1-3 John - 1st John 1:7-8 God is light and our fellowship with him - Part 2

Well, this morning we have 1 John continuing on in the first chapter, looking at 7 and 8 this week. I want to go ahead and start in verse 5, and we'll read 5 to 10. And then we'll dig in together. John writes, This is the message we have heard from Him and announced to you, that God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all.

If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus' Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. However, if we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us."

Alright, so this morning I want to reiterate something that we said last week, and I want to go over this if concept, this adjunctive if, and I'm going to do that starting with a joke. A woman tells her husband, who is a software engineer, or he could just be an engineer, but I'm a software engineer, so I want him to be a software engineer.

Please stop by the store and pick up half a gallon of milk. If they have eggs, get a dozen. The man came home with 12 half-gallon cartons of milk. I guess they had eggs. So the if in a sentence is right. I can see the engineer wives are like, oh no. Because if we look at this, if they have eggs, get a dozen. Get a dozen what? Eggs or milk? He reinterpreted it because she wasn't specific about which one it was. He reinterpreted it as half gallons of milk. It's really a bad joke and I apologize. We'll just move right on. Here's the thing.

She asked if that's the way my mind works, and I said, yeah. Jessica makes me a grocery list on occasion, and she'll say, you know, cucumbers. And I get to the store, and there's English and some other kind, and I don't know which one. I've learned that she wants the not English ones, but I don't know why the cucumbers speak. So we have this issue of if, and then we'll go back to this, but we'll ignore the joke. We have this issue of if. And the if in this context, because of the words that are tacked onto the relationship with the if, the words are subjunctive and they bring with them the idea of potential.

So I want to take a look, and I've got them on the handout, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. 3 starts off with the potential of fellowship between believers, that we may have fellowship. Four, the potential of the joy being full. And six leads into the possibility that we say we are having fellowship, but in reality we are potentially walking in the darkness. He's speaking about this hypothetical possibility, but he's not saying it is absolutely so. The idea is that he's presenting principles. It's easy to get caught up when somebody presents principles and start looking for rigid rules and laws, especially because if lends itself to such hard logic.

As a software developer, I write if possibly hundreds of times in a day. Usually with stuff after it. It's not very useful to just write if over and over and over again. But I write if all the time with the idea that there's a condition that if it's true something's going to happen in the code. You've experienced checking a checkbox in software and everything changes. somewhere if condition was true. Sometimes that is disastrous and you wonder what happened to your program and sometimes it does what you want so that's a good thing. But in the context of this adjunctive we need to not look at it as rigid rules necessarily but that he's speaking about the hypothetical and the principles that are there. What are the principles that we want to...

Well, let me read a quote here before we do that. I've got it on the handout here. John presents the concepts not as the third person plural, them but not me, with all these if things, but instead writes of the fellowship and things that might block that fellowship from the first person plural, we as humans.

He's engaging with his audience in the first person plural. He's saying we. That lets us know that he better be speaking hypothetically because otherwise he's riding with the authority of an apostle saying that he's actually been lying to you and walking in darkness. Because he says we. Unless he's speaking hypothetically and we have a context in which we understand he's speaking of the principle. We've already answered that. Okay, just because I want to make sure this is really, really clear, and we're going to repeat it probably next week too, so get used to this.

What is the difference between fellowship and relationship in light of position and condition? What is the difference between fellowship and relationship with God in this passage? relationship has to do with our position, right? Yeah, relationship is position. And I was over here writing nerdy stuff on the whiteboard, and so I moved my chalk. Well, I won't write it. But we have... Fellowship is... Fellowship is what? How would you define fellowship? Having things in common. Sharing in common. And then what is relationship?

In this context, it's an absolute. If I say that Mark is my son, I can't change that relationship. That was established by God. Okay, so it's defined and established. That's established. Because I ran out of space. Can we simplify it and say relationship is family? Okay, so the relationship we could say is family. That's really important. No matter what happens between me and my father, he is my father. We have that relationship.

