1 John: Jesus, Our Advocate

Our passage this week, we are working our way through the book of 1 John.

Our passage this week is a little bit of a repeat from last week.

Actually, the whole entire passage we read last week, but we're gonna work our way through a little bit of verses we talked about last week to get to verses 1 and 2 of chapter 2.

So some of it will feel like a little bit of a review, but hang with me because we're trying to get to verses 1 and 2 of chapter 2.

Now, here's what I read this week about this passage that Christie just read in 1 John verses 1, 8, to the end of chapter, chapter 2 through verse 2.

Here's what I read this week about that passage.

Said this Sin is a crippling disease.

Sin is a crippling disease under a veneer.

Now, maybe you're here, just showed up at church, finally got yourself back to church, you mustered up together.

You're like, great, great, this guy, like week one back, he's gonna beat me up on sin.

All right, well, hang with me.

Uh I don't think that's gonna be the case.

Perhaps you'll feel that way, I don't know.

Uh, but I don't think that'll be the case.

Hang with me.

So first let's remind ourselves what a veneer is.

So I grabbed some pictures for us to uh look at.

So here's the first one.

Uh this is let's talk about veneer, right?

This old dresser, and the dresser was built out of cheap wood, and then what do we do?

We put a thin veneer of more expensive wood on top of it.

So this is a great picture because you can see that the veneer has worn off.

All right, picture of this guy didn't think he was gonna be in a sermon, but he is.

Especially his backside.

He didn't expect that.

And so they built this wall, probably there's two by four and plywood, then you got some uh you know, cement in there to hold on stone veneer, right?

So it's not a stone wall, right?

It's the stone veneer wall, is what it is.

Uh here's our last picture here.

All right, so you know what those veneers are, and we thank him for getting those veneers.

So here's what's clear.

Here's what's clear.

Some of you have veneers uh as well.

I had my teeth whitened, by the way, so I'm in I'm not in judgment.

I'm not in judgment, okay?

All right, we're all trying to improve ourselves along the way, is what we're trying to do.

And a veneer is that improvement.

A veneer is covers that which is less appealing.

That's what the wood veneer was, that's what the stone veneer was, it's what the porcelain teeth veneer thing is.

It's just covering that which is less appealing.

We're not saying sin makes you unworthy.

That's what you can easily hear.

So I need to go out of the way to say that.

It doesn't mean you're unworthy.

We were beautiful before we were broken in Genesis 1.

That's still true.

Yet under that ideal self, under the ideal self that we would like for ourselves to be, and certainly the ideal self that God has called us to be, we are not all put together.

We are self-bent in nature.

Now let's look at these verses.

1 John 1, 8 through 10.

I'll reread the verses Christy read for us.

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

So here's point number one.

This is straight from verse 8.

Sin is comprehensive in all people.

Sin is comprehensive in all people.

So it's possible you don't feel like a moral failure.

That's very possible.

It's possible to feel that way.

It's possible to feel like you've done more good than bad, and then you know, work your way from there to feel like you're just not a moral failure.

That's very possible.

But it's also possible, and here's John's point, it's also possible that you lack the self-awareness to be aware of the sin inside of you.

Now, the hard thing there would be is you don't even have the awareness of it, right?

And so we just pray in the grace of God that you would see that you have sin inside of you.

There's a crippling disease.

This is what John is saying.

It's for you and I to be very careful not to be deceived.

And that's his word.

Don't be deceived that you don't have this going on in your heart and in your mind and in your actions comprehensively.

Now, others of us, we can feel this sin reality, this sin doctrine to the point of crushing us because you were raised with the guilt trip by your parents, or you got the guilt trip by your church, and it was more sin than it was grace, and you know how to all that fit together, and you just constantly sort of feel under it and unworthy.

And then modern culture comes in, it tends to side on the side of your good person.

Like you don't have original sin inside of you, and so the effect of that is you need to just pull your bootstraps up a little bit and let your good be better than bad, which is an incredibly exhausting path for life.

And John's just saying the whole time, just be careful and all that.

Be really, really careful because we all love to hide from ourselves.

We want to hide from ourselves.

We want to just live in the veneer.

I can remember being at a finance class at UGA.

It was a huge class, it was like 200 people, big auditorium.

First day of class, I was sitting up toward the top of this big auditorium.

They pass out the syllabus.

You remember when they pass out the syllabus and pass it out, and everybody starts talking to each other because this is your life for the semester.

And you only have one main question when you're in college.

Is the final comprehensive?

That's what you're looking for first.

Is it comprehensive?

Is it comprehensive?

Is it comprehensive?

This is the question.

Is the final comprehensive?

Well, this syllabus goes out.

There are only four things on the syllabus.

Every test rolls into the next test, and every test is comprehensive.

And all of us are just going bonkers.

We can't believe it.

Can you believe this in a class, right?

Like that I would we would have to know this material.

Like it's unheard of.

Right?

And there's this feeling like I'm gonna have to know everything from the entire class.

Comprehensive.

We realize the nightmare of comprehensive.

