The Case and the Cost | In light of love | 1 John 2: 1-2 | Ep.3

Welcome to Preaching from Bryanson Bible Church, located in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa.

It is our prayer that this teaching would bless you, deepen your love for God's Word, and encourage you as you follow Jesus.

And if you're not a Christian, we pray that this message would encourage you as you explore the Christian faith.

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

He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.

And my grandfather, who I called Opa, lived in a cottage with my Omar on the property where we grew up.

And at that young age, my Opa taught me how to do woodwork.

Now I was absolutely obsessed.

Every day I would come home from school, that's what I wanted to do.

And I'll have you know that I wasn't just pottering around.

I saw myself more like Picasso.

I was making boxes and hand-sanded, slightly lopsided coasters that my mom pretended to use for years.

And here's the thing: my grandfather taught me how to do woodwork the old-fashioned way, which is code word for the painful and slow and blister-inducing way.

No shortcuts.

You measure twice and you cut once with a handheld saw until your shoulder ached, trying to keep that thing in a straight line.

But in my dad's garage sat the desire of my heart: an electrical bench saw.

To an 11-year-old, that tool, that piece of equipment wasn't just a tool, it was like a magic wand.

I mean, why slog for 40 minutes with a handheld saw when that machine can do the same job in four seconds?

My dad, however, was very clear with me.

The day he got that saw, he marched me into the garage, stood me next to it, looked me in the eye, gave me that look, you know, the one that precedes a very long family meeting.

And he said to me, Mike, do not touch that saw unless I am standing right here.

And for a while, I was the model of perfect obedience.

But every afternoon it was like that saw would call to me, it would call my name.

Mike, come and use me.

Late one afternoon.

I convinced myself, nah, I'm basically a professional.

I marched into the garage, I flipped that switch and powered that saw on.

And it didn't just whine, it screamed with the joy of a machine that knew it was about to encounter soft, unprotected human tissue.

If you know anything about woodworking safety, you know that especially with a bench saw, you use a pedal or a push stick to push the wood through that blade because you want to keep your fingers, your hands in a different postal code from that blade.

But I was 11-year-old, I was wise in my own eyes, and that day I didn't use a push stick, I didn't use a pedal.

So I made a few successful cuts and I thought to myself, you know what, I've got this.

I was basically the Elon Musk of Carpentry.

Now, what's my dad on about?

This is easy.

I gripped one piece of wood a little bit too loosely and maybe a little bit too close to the center.

And as I came to the saw, I put the wood to the blade.

And if you've ever used one of those machines, you know what happens.

The blade sucked the piece of wood in.

And it took nearly the entire tip of my right thumb with it.

Now, in that moment, I didn't just scream, I hit a pitch only dogs could hear.

There was blood everywhere.

The tip of my right thumb was cut nearly all the way through.

And of course, I panicked, and so I'm trying to sort of cover this up.

I ran into the house and I run not to my mom, but I run to my understanding Omar.

And I knew it was coming that evening when my dad came home, and I thought maybe she would be able to shield me.

My dad was going to be the judge, and I would be the recipient of a swift punishment.

That day, I took a shortcut.

I did something that I wanted to do.

I didn't obey my dad.

I didn't obey the safety of the commands of my dad, the boundaries that he had set in place.

And that night, as I sat at the kitchen table waiting for my dad to get home, it felt like forever.

When he finally pulled in the driveway, I was sitting at the table as white as a sheet, trying to cover up the mess that I had made under the tablecloth.

And just then he came in, my grand stood up, she laid her hand on my shoulder, and she spoke for me.

She said, You know, Mike's a good kid.

Like he really, you know, this is a once-off thing.

This never happens.

Please just be lenient with him.

That day she advocated for me.

She sort of pleaded my case, and in some senses, she she calmed the storm of judgment.

I'm sure if I did a poll of this room this morning, every one of us has our very own bench saw story where we thought we knew better than the person who was giving us the instructions.

Whether you are the child who touched the saw or the parent who watched as your child walked into a mistake that you warned them about, we all know the heaviness of those moments.

We know the heavy realization that we've stepped outside of the lines and now we have to face the consequences.

So you might not be playing with power tools in the garage, we might not be playing with power tools in the garage, but don't you find that we short circuit our integrity in other ways?

So often we choose our own desires over the safety of the commands of this God of light that we've been reading about in John's letter so far.

Like we heard last week from Buddy, when darkness begins to creep in, we begin to take spiritual shortcuts.