However, we might possibly not have fellowship. It is possible that I go out and I go do something ridiculously crazy and carnal and fleshly and selfish, and for a while we don't have fellowship. We're still father and son, but there's still a reality that he says, Randy, it's not okay for you to beat your wife to death. That's damaged our relationship. You know, I'm giving an extreme example for the sake of the fact that I tend towards extremity and I apologize.

So the difference between relationship and fellowship is important in this context because John is not talking about you losing your relationship with God. He talks about gaining a relationship with God, but everything after that has to do with the fellowship with God. So let's keep that in mind. Fellowship is the context for the verses that we're going over.

Just to make sure that I have made it really, really clear, I wanted to do this chart last weekend after we were done with the class. I wrote this on the board. This is a slightly prettier version. But I wanted to just review this because it never hurts to go over this and be reminded of the difference between position and condition.

Our position is how God views us in the eternal context. That's the way I think of it. Before we become believers, I can use the laser, but it's easier if I just stand here and let the light shine in my eyes. Our position is in Adam until we're saved. And then our position is in Christ. Colossians 3 tells us we're seated in the heavenlies with Christ, presently. That's our position. God sees us in Christ.

Our condition, however, can change. We can be in fellowship and then we can be walking in sin for some unknown amount of time. This shouldn't be looked at as some static amount of time. This is a pattern and not an absolute sequence. We might have times of sin, but then when we realize that we've been walking in the flesh instead of walking in the spirit, the Lord restores our fellowship with Him.

We come to Him and say, sorry, Father, and we're restored back to fellowship. Until, of course, death or the rapture, in which case our position and our condition will be unified. Our location of our soul will be the same as our heavenly position. So that's position and condition.

But fellowship is a core part of how that happens in our walk with the Lord as we continue to grow. If you're not in fellowship, can you continue to grow? This is totally indirect from the context of 1 John, but I just want to ask that. We're not going to grow spiritually if we're not in fellowship, which is probably why John is so concerned about the fellowship of the believers.

So John continues on here and he says, But if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. The concept of walking was an Old Testament or Hebrew concept.

If you will, in your Bibles, turn to Exodus 16.4. It's the book after Genesis. You have to go really far left in 1 John. And if you get there, go ahead and read it out loud for us.

Then the Lord said to Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you, and the people shall go out and gather a day's portion every day. that I may test them whether or not they will walk in my instruction. So we have here God using the term walk to describe not just perambulating. He doesn't want to just see if they can get from point A to point B on their feet. He's actually talking about the way that they live their lives, it's their lifestyle.

One of the things that I think is interesting in the Old Testament, and I don't have the reference in here and I apologize for that, is that God tells them to write the law on a piece of paper and carry it where? Where does he say to carry this little piece of paperwork with some of the law on it? There's two places. On the forehead or on your wrist. Now, what's the benefit of having a little box with some law on it, on your forehead, when you go out walking?

It's possibly going to be in your vision, but the other thing is, other people are going to see you, and they're going to see the law, and they're going to be reminded we have the righteousness of God that's been given to us in this law. It's not their righteousness, but it's the righteous law of God.

And if it's on your wrist, you're going to see it, just like a watch. It's always there. It's in your peripheral vision all the time, swinging around because you use your hands. So, when they were walking around, they were constantly reminded by the law, or of the law, and it used to be their lifestyle.

We're not under the law, so we need to take that into account. What does John tell us we need to be walking in instead of the law? He says the light. The other thing is that in Leviticus 18.3 God specifically contrasts walking under the law with walking under any other systems.

He mentions the Egyptian system in Leviticus 18.3. What are the differences between walking in the statutes that reflect God's righteousness and walking in the light of God's righteous fellowship? We'll come back to that question. We'll ask these three and then we'll come back to it. What does God, or I'm sorry, what does walking in the law look like? Doing. You're focused on the law. You're focused on the law. Do you have a checklist? 613 items on it. Things you can do and things you can't do.