And it means fullness, fullness, the full class, comprehensive.

So this is the bad news, which is also the good news.

It's interesting how this works.

The bad news is this sin is comprehensive inside of us.

It fully affects us.

Not just in our actions, like those are sins, like that's a sin, and that one's a sin, and stop doing that, and stop doing that, but also like in our heart and in our motives.

And sometimes you don't see it until years later, and you're like, oh, I thought that was so good, and then like you look back and you're like, that was really selfish of me how I did that or judged that or handled that.

It's comprehensive.

It's just, it's it's in us, it's a part of us.

And then in a strange way, even sin is a is good news because it rightly names that which has been true inside of you your entire life.

So you can go the way of modern culture and pretend like the crippling disease is not in you, which means you'll try to do a whole bunch of good to outweigh a bunch of the bad.

But to name something for what it is is incredibly relieving.

To just say, like, oh, the reason why I do things I don't want to do and regret it later, that's sin.

The reason why I think things and I don't want to think them, that's sin.

The reason why I don't do things, I should have done them, oh, that's that's sin.

The reason why my motives are not always pure, oh, that that's sin.

Like to actually have a name for the thing is incredibly relieving.

I read two weeks ago uh author and memoirist Mary Carr, incredible writer.

She wrote this.

She wrote, nothing is more non-judgmental than the doctrine of sin.

Because you're in agreement that we're all just the same.

Isn't that non-judgmental?

To just say we're we're all we're all the same.

We're all sinners.

Incredibly non-judgmental.

Point number two, this is from verse nine.

Comprehensive sinfulness needs ongoing confession.

Comprehensive sinfulness needs ongoing confession.

Now, this need is not to earn the acceptance of God.

That's not what this is.

This is for us to grow into the awareness, this ongoing confession is to grow into the awareness and the knowledge of the acceptance you already have.

So maybe you had a point of confession of your need and acceptance of Christ to come into belief of Christ to be a Christian.

But ongoing confession is not like, oh, I gotta do this again in order to be right with God or have my acceptance with God to be correct.

That is, this is about growing into the awareness of that which has always been true and is true for you right now.

This is why confession is the road to healing.

Last Saturday, not yesterday, the Saturday before, I was a real pill like all day to my family and especially to Christy.

But then it came out in the evening.

I was I was tired, we just got back from dinner, we we parked in the garage, and we parked in the garage, and we would get in there, and I'm just like, let's get in the house and do the bedtime, let's do all that.

And so I'd like, hey, uh, clean up your trash.

We're in the car, we produce a lot of trash in the car, clean up your trash, pick up your shoes because our children love to take the shoes off in the car.

Clean up the trash, pick up your shoes, let's get in the house.

Like, you know, the orders are there.

Pretty simple structure there, very clear, very clear.

I head into the house, they're doing the couple things they need to do.

They get into the house.

One daughter doesn't have her shoes, so we walk back out to the garage and we get out of there.

One shoe, one shoe.

Can you believe it?

Where's the other shoe?

And I become like providing working dad.

I paid for that shoe, and you know, we're gonna find that shoe, and that shoe costs$30, and yeah, like I'm like, you know, like I've never lost anything in my entire life.

Yeah, like I'm proving a point, right?

And I'm just a pill.

I'm impatient and I'm short and I'm rude.

So uh we didn't find the shoe, by the way, just to let you know, shoes disappear.

And tucking her into bed that night, and apparently, like very apparently, like I'm unsettled, right?

Like I'm unsettled.

And I just apologize to her.

Not because I'm like some great person or dad, it's actually the opposite.

Like I was impatient.

I just needed to apologize to my my kid, and I just you know, it's like I'm sorry, I you know, I was impatient.

I was really I was actually, I was actually what we tell you not to be to your sisters, is like what I was to you.

Like I was like, I'm I'm I'm sorry about that.

The most amazing thing always happens in these confessions interrelationally, any confession between in relationships.

This part of us that's unsettled gets settled.

And then this wedge between the two of you, maybe not perfectly, is removed sometimes, but it gets removed.

This word confession, a powerful word, Greek word, homologio.

Here's what it means.

It means to say the same thing as.

Here's what I love about this.

You're not creating new information for God.

Right?

That's what the definition of the word is saying.

I wasn't creating new information for my daughter, she's already here, but your children already know about you, right?

Like maybe they're young enough, they don't have words for it yet, or maybe they're old enough and they have very clear words for it.

They already know.

And by the way, if you're wondering if you're a sinner, just ask your family, right?

Any of us?

So when we go into confession to God, we're not creating new information.

Like he doesn't know, like, oh, I didn't I didn't realize that.

You know, it we're coming into agreement with him about what he already knows to be true about us and about our need for his perfect supply of grace for us.

Isn't that amazing?

Doesn't that kind of change how you feel about confession?

I get I used to think confession sounded so horrible, like something to avoid.

That's this sounds like something I need to do.

This sounds incredible.

This sounds like this sounds like a way to grow in the grace of God.

The good news is you don't even need an altar.

You don't even need a priest or pastor.