We begin justifying habits that we know we are that we know are wrong, saying that it's not that bad.

We begin excusing our anger, our bitterness, our greed, and saying it's just because I'm having a bad day.

We blame our deceit, our compromise, our hidden impurities on the pressure situations that we face in life.

Or even worse, we dilute the gospel into cheap grace, thinking that we'll just we'll use malicious gossip or hidden sin during the week and that God will just forgive us anyway.

But inevitably, we slip up.

And those bad decisions that we make eventually catch up with us, and we find ourselves bleeding in the garage.

And in those moments, don't you find that our tendency is to try and hide that sin?

So often we want to hide our sin in the darkness because we fear if we come to the light, we'll be exposed and we'll only find judgment.

And so we sit at our metaphorical kitchen tables trying to hide our bandaged hearts, keep them under the tablecloth so that nobody sees the mess we've made.

And in those moments, who will plead our case?

Who will advocate for us?

The Apostle John starts this chapter of his letter like this.

He doesn't start with thunder or lightning or a lecture on safety protocols.

Instead, what he does is he leans in and with the tenderly, the tender, fatherly tone of a grandfather, pulling up a chair to that kitchen table, he looks at our wounds and he says, My little children.

And the words that follow are not words of condemnation, but they are words of deep comfort.

Basically, the crux of what he says in these two short verses for us today is that as Christians, the standard for our lives is holiness.

But when we mess up, Jesus Christ is the one who will plead our case, calm the storm of judgment, and restore us to the Father.

So let's take a look at those verses.

I'm going to read them for us again.

1 John chapter 2, verse 1, he says this my little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.

1 John 2:1

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

He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.

You might remember from week one of our series, Buddy mentioned that John doesn't develop his arguments in this letter in a logical or linear way, like a modern textbook would, but instead he almost circles around a few core ideas: light, love, life, obedience.

And every time he comes back around, he looks at a slightly different angle or insight or pastoral emphasis.

You might also remember that the theme in this opening section, this opening section is that God is light.

And if we are going to have fellowship with him, we too must walk in the light by keeping his commandments.

But John knows keeping God's commandments is hard.

He knows that we slip up, he knows that we find ourselves bleeding in the garage, so to speak.

Last week we saw that when we sin, we are to come to God and confess our sin to God.

This week we see John circles around this idea of sin, but he comes at it from a different angle.

And he says that when we inevitably mess up, here's what God has provided.

And he gives us two weighty theological anchors for us as Christians to help to help us navigate sin in our lives.

The two things that we'll look at this morning, firstly, is that Jesus is our righteous advocate.

And secondly, Jesus is our righteous propitiation.

On the one hand, he says Jesus is our advocate because John wants us to be secure in our salvation rather than crushed by our sin.

On the other hand, he says Jesus is our righteous propitiation because he wants us to be stirred at the cost of that salvation and not to think that grace is cheap.

Jesus is our righteous advocate, he's our righteous propitiation.

Let's look at the first idea that Jesus is our righteous advocate.

For the first of seven times in this letter, John uses this phrase, little children.

And here he adds the word my.

What we can infer from that is two things.

Firstly, that John is getting on in years.

He is an older man if he can call them my little children.

Secondly, that John has a special pastoral concern for these original readers.

He sees himself as their spiritual father.

And with the tenderness of a spiritual father, he sets out his desire for their lives.

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

His desire for them is that they would not sin.

Just in case they were tempted to minimize the gravity of sin because of anything they might have read so far or anything they may have heard, he nips that thought in the bud.

And in fact, John throughout the letter expresses horror at sin, hatred of sin, rejection of sin.

A key theme in the letter is that if we are to have true fellowship with God through Jesus Christ, the goal is for us not to sin.

The goal is for us not to sin.

But John is realistic, he's not idealistic.

And so he says, if we sin, here is what God has provided.

Before we look at Jesus, our advocate, something so important to camp on in just what he says there, the fact that if we sin, here's what God has provided.

In these verses, John is not teaching about someone who uses grace as a permission to keep on sinning.

But rather the Greek verb he uses when he speaks about sin points to a sudden stumble or an unintended fracture in an otherwise faithful relationship with God.

And here's why that is significant.

Here's why it is because he's being deeply realistic.

God's standard for Christians, for our lives, God's standard is holiness.

But he's saying that seasonal failures don't cancel our salvation.

See, we can slip up without being disqualified.

Why?

He then goes on to set out that he has what God has provided.