Did walking in the law encourage fellowship in the flesh? Okay, by in the flesh I mean Would the flesh be stirred up by the law to be walking in fellowship with other people who are practicing the law? I don't think it does. You focus on the law, not on somebody else. When we read the Gospels, I think this is a classic example, when we read the Gospels, how many times do you see the Pharisees encouraging the other people around them and saying, I'm so glad you're doing such a good job? Or how many times do we see Christ correcting the Pharisees because they're beating the snot out of everybody else with the law. So the law encourages the flesh to separate. Because the flesh, when it responds to the law, does things selfishly and it looks at itself and it wants to make sure I'm more righteous than you.

Did walking in the law encourage outreach? The interesting thing is that the law actually has provisions for outreach. The law has places where it says, if you come into contact with somebody who is not a Jew, here is how they can become part of the House of Israel.

But, here is the unfortunate part of that. They were so concerned about fulfilling the laws that separated them from the other nations that they never actually contacted them in such a way that they would actually do outreach and then be able to invite them in in any massive way. They were so concerned about selfish things. Gail? Were they overly afraid possibly of being defiled in some way by speaking to people that didn't follow the law.

That's part of it. What's interesting is that those who were concerned about fulfilling the law, and the part of Israel that were concerned with that, didn't want to be defiled. And those that ignored the law and liberalized it, just ignored the parts that separated them so that they could have their own personal gain and benefit. And they ignored those parts of the law, but they didn't outreach.

The amazing thing is that even still, who is in charge of wooing people to salvation? The Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit still draws people unto Him. That's really important when we get to the New Testament. Why is that so important? Based on Acts chapter 2. I'll narrow it down for you. Who is present in Acts chapter 2? The Holy Spirit. Yes, the Holy Spirit is present. Who else?

How many people spoke when the tongues of fire came down on them? And what did they speak? We don't know an exact number of people. There were many people that spoke many languages that they had previously not known. Why? because there were Jews in the area that were not Hebrew.

So despite the fleshly response to the law not being outreach, the Holy Spirit and God was still actively involved in telling people about his work and reaching out to the world. But I just wanted to kind of point out that when John is talking about walking in the light, there is an aspect of outreach and there's an aspect of fellowship in this that are not paralleled with the law. Jack?

When you were talking about walking there, these people that heard the message of salvation were called by God before the foundation of the earth. area in there that's hard for us to comprehend. Yeah, God is still sovereign. I'm speaking of the general pattern of humans' response to the law being selfish. I want to make sure that any time we see a pattern of the flesh in response to things, God is gracious and overrides that in so many cases. And in the case of people not reaching out like they should have, the Jews not reaching out, it's unfortunate, but they still existed. The prophets still existed.

What did Daniel do with King Darius? He was in the lions' den, he came out, and what did King Darius say? He proclaimed that Daniel's God was the one true God. So even though he was walking under the law, he was still righteous in the sight of man. God had given him a righteous attitude. and he was still reaching out.

But I'm just saying there was a general pattern amongst the hoi polloi, the broad sweeping array of Jews. They looked at the law and they saw it as a schoolmaster rather than an outreach opportunity. I think somewhere in the New Testament it said the Jews, the apostles, they were not allowed to enter into the house of a Gentile. Right? The apostles? The Jews were not in the practice of going into the house of the Gentiles.

Was that a law or just a tradition? This is where my recollection of all 613 laws is. I should work on that sometime. I'm still learning about this. The thing is that there are rules about what is clean and what is dirty, but the other thing is that it wasn't that they were not allowed to travel outside of the land and trade. It was simply that while they were out in those places, they needed to observe certain restrictions to keep them separate unto God, not to keep them righteous in the sense of saving themselves with their own righteousness. I'm not aware of any law in my recollection of all the readings of the Old Testament where it says you can't go into their house.

There are times when Christ, when he sends his disciples, he says just go to the Jews. And that's part of his outreach to the Jews and his mission when he came down to the earth to reach Israel. They rejected him. which of course brings us to the rest of the history that we live in, but that's part of that.