It's just wherever you come into the awareness of your sin, heart, mind, deed, wherever that moment is, you're driving down I-75, you got Garth Brooks on, or Taylor Swift, whatever your tune is, you, and you go like, oh, I didn't realize, oh my gosh, that memory, you're replaying something, or heads on the pillow at night, you're replaying something, and you come into awareness of the sin.

There's your altar.

Right there.

Kitchen sink, you're crying, right?

Like anywhere, it doesn't matter.

There is your altar.

God, I missed that.

I should have done it, I missed it.

God, I I did that.

I said that.

I shouldn't have said it.

Sorry about that.

I don't want to be like that.

There's this motive in me.

I need this worked out.

There's this fear in me, there's this anxiety in me.

God, I want to come into agreement with what is true about me as being imperfect and a sinner and in supply of your great grace.

Isn't it amazing?

We don't have to give up on the doctrine of sin to embrace the doctrine of grace.

What a gift.

What a gift the Christian faith gives us.

We don't have to give up on the doctrine of the justice of God in order to believe in the grace of God.

How incredible.

Chapter 2, verses 1 and 2.

My little children, John writing, so endearing.

My little children, I'm writing these things to you so that you may not sin.

So he's going, like, I have a hope for you of a life of peace, is what he's saying there.

And then he goes, but, he's like, I know about you guys.

But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.

He is the propitiation, big word, we'll talk about it, for our sins and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world, for anybody.

Open for anybody.

Point number three is this just as sin is comprehensive, Christ's work is comprehensive.

Verse 1 literally says this we have, when you sin, a paraclete with the Father.

Now that word paraclete is that word advocate.

It means to represent in a legal manner.

It's an official binding relationship that whatever they achieve, your paraclete, your advocate, whatever they achieve, you achieve.

They win, you win.

Here's the quote I read about it this week, broke it down for us, theologian Charles Hodge.

I think we'll put it up on the screen here.

The relationship of Christ to his people.

So to you, hear this for you.

The relationship of Christ to his people is that of a legal advocate to a client.

The former personates the latter.

The lawyer stands in the client's place.

It is, while it lasts, the most intimate of relationships.

You may not even have to appear in court.

You are not heard, you are not regarded.

You are lost in your advocate, who for the time being is your representative.

The advocate, not you, is seen.

The advocate, not you, is heard, the advocate, not you, is regarded.

And then something cool happens in this next verse in verse 2.

Another word is used.

This word propitiation, big theological word.

It's a rare word, actually, in the scriptures.

And it means this: a sacrifice given to an angry God, a sacrifice to appease an angry God.

Now, you get stuck there and go, oh, angry God, like I don't do that part, I don't do that part.

But here's what this is teaching us.

It's teaching us, first off, we don't have to give up on the justice of God in order to have the grace of God.

That's incredible.

And it's also teaching us this: God's not angry with you.

He already handled that within himself.

He decided within himself, by his own means, Christ's work, your sin put upon him, his righteousness given to you, you're forever beloved.

He settled all that.

He's not angry with you.

Not from that stuff from long ago, not today, not tomorrow.

So the image that's built for us is a grace, a loving God that is accepting and welcoming.

And the grace of God says to the justice of God, oh yeah, I know him.

I know her.

I'm his advocate.

I'm her advocate.

Justice of God, you don't have to look at her.

You don't have to look at him.

I know Russ.

You look at me.

You look at my perfect record.

You look at my perfection.

And I in the grace of God will stand and cover him.

He is utterly lost inside of me.

All of it forever has been paid for God.

By himself, he paid for it.

You may be broken.

You may feel broken.

You may have a broken moral record.

It may be in deed.

It may be in thought, it may be in motive.

It's one of them.

I just covered it all.

But you are more loved by God than you could ever dare to dream.

And we know it.

We know it securely in Jesus.

This is the gift of Jesus.

Here's what this means for your life.

Three things.

Sermons just beginning.

Just kidding.

No, we're not.

Here's what this means for your life.

Six-point sermon.

Number one, you can call sin and stop avoiding the issue.

That would be incredibly relieving for some of us.

Number two, you can deal with the guilt you've been avoiding and shoving that sucker down so deep it's causing a mess in your life and relationships.

And because you can call sin sin, and because you're already loved by God by Christ's work, you're secure, you're already accepted.

God isn't angry with you.

That's why Paul can say there's no condemnation for us.

Number three, last thing.

You can stop trying to pay God for something that has always been a gift.

And you can just walk with them.

You can walk with them in ongoing confession, and you can walk with him in ongoing delight of how much he loves you.

My brothers and sisters, may you know the sweet and sufficient justification and rest of Christ's word for you.

Let's pray together.

God thank you for your good work, that you are our advocate and you are our propitiation.

God, thank you that you settled your justice by means of your grace.

I thank you that we can see and call sin and ourselves always first.

That we are not perfect and yet we are perfectly loved by you.

That we are humbled and we are loved.

God, thank you for this great gift that is true for us.

May we celebrate it here as we receive communion in Jesus' name.

Amen.