Jesus Christ, our righteous advocate, who speaks to the Father in our defense.

Jesus Christ, our righteous advocate.

Firstly, he says, Jesus is righteous.

Throughout the New Testament, we see that Jesus was without sin.

He knew no sin.

He was spotless.

Even later in this letter, in chapter 3, verse 5, John says that in him that is Jesus, there is no sin.

That's what he means when he says Jesus is righteous.

He then says, Jesus is our advocate.

The word, the original Greek word that he uses is a word used to describe a person who comes alongside someone else in need, mediates for them, an intercessor, someone who speaks on their behalf.

This image of advocates should be crystal clear to us.

Picture someone who stands up for you in a court of law and speaks to the judge on your behalf, someone who advocates for you, someone who takes something that is beyond your ability to handle and carries that burden for you.

And that means, what that means is that the fact that Jesus is our advocate is good news.

Because no matter the bind that you find yourself in, no matter the gravity of sin that you may have stumbled into, because of our righteous advocate Jesus Christ, the terrifying charges against us are handled and we can be restored to God the Father.

Just a point of theological clarity here, again, before we move on.

When we come to God in repentance and faith, when we put our trust in Jesus Christ, we move from death to life.

At that moment, we are justified, we are declared innocent because what Jesus Christ has paid for our sins.

It's not as if we need justification over and over again.

I love the way that the late theologian John Stott explains this.

He says, Once the sinner has been justified by God his judge, he has entered the family of God and become related to God as his father.

If he should sin, he doesn't need another justification from the divine judge.

He is a child of God.

He needs the Father's forgiveness.

This is assured to him through the advocacy of Jesus Christ.

So what that means is when we stumble into sin, Jesus Christ, our righteous advocate, comes alongside us and he advocates for us, and he doesn't make a new defense every time he does that.

Instead, he points to what he has already done.

Our advocate restores us to the Father by pointing to his completed work, his finished work, and we're going to speak about that in just a moment.

But let me ask you this morning: where is it in your life?

Perhaps it's this year or this week, even this morning, where is it that you might have failed or stumbled?

And where you need to be reminded that you have an advocate before the father, standing alongside you, pleading your case, restoring you to the father.

Where might you be standing in the garage over a mess trying to hide your bleeding self under the table?

Perhaps it's in your professional life where you have been justifying taking shortcuts.

Maybe you've been cutting corners on business deals or falsifying some numbers, hiding a critical piece of truth just to secure a client or to protect your reputation.

And you've been telling yourself that this is just how everybody in Joburg does business.

But this morning, God is convicting you, He's showing you that that's not honoring to Him.

Maybe it's in your at home where you have been excusing your conduct.

Perhaps you completely lost your temper with your spouse, you completely lost your temper with your children, or you're harboring this cold bitterness, and you've been brushing it off, saying it's just because I'm under so much pressure at work, it's just because I had such a bad day.

But this morning, God is saying to you that that's not how He would have you live in the light.

Maybe you are making the grace of God cheap.

You know you're living outside of the lines that God has set, and yet you use the cross as an excuse to keep on sinning and saying that God is going to forgive me anyway.

But this morning he's convicting you that that is not how he would have you live.

He wants more for your life as his child.

Perhaps it's in your private life where you are striving for this almost impossible, sinless perfection.

You've misunderstood sincere obedience, and you've turned the Christian life into a high-stakes performance review.

You try to reach this standard that is impossible for you to reach on your own, and when you fail, when you inevitably fail, you beat yourself up about it.

You stop praying, you withdraw from community, you feel as if you have to serve a spiritual sentence before God will even look at you again.

Now, in this text, John is speaking about sort of seasonal failure, stumbling into sin.

But even if we've walked in here this morning and we are trapped in serious sin, if we are trapped in habitual sin, the solution that God provides is the same.

Jesus Christ, our righteous advocate.

Wherever we may have stumbled, if our tendency is to hide, if our tendency is to feel overwhelmed by our guilt and shame, if our tendency is to want to put in double shifts of performance just so that we can feel like we are in God's good books again, leave the apostle John Woods, bring up that chair to the table, and you would say with the tenderly concern of a father, stop.

Stop.

You don't need another justification from your judge.

You need to come home to your father.

You are secure in this gift of the righteous advocate who stands alongside you and restores you to the father.

You may then be wondering, as I was, how?

How does Jesus restore us to the Father?

What is the basis of our defense?