So, let's come back to this question. What is the difference between walking in the statutes that reflect God's righteousness and walking in the light of God's righteous fellowship? I'll help you. Vicki, if you have answers, go for it. No, I was, I don't know, I was just going to say that the Holy Spirit and the sacrifice of Christ are what enables us to walk in the Spirit. Absolutely. He enables us and empowers us.

It's not something we do of our own accord. So I wanted to draw out some comparison and contrast between those two just to make sure that it was clear. Walking out the statutes, there was communion with those who adhered to the law. It didn't mean people necessarily did. If they were being selfish and self-righteous, they might not do that.

But there was the intention that you would constantly be edifying and encouraging one another with God's righteousness in the law. Walking in the statutes would be an outward sign of God's righteousness that He had commanded for you to do. and it separated Israel from the other nations' practices. He said, don't walk like the Egyptians, which is not a reference to an 80s pop song. It reduced sacrifices for sins, if you were walking in the righteousness of the law, but not offerings of thanks. Even if you were really righteous, you would still offer sacrifices of thanks to the Lord.

How many of you have read through Job hopefully everybody. In the book of Job, what is he doing for his children at the beginning of the book? He's offering sacrifices just in case they didn't. I really love my kids and I want to make sure that God knows that I love them and make sure that these sacrifices are offered. Now the kids weren't involved, which makes it kind of a question mark as to how effective they were. But it was Job loving his kids so much, he just wanted to make sure that that was in there. Those sacrifices were there.

But even if you were really righteous, there was still the offering of thanks that constantly needed to be offered up throughout the life of the Old Testament saint. Now let's contrast that with walking in the light. Walking in the light is communion with God and communion with other saints. So first it's communion with God and secondly communion with other saints. It's an outward dynamic sign of God's righteousness.

Why would I use the word dynamic there aside from being a software developer and use the word dynamic in software development? Is the law dynamic or is it static? It's rigid and fixed. Rigid and fixed. Thank you for translating static. Most people think it's static in that context.

The law has 613 rules that are known and are exacting and are recorded and in place. How many laws are in the New Testament? Paul talks about the law of Christ. When the Holy Spirit, and Vicki alluded to this, when the Holy Spirit works in us, as new technologies are invented, believers don't have to go consult the law. They can go have the righteousness of Christ shown in those ways. As new technologies are invented, the law has to scramble to try to figure out how those pieces fit together.

How do they juxtapose? We've got an oven. I know. If you randomly push buttons, it'll randomly at some timed event turn to 350 degrees. That way you didn't work because it didn't directly respond to you doing something. New technologies invented. Oh, we've got an escalator or an elevator. Well, how does a legalistic Jew respond to an elevator? Well, the elevator either stops at every floor or it goes to random floors and you just get to wait until the door opens on the floor you want to be on. How does the Christian who's walking outside of the scope of the law, empowered by the Spirit, handle an escalator, I mean an elevator? I did that twice this morning. Do we panic or do we just push the button for the floor we want to go to and we get to where we need to be?

So by dynamic, I mean the outward dynamic signs of God's righteousness in any context that He puts us in. If He wants to show His righteousness, you don't have to be worrying about the law and what the law says is the righteous output in that context. It doesn't matter if we have flying cars, driving cars, donkeys. If we're getting from point A to point B, we don't have to worry about the law. We can just love people and show the righteousness of God in the situation He's put us in.

Randy, there's a verse that's coming up, I'm going to be filling in for Mike. Okay, cool. It fits this context in Romans 12, 9, talking about how the Christian is to live. He's talking about his love. He says, let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil, cling to what is good.

Yeah. And what I kind of found out is that, I studied it for Wednesday, He gets parameters on the love. It can't come from an evil source. But you're to claim what is good. He gets his parameters on what the love of God looks like. He doesn't mess with evil. He focuses on good. The love is shown in the context that the Lord has put us in.

Alright, so walking in the light, outward dynamic sign of God's righteousness. It separates the flesh from the spirit. Walking in the light, we know, hey, this is the Holy Spirit working in me, and I'm walking in that light. Or we go, hey, that's the flesh. And the Holy Spirit convicts us and draws us back into fellowship. Again, back to walking in the light.

