hurts the other, embarrasses the other, or contradicts the other. In 1 John 1:8-10 John is says, “If we claim to be without sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not is us. If we confess ours sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has not place in our lives.”
So if we don’t do as He asks it is evidence that we do not know Him and don’t have a relationship with Him and in fact are living a lie. But because God is light and God is life, to be a Christian is to do what He does, to shine as He shines, and to live as He lives.
Sin does not bring life. Sin brings death. Sin does not build up. Sin destroys. When John says here that Jesus came to take away sin, he is not just talking about the condemnation of sin, but also the practice of sinning. No one born of God’s Spirit makes a practice of sinning. Do we sin? Yes. Our weaknesses, our infirmities, our imperfections, our limitations all are harbingers of sin, but and let me say it again, Jesus came to break the power of sin over our lives. Most of us give in way too easy to the power of sin and Satan in our lives. “I’m only human,” we say and that statement is a cop-out fueled by pride, a desire for pleasure and a doing only what is easy. There is a difference between the practice of sinning and occasional sinning.
This is what John is talking about here as it relates to obedience. There are 3 lies about sin. The first is that we say to one another, “I have fellowship with God while I am walking in darkness (or living in sin).” The first lie is that I can live in sin and everything is all right. Listen to John’s answer to this lie, “You lie and do not practice the truth.” (1:6) You simply cannot knowingly live in sin and at the same time have a relationship with God. Yet how many of us do that in the same way that we have lovers on the side all the while being in a “loving” relationship with our wives and our husbands. Not! Sin is sin and the only way to get rid of sin is to confess it, repent of it, and allow the blood of Jesus purify us and restore that fellowship we have with Him and one another.
The second lie about sin is thinking that since I have fellowship with God “I have no sin” because it is ‘covered by the blood of Jesus.’ John says that we are lying to ourselves when we say that. Sin is sin and it cannot be glossed over.
Sometimes we excuse our behavior, the 3rd lie, and say, “Well, it is not really sin.” John’s answer, “You make God a liar.” It is God who defines sin, not us. Our arrogance and pomposity as humans never ceases to amaze me. Honesty and truth telling is vitally important to being a Christian and to this leg of obedience.
The most important question of all is this: how can I live a life of consistent obedience? The first thing John is saying is the importance of your attitude. Don’t expect to sin, rather expect not to sin. You may think that is impossible given your own tangle of motivations and emotions. If we are capable of pleasing people and doing what others expect, why is it that we think that we cannot please God? Now this is where the Holy Spirit comes in. Through His power we are able to please God, to make Him happy with what we do. John is saying that ought to be our expectation every day. We are not talking about perfection here, not performing up to some absolute standard. But we are talking about a desire to have an attitude that endeavors to live lives pleasing to God.
Second, keep in mind that John is not saying that Christians cannot sin. Note what he says, “Those who abide in Him do not sin.” For Christians sinning is abnormal and not sinning is normal. In 1 John 2:2, he says that when we sin as Christians the answer is immediate confession and God will cleanse us from that sin. John is telling us that we do not need to depend on perfect performance to keep our relationship with Jesus intact. We depend of Jesus Himself, who is our advocate, to make things right.
Obedience is the result of the living Christ living in us—the abiding presence of Christ. “No one born of God will continue to sin because God’s seed abides in him; he cannot go on sinning because he has been born of God. This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are….” (1 John 3:9)
In the new birth experience when we invite Jesus to take up residence in our lives, something happens in the deep recesses of our being that transforms us and we no longer live for ourselves, but we live in and for Jesus. John is saying to us here that if you are a child of God, you will look like Him, act like Him, talk like Him and do the things that please Him.
If you claim the name of Jesus, are your walking your talk? John reminds us (2:14), “The Word of God lives in you and you have overcome the evil one.”