Because God, we know this, that God's God's righteous and holy character means that he can't just let us off the hook.

Someone's got to pay for that.

Either it's got to be us or it's got to be someone else.

And the John answers that question by saying, not only is Jesus Christ our righteous advocate, but he's also the basis for our defense.

He says this secondly, that Jesus is our righteous propitiation.

Now that word is a difficult word.

I mean, you should try to say it five times quickly, you'll stumble.

It's a difficult word because we don't use it in everyday conversation, but it's an incredibly important theological concept in the Bible.

In fact, this word or forms of this word appear in four very important New Testament texts.

Firstly, in Romans chapter 3, verse 25, the apostle Paul has just said that we are all sinful, we've all fallen short of the glory of God, but that we can be redeemed because of Jesus Christ, who is our propitiation to be received by faith.

Romans 3:25

Again, we see the word in Hebrews chapter 2, verse 17, where the author of this letter to the Hebrews says that Jesus Christ took on flesh, he knew what it meant to be tempted, and yet never sinning became the propitiation for our sins, so that we can be delivered from our slavery to sin.

Hebrews 2:17

Later in this letter, in chapter 4, verse 10, John says that it was because of love that God sent Jesus Christ to be a propitiation for our sins.

And then we see it again here in chapter 2, verse 2.

Simply put, propitiation means that God's holy wrath against our sin or at our sin has been completely turned away from us because God has provided Jesus Christ to.

Take the penalty, the punishment for that sin on the cross.

I'll say it again because it is a mouthful.

God's righteous anger at our sin has been completely turned away from us because God provided Jesus Christ to take the punishment for that sin on the cross.

Because God provided Jesus to take the punishment for that sin on the cross.

And when we think about this concept of propitiation, just a few important things to bear in mind.

As we think about this wrath of a holy God, we must not somehow think that that is arbitrary or that it is impulsive, God's anger.

It is steady, consistent antagonism towards all evil that is consistent with his righteous and holy and loving character.

Secondly, propitiation does not mean that either us or a third party has paid a bribe to God so that he can somehow look away from us.

God is the one at work in propitiation.

Jesus Christ is not a third party that is paid as a bribe to God so that he can look away from us.

Jesus himself is God.

So not only is the object of propitiation, but he's also the origin of propitiation.

Third, it's not as if in propitiation that God sent Jesus to the cross to do something that Jesus was reluctant to do.

It was love that sent Jesus to the cross.

In fact, love, John attributes love to both the father and son in this act of propitiation.

Take a look at chapter 4, verse 10.

He says this, in this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us.

And so he did what?

Sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Chapter 3, verse 16, by this we know love.

That he that is Jesus laid down his life for us.

I love the way that the theologian Daniel Aiken describes propitiation.

Here's what he has to say.

He says, Jesus Christ, by his bloody sacrifice on the cross, satisfied God's holiness and turned away his righteous wrath from sinners.

The wrath that should have been poured out on sinners was poured out on Jesus.

The judgment that should have been experienced by sinners was experienced by Jesus.

The hell that should have been experienced by sinners was experienced by Jesus.

So what this means is that the claims against us because of our sin have been satisfied.

They have literally been absorbed and God's anger has been turned away from us.

John finishes off these verses by saying that He is the propition, Jesus is the propitiation for our sins and not only for ours, but also for the sins of the whole world.

Very important.

I hope you're listening right now.

What he means is that nobody is beyond the reach of the saving work of Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the only way to salvation.

When we come to him in repentance and faith, it's not automatic.

We have to come to him in repentance and faith.

He's saying that if anyone ever was saved or is to be saved, he is saved through that atoning work of Jesus Christ.

And what that means, if the sacrifice of Jesus, this propitiation is vast enough, if it is wide enough, it is if it is infinitely deep enough to cross every social, racial, cultural boundary that ever was, if it's big enough for the whole world, then surely it is big enough for the mess that you or I may have brought into this room today.

By affirming Jesus is our propitiation, John wants us to be stirred at the cost of our salvation.

In our modern context, we can become desensitized to sin, don't you find?

We think it's not that bad.

We reduce sin to a minor error or an off day.

But he has the problem facing every human being that is outside of Jesus Christ.

The holy wrath of an omnipotent God is directed at them because of their sin.

Sin is not a minor error or an off day, it is rebellion against our Creator.

And so it stands to reason that the most terrifying thing in all of the universe is the wrath of a holy God.

So much so that it required a spotless lamb that that wrath might be turned away from us.