Does the Holy Spirit, and I've talked about this in other classes, but some of you weren't in those classes, so I'm going to repeat it. Apologies to everybody else. Does the Holy Spirit make us feel guilty? Or does the Holy Spirit convict us unto fellowship? He convicts us unto fellowship. What loves guilt in the life of the believer on the earth?

The flesh. The flesh loves guilt because it's like, oh no, I didn't do it right. How can I fix it? I'll fix it. I've got to feel bad for three days. If I feel bad for three days, then I know God won't forgive me. I blame somebody else. Yeah, Adam and Eve. This woman you gave me, Lord. Who's the snake? The snake's like, well, I've got nothing to point to. I've got nothing to point with.

But the Holy Spirit draws us to fellowship over and over again. And walking in the light constantly causing us to be thankful always. We don't offer sacrifices, but we're constantly coming to the Lord with thanks, or we should be at least. I've shared this story before, but it always bears repeating.

In the mornings on the way to school, I take my daughters, I take Abby to school, and Evelyn, our five-year-old, isn't in school yet, but she comes with us. And we pray. We pray on the way to school. We've been praying for Peggy Harris all this time. It's really cute. I say, what do we have to pray about? Peggy Harris! That's the first thing out of their mouths. We've got to pray for Peggy. And then they have to think really hard about any other prayer request. But we always have Peggy Harris. But Evelyn always prays like this. Thank you for this day. Thank you for the Lord. Thank you that you're going to heal Peggy Harris. Thank you for whatever... Every prayer request is prepended with thank you. Thank you for this thing that you're going to do, Lord.

Now, does she understand the construct of everything she's praying? Maybe not. But as an adult, it's humbling to hear my precious little girl say thank you at the beginning of all the prayer request items. And as believers, thank you for not having sacrifices. Thank you for sending the ultimate sacrifice and thank you for letting me learn and grow in this context and thank you over and over again.

So walking in the light is pretty radical and different from walking under the law. So he talks about fellowship as we continue on in this passage. He says that we have fellowship... I'm looking at the clocks and I'm not even touching the... we'll see how far we get. Light as He is Himself is in the light. So we're having fellowship with Him there in that context. We have fellowship with one another. I had to make another chart, but this one's not in your handout.

But the idea is that we have fellowship with God on the innermost part, on the innermost circle of our relationship. It's first fellowship with God, then fellowship with the body, and then the consequence of that is outreach to the world. That's not inherent directly in verse 7, that we have an outreach to the world, but he's going to come into that later on in the book of John. But the first part is the fellowship with God.

The next part is fellowship with the body. And I've got some other verses on there, and because of time, I think we won't go through all of them. Make a note, well it's already in some of this here, You see on the handout on page two, there's a bullet point list that says inclusive qualities of fellowship. There are a bunch of Bible verses in there. Some of them are on this chart here. I would strongly recommend that you take a look at those.

Roger just mentioned Romans 12.9. Romans 12 is actually very much about this model. Verse 1 of Romans 12 says that by the Holy Spirit we offer our lives as a living sacrifice, or a true and worthy sacrifice.

And then he talks about our relationship with God, and then he talks about the outer circle of how the body is supposed to grow and interact with one another. And then the end of Romans chapter 12, particularly in verse 18, he talks about having an impact on the culture and the world around us on the outside of that. But when we have this fellowship with God, it can't stay internal. It doesn't just stay internal, it impacts other relationships outward. As is typical when we study God's Word, we find there's this constant pattern and reminder to be intimate as a body, to know one another and have fellowship and relationship with one another.

He continues on in the verse And he says, and the blood of Jesus' Son cleanses us from all sin. Now, what is the context, before we get into these questions, what is the context for this blood that cleanses us from all sin? Is that every time we have fellowship the blood cleanses us from sin? Is that what he's saying? I think the answer to that is no. I hope that's obvious, but at the same time, I just want to make sure that you know that's not what he's saying. He's talking about by having fellowship with God, the first time, when we're saved, the blood cleanses us from all sin. And every time we sin after that, does the blood still cover that sin? How many sins does the blood cover? All the sins. It's covering all sins.

