Baptistway Bible Study for Texas for Dec. 21: God’s children imitate Jesus_112403

Posted: 11/24/03

Dec. 21

1 John 2:28-3:10

God's children imitate Jesus

By Gary Long

In my home, the evening meal is as close to heaven as I can get this side of the grave. Several nights a week, our scattered family carves out time to come together and feast. We report on school, work and church. We laugh and joke. Sometimes we have good table manners, other times we have burping contests. (I know, I know, but a preacher has to cut loose somewhere.) We ask each other where we see God at work.

We also talk openly about hard topics. Nothing is out of bounds, no topic is “shushed,” because Traci and I want the family table to be a space where all are welcomed and all can become family, freely discussing the best and worst in life. My children are coming to know who they are as individuals and as a part of the Long family.

So it is in churches that eat together often. Kate Campbell sings about grieving Christians, “Funeral food, we sure eat good when somebody dies!” Tongue in cheek? Yes. True? Definitely. We have a strong theology of food in Baptist life, not just here in Texas, but all across the Bible Belt.

What is it about eating together that strengthens our body while nourishing our identity as the family of God? I think the power of the meal is not in the grub but in the intimacy of the eating act. Eating together is healing and restorative. There is something powerful about sitting down face to face and engaging in the most basic, primitive and essential act we humans do. We forge a tie and become closer at the table. As in our homes, we come to know who we are as children of God within the context of the family of God.

Claiming our spot at God's table–obedience

In this week's text, we find a great jumping off point for what it means to be the children of God. It certainly is more than eating at the table together. The defining characteristic of God's children is their love for one another, of finding our place at God's table, as well as making places at the table for others. More practically, though, this involves understanding our need for obedience to God.

What that obedience looks like is more difficult to grapple with, but 1 John 3 makes it plain that at least part of the battle is avoiding sin. Primarily, we see obedience to God can be achieved by imitating Jesus. One might argue so far as to say that the very reality of an individual's relationship to God is verified by the quality of our imitation of Jesus.

This passage makes unmistakably clear that Jesus came to eradicate (not merely combat) evil from the world. Twice the text succinctly asserts that Jesus' purpose in coming was to defeat sin powerfully and finally. First, in 3:5, “… he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin.” And later in 3:8, “… The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.”

Herein is no middle-ground solution, no compromise to the problem of humanity's complete depravity. The solution to the presence of evil in the world is Jesus utterly destroying evil. We interpret Jesus' work on the cross as well as his resurrection as doing just that–eradicating evil.

Although evil may still be present in the world, we Christians confess and profess by worship, work and witness that Jesus' kingdom shall be brought about ultimately and completely and that evil will finally have no reign in the world. It is when we obediently seek to imitate Jesus, conqueror of sin, that our lives become a part of the plan to eradicate sin and destroy the works of the devil also. Plainly, the children of God must do what is right according to God's commands.

Claiming our spot at God's table–heirs of hope

Jamie Lee Curtis wrote a children's book called “Tell Me About the Night I was Born.” In this story, an adopted child is told about how she came to be with her adoptive parents and the special place she holds in the family. I don't have any adopted children, but I do have three birth children. One night, I was reading this book to my middle child, and along the way I felt a strong need to clarify for him that I was his birth father.

Later introspection caused me to wonder why I had wanted him to know that. I think it was that I wanted him to know that he was “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone.” But I know that would be relatively unimportant to a 6 year old. But it was important to me for him to know he was of my “seed” and he would bear the genetic imprint of his father throughout his life, for better or for worse.

Isn't that rather like 1 John 3:9? Knowing that God's seed of righteousness is within makes all the difference. And in this case, having God's seed in our spiritual DNA is for better rather than for worse because the Holy Ghost encoding we receive is flawless and contains no hint of disease. If we were to obediently follow God's spirit in our lives at all times, we would truly be like Jesus. Of course, this is not possible. Sin still has sway.

We might do well to pair our proclivity for disobedience with the hope we have as through fully understanding what it means to be the children of God. The “hope” in 3:3 is a description of the Christian experience. Especially in this passage, the writer is making clear to us that the “hope” lies in knowing we are God's children. Being a child of God won't be “undone” or “reversed.” As surely as our parents could never deny our blood ties on the genetic level, God will not let us slip out of God's hand once we have been “born of him.”

Self-help righteousness

It is abundantly clear that anything good (“righteous” 2:29) that is in humanity is there because people follow in imitation of Jesus. “… Everyone who does right has been born of him.” In the phenomena of this “self-help” age, we are told through countless books on self-improvement that the secret to change lies within us. Although I concede they have done many good things for the Christian cause, Robert Schuller and Norman Vincent Peale have misled Christians to believe we have everything we need within us to be good people.

However, Christianity is based upon the very principle that we are totally sinful without any hope of fixing or repairing this breach ourselves. This is the meaning of “sin” in 3:4. The necessary conclusion is that we need the redemptive work of Jesus. The methods of self help or the “power of positive thinking” may make our lives better in some ways, but no amount of self help will enable us to overcome the fact that we sin. We are sinners, even the best of us.

“Christian Self-Help,” a shelf we see in some Christian book stores, seems oxymoronic when viewed this way, for no amount of “self help” can we apply to make things right between us and God. These books fail most often in that they treat sin as symptoms, much like the way a doctor can treat a cold. We manage the cough or the sniffles of the cold virus, but ultimately medicine cannot kill the common cold. In the same way, self-help methods that don't deal directly with the sin nature of humans will deal only with the symptoms–like your weight problem, troubled childhood or lagging self-esteem–but won't deal with the deep-down state of your being, chiefly a state of sin.

The good news is that we have hope. Our hope is that we shall one day be like Jesus, who, while fully human, was able to discern and accomplish God's will in total obedience. And that same Jesus was accepted by God and now stands as an advocate on our behalf, an advocate for all who would believe in Jesus. I can't wait for Jesus to show me my place at the great banquet table for all of God's children. Maybe you and I will be seated together for part of that meal.

Questions for discussion

As a class, discuss the difference between seeing sin as “acts of wrong” versus seeing sin as “a state of being.” How do you “manage” sin based on the different views?

In what ways are churches susceptible to corporate sin? How might churches avoid being lead astray theologically?

What guidelines does this text suggest for maintaining fellowship in a church?

What suggestions does this text give us for choosing and training leaders in our church?

If you understand our relationship to God as “adopted heirs of hope,” how might your study group share God's love with the lost? How might your church be transformed by fully recognizing their place as “adopted” children of God?