So friends, John sets out these two concepts: Jesus as our advocate, Jesus as our propitiation, because he wants us to be secure in our salvation, but he also wants us to be stirred at the cost of that salvation.

But I found that this concept, what he's teaching here, really hit home for me when I understood how these two concepts work together.

Jesus as our advocate and Jesus as our propitiation.

I want you to picture for me, just for a moment, those courtroom dramas that we love to watch on TV.

Shows like Suits or Lincoln Lawyer or Matt Lock or The Practice.

In every one of those shows, there's that moment where the defense lawyer or the advocate stands up before the jury and fiercely maintains their client's innocence.

They always look for a legal loophole or a technicality to prove that their client didn't do it.

Or they plead for lenience on their client's behalf.

And if I'm honest, for the longest of time, that's how I thought Jesus Christ the Advocate pleaded for me before the Father.

In a similar way to my late Oma, bless her soul, how she would plead before my parents for me.

You see, I pictured Jesus as a defense lawyer who would stand before God and plead for lenience for me.

Plead for God to be lenient with me.

I imagined him going through his stack of case files, finding the one that's labeled Michael Kombrink, pulling it out, maybe sighing deeply, and then saying, Father, yes, it is Combrink again.

Can we just give him another chance?

You know, he's really a good person.

He tries really hard, he reads his Bible, he goes to church.

But that incorrect picture of Jesus as my advocate left me feeling little comfort because I would always wonder deep down when God would reach the end of his grace towards me.

When he hears me confess my sins for the 571st time, I imagine him saying at some point, enough, no more, you have run out of chances.

And perhaps you sit here this morning with that same agonizing insecurity.

See, the accuser still stands up and he reads out a charge sheet against us that is terrifyingly accurate.

He lists the corporate shortcuts, he lists the pride and possessions, the greed, the double lives we try so desperately to hide.

And he says to the judge, Your standard is holiness.

And they've fallen short.

Your law demands death.

And you sit at the defense table as white as a sheet, spiritually bleeding, because you realize that you have no defense.

But just then your righteous advocate stands up and he doesn't pace the courtroom like one of those lawyers would on TV and say that you are innocent.

He doesn't say to the judge that you are a good person.

He stands up and he says to the judge, Father, every single word of accusation against them is true.

They are 100% guilty.

And the sort of courtroom falls silent.

You can hear a pin drop.

And then Jesus opens his portfolio and he says, Father, the law demands death as the penalty.

But I have already died.

The law demands that a debt must be paid, and I have already paid.

That's what Jesus Christ says to God.

See, in that moment, Jesus is not pleading to God for lenience, he's pleading to God for justice.

Think about that for a moment.

Jesus is not pleading to God that we are innocent, he's pleading to God the debt has already been paid.

And because well, God doesn't forgive us because he's a lenient God, he forgives us because he's a just God.

And he doesn't demand two payments for the same sin.

Can you see that?

Jesus has already paid.

Man, that should give us so much hope.

That should give us so much confidence this morning.

Do you see how those concepts work together?

Jesus can only be our advocate in heaven because he's already been our propitiation on earth.

And the Christian life is really a it's a journey of repentance.

We stumble and we come back to God.

But if our confidence is only based on how well we performed in the last week, well then I'm afraid we will live in a terrible, agonizing, crushing insecurity.

But when we realize that the spinning blade of God's divine judgment struck Jesus Christ instead of us, well then we are liberated.

And in that moment we worship because grace is absolutely free to us, but it was infinitely costly to Him.

And that cost doesn't make us reckless, it makes us fall to our knees in awe and it makes us hate the shortcuts of sin in our lives because of what they cost our Savior.

And we don't go out of that courtroom to carry on sinning, we run out weeping for joy, fiercely committed to living lives of sincere obedience.

So, friends, this morning don't run from him in your shame.

Run to your righteous advocate who stood in God's divine courtroom on your behalf so that you could be declared innocent and restored to the Father.

Come to the table, so to speak.

Step out of the garage, come to the table, and rest secure in your righteous advocate, Jesus Christ.

Before we go into a time of communion, I want to give you just a minute or so of quiet reflection as you're sitting in your seats.

Bring to God the thing that He is pressing on your heart right now as you reflect and as we get our hearts ready to take communion together.

Thanks for listening to this sermon from BBC.

If you have questions about what you've heard or would like to find out more about the Christian faith, we'd love to hear from you.

You can visit our website or reach out using the contact details below.

God bless you.