The Greek is really explicit about it. You can't mess around with it. When we get into verse 9 next week, somebody else is going to get to talk about the fact that it cleanses us from all unrighteousness. There's this pattern that John is using. Which of your sins is too much for Christ's blood to have covered? None of them. There's not one that is not covered in this context. He uses the word all because he means the word all in verse 9. And he uses the plural in 7 when he cleanses us from all sins in 7 as well.

Any more thoughts on that? We're kind of running short, but I do want to ask the last question on here because I think it's really important. Was Christ's death only substitutionary? And the answer to that is a resounding no. Why was it not just substitutionary? The reason I ask this, and I probably want to beat this to death more than some other questions, is because when I went to seminary, all I heard about over and over and over again was the substitutionary atonement of Christ's work on the cross.

Which is awesome. Don't get me wrong. That's pretty amazing. Christ went as a substitute for me. But what else happened? What's the other half of Christ's work on the cross that we get so excited about? He satisfied His Father's righteousness. Okay, He did. But He took us with Him. He took us with Him. We were identified with Him in His death, burial, resurrection, ascension and seating.

That's the thing that blows me away. If you just hear about substitutionary atonement, you're like, well, I really owe Jesus as much money as I have because he paid everything else. Unless you recognize, I was identified with him. That cross was packed full of hopefully millions upon billions of people that were identified with him on the cross. And that grave was packed full of people who were identified with him. It's a big difference between just substitutionary with the cleansing of blood, but also the idea that we were identified with Him in that.

Alright, so he continues on in verse 8. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. Who has the right to declare the moral standards for the whole universe? God. So who has the right to say that they have no sin? No one. God has the right for the whole universe. He has the right for the individual to say, this is what I expect in righteousness.

We don't have time to read the passage. How many of you have read Romans chapter 1 within the last several years? Remember the second half of Romans chapter 1? He gets really graphic in describing a long list of sins. And he closes by saying, and all those people who are doing the sins want you to join in with them. Come on. Do this thing with me. If we all do it together, then God can't hold all of us accountable, because it would be too many people walking in sin, and that would just not be fair. The heart of man suppresses God.

Romans 1.18 says they suppress their knowledge of God. And they've traded their idea for God for the creation. They took the Creator and said, not interested.

Really love the creation. We're way better. Like last week, I think Gail said, roughly the equivalent of God made man in His image and man returned the favor, which is the McClain quote. But the thing is that you have this pattern of, if we say we have no sin, I've got no sin, I've had people tell me that. How many of you have had people tell you that? Right.

I don't sin. I don't believe in sin. That was my favorite. I don't believe in sin. Past the cocaine. I don't believe in sin. Pardon me while I go hire this prostitute. I don't believe in sin. I'm going to do all these things that feed me and make me feel good about myself. Because I am pretty awesome. I figured that out. Or are we allowed to say that we have no sin? And John doesn't think that's a good idea. There's a really buggy verse here. There's a buggy verse here? And it seems counter to this.

You're going to get to it, but in 3.9 it says, whoever has been born of God does not sin. Or as it remains in it, he cannot sin, because he has been born of God. It's out of context and all that, but anyway, just jump on ahead. This is actually one of the most touchy verses in the whole book, and we're going to get to it. We're going to explore it in its context. This is where the position and condition thing is really critical as well, because he's going to be talking about those things.

My most commented blog post on my website is a blog post I wrote about, are we sinners? Are we still called sinners? Does God see us as sinners? And the answer is, positionally, before Christ, or before God and Christ, no. Do we still sin? Yes, but we are not sinners. We are sanctified. We are called righteous in Christ. And this is one of those verses in John 3 where he says, hey, we don't sin if we're abiding. In context of abiding, we're not sinning.

It's a big deal. We're going to have to tackle that, because that's going to need its own lesson. I haven't looked at the schedule, but that one's going to need to have... If we say we have no sin, is that the same thing as saying, if we say we don't sin, I don't sin? Is that saying the same thing?

He is saying that the human being outside of Christ, before salvation, is saying, I don't have sin. I am not unrighteous. I do not need a redeemer. So this is the unsaved saying they don't have sin, not the believer. John writes this in a plural first person, and he's saying these things about himself but the whole world.

We're not talking about sins here, we're not talking about acts of sin, we're talking about sin nature. That's right, that's good. We do not have, if we say we don't have a sin nature, this is singular. Right, exactly, that's one of the keys. That's the key here, to understanding that if we say we don't have a sin nature, a nature to sin, then we're lying. That's a huge difference from saying that we don't commit sins. We recognize we commit sins.

But this passage is saying, if we say we have not a sin nature, I'm making it verbal. Yes. And that's an important thing is the context of that. When we get into 3.9, it's going to be one of those greeky weeks. So we have to look at the sentence construct and see what he's referring to in that context. But Roy points out appropriately, if we say that we have no sin, there is no sin, I don't have a sin nature, there's no sin inside of me, we're deceiving ourselves. And I think the deceiving ourselves is a really interesting problem.

Romans 1.18, he says we suppress our knowledge of God What is self-deception about? Self-deception is one of those times where we have convinced ourselves of something.

It's funny, it's actually the way that most of the world describes faith. It's not based on reality, it's based on a, I hope so, and I want this to be this way. Faith is actually in the facts. It's not just hypothetical, touchy-feely business. Self-deception here, I am saying that I have no sin, because I really hope it's true, because if I have sin, then we've got a big problem we've got to deal with.

But I don't like the idea of God. I've got Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion. I have only been able to read the first three and a little bit of four chapters because it is so, so ignorant and it makes a bunch of broad assumptions and it says, look at the Crusades! Those people called themselves Christians and they killed people. All religion is stupid.

That's like a logical jump that is mind-boggling to me. Just because someone calls themselves something doesn't mean that they actually represent the ideals of that something. Just because somebody does something doesn't mean that is consistent with the teachings of the scriptures. He does these crazy leaps of logic.

He is self-deceived, but he's got a lot of people that are cheering him on. Anything but that. closing because we're out of time here. He says we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. What is truth? And of course this is unclasped by itself. Pilate said it.

Epistemology is the philosophical study of what is truth and how do we know what we know. 1 John verses 1 and 14. 1 tells us in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God. 14 tells us that the Word was truth and that the Word was Christ. Truth, as a principle and as an idea, gets its source and its origin and is defined in God. You can't define truth outside of God without it being a lesser idea.

Our culture has embraced the idea of relativism. Relativism says that you have your truth and I'll have my truth. And we'll have our separate truths. And never between shall meet. And what does relativism breed? Not unity. It's divisive. The other problem with relativism is that moral standards are make-believe and fictional and completely subjective to us.

I want to do this and since I am the authority of what is moral in my life, it's okay. But John says these people, they are self-deceived and they don't have the truth in them. If you don't have the truth, you have nothing to measure your own life by. If you're measuring stick, it's broken, and really inaccurate. And if you've ever measured things with inaccurate measures, you get some interesting pancakes, or you get some interesting recipes, or you get interesting lives, because the standard is not God's word and God's righteousness.

It's ourselves, and then it gets funky. We're out of time. I should close. We should pray. But next week... Is it Bob? I wasn't sure what the schedule was. So Bob gets to tackle 9. And 10. And Bud is just waiting for us to talk about 9. Actually by this time he's already told me he's done talking about 9. He's decided about 10 now.

Let's go before the Lord. Heavenly Father, we ask that you just draw these truths to our mind this week as we meditate on your word and we continue to grow together. Lord, I do pray for fellowship within this body and intimacy as brothers and sisters in Christ. And Lord, I just want to pray for the edification of this body through the truth of your word. And we thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.