BaptistWay Bible Study for Texas for Dec. 7: Jesus the only fix for broken lives_112403

Posted: 11/24/03

Dec. 7

1 John 1:1-2:2

Jesus the only fix for broken lives

By Gary Long

Consider for a moment your favorite restaurants. No matter the cuisine, what do they have in common that makes them your favorite? The common thread between my favorite restaurants is more than the taste of the food and quality of the service–it is the experience I have there.

The word is “organoleptic.” It means that something is known and understood through multiple senses. To experience a favorite restaurant fully is to savor the food, to smell the varieties coming from the kitchen, to take in sights that stimulate the eyes, to hear the music in the background or the voice of a close friend, and to feel the textures of a nice napkin or a sturdy coffee cup.

Such was the experience of the Johannine community as they sought to describe their experience of Jesus. For the first time in history, God became touchable and seeable, as well as hearable. No longer was God narrowly accessible only through the temple and high priests. Now God was something to experience personally!

Linked closely to the gospel of John, the community from which 1 John emerged certainly would have in their corporate memory, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). The reality of God becoming human was something the writer of 1 John could hardly express, much less contain. It was more powerful than human comprehension could take in. Like trying to describe our favorite restaurant, they could only use words of sensory experience because God had become “really real.”

Emphasizing this reality was meant to serve a dual purpose: (1) Harkening the advent of God moving in a new way and (2) restraining the heresy that Jesus was not really human or was somehow “less” than human.

Advent of Jesus signals a new way

These two purposes offer up an applicable message for us too. Clearly, the epistle is seeking to build unity among believers around the truth of Jesus' identity as God incarnate. Moreover, not only do verses 1-4 provide boundaries for the makeup of Christian community (that is to say, Christians have the distinct belief that Jesus is God in the flesh), but the passage also informs our development as Christians.

It's like this: If we believe we should attempt to live like God, and Jesus was fully God, then we are to live in the light of Jesus' ways. It's really rather simple. If we want to live like God, we should live like Jesus lived. God's advent in the person of Jesus signaled the beginning of a new time and a new way of being the people of God, both for the Johannine community and for us. The difficulty arises in discerning how we ought to live like Jesus in our culture because certainly the ways of living in the dominant culture of American society run counter to many of the distinctly Christian ways of living.

If we seek to live in accord with Jesus' way of being light in the world, we ought to consider some things. For example, as 1 John says later, Christians are to be known by their love. Further, nearly all Christians I've met agree our love is to be patterned after Jesus' kind of loving. Yet I would submit that most of us have a poorly formed understanding of Jesus' kind of love.

We freely interchange several concepts in our use of the word “love.” I love pizza, and I love the Tar Heels, but that certainly is not the same as “I love my son, Caleb.” What's more, as Philip Kenneson suggests in his book on the fruit of the spirit titled “Life on the Vine,” we dole out and receive love as if it is a marketplace exchange. We assign values to everything in our culture, including other people, and in so doing we “love” others only to the extent that they offer us something in return.

Henlee Barnette once spoke, “Love pursues the good of 'the other.'” For us to live in the light of Jesus as fully God means we must relearn some basic teachings of Christianity, and one of those ideals is to love as Jesus loves. Instead of ending our commitments to one another in marriages, friendships or church memberships because we no longer perceive that we are getting something from the exchange (that is to say, we no longer “feel loved”), we must willingly confess we have decided to stop willing what is best for “the other” and admit we have ceased to love.

Restraining heresy

The occasion for this epistle includes the need to combat heresy. The church was struggling to understand who Jesus was in his nature as God. Was Jesus mostly human with some God-like qualities? Was Jesus fully God and not really human, only appearing phantom-like as a human? What John most wants to say in this chapter is that somehow, beyond our comprehension, Jesus was at once both “one with man, and (in some sense) one with God.”

If you can get a Christian to be honest, she will confess to struggling with this very issue. There is no way to begin to describe the perfect blending of God and humanity that we see exhibited in Jesus, yet we try. And it is important to clarify what we believe about Jesus, for I am convinced that how we answer the question of who Jesus is determines the foundation of our faith as Christians.

When Jesus asked his disciples who they thought he was, they proclaimed him the Messiah. He ordered them to keep his identity a secret at that time. However, when we arrive at the time of 1 John, it is clear it is a matter for proclamation and an issue of doctrinal debate. The conclusion one reached determined whether “fellowship” (1:3, 6, & 7) could be forged. This is because the writer viewed the individual's assent to Jesus as fully God and fully human as a sign of “fellowship” with the Father through Jesus, as well as a criteria for fellowship in the church.

Ultimately, orthodox Christianity came to confess Jesus as the messiah, the Christ. 1 John ascribes this title indirectly with the phrase “word of life” (v. 1), echoing the high Christology of the prologue to the Gospel of John (1:1-15) and making clear that Jesus as Christ was from the beginning with God and intimately related to God. Jesus existed from limitless eternity and has entered into the plane of history to dwell among us. Indeed, as the deep meaning of the haunting hymn “O Come, O Come Immanuel” proclaims: God is with us.

The “message” 1 John wants us to receive deserves special note, that “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all” (v. 5). This message serves not only as an introductory appetizer to the rest of the epistle, it also serves as the wellspring from which our Christian ethic might emerge. Take note of the use of “light” and the interconnectedness between walking in light and experiencing righteousness. God is light, we are children of the light and we should therefore walk in the light.

The Johannine community would probably have heard this message and recalled their Jewish ancestors' experiences with God as fire. In Exodus 3, Moses experiences God as fire. On the exodus from Egypt, the Israelites are guided by God's presence as a column of fire. God's presence in the tabernacle is signaled by fire. Simeon hails the birth of Jesus as “light for revelation” (Luke 2:32), John the Baptist applies the light metaphor to Jesus (John 3:19-21), and Jesus himself claims, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12).

Walking in this “light” is a demanding thing, as already highlighted in the challenge to consider our understanding of “love” toward one another. But walking in the light also produces righteousness in us. This is not a “works-righteousness” but rather it is the effect of walking with Jesus. We strive to be more like Jesus, and in so doing recognize our sinfulness. We confess our sinfulness, and “he who is faithful will forgive us our sins” (v. 9). The point is clear: We need forgiveness. Being in the light of Jesus helps us recognize that truth, and then the abundance of grace is given us when we seek restoration.

Unlike the majority of Paul's work, which is centered on freedom from sin as freedom from the law, the debate concerning sin that 1 John addresses wasn't really about whether certain things were sinful or not. It was really about whether or not sin mattered or even existed. 1 John would have us believe sin does exist and does matter in this world. The Gnostics of that day argued sin didn't matter because the moral world of the flesh didn't matter. Sin was inconsequential.

This is not too different from our context today in which there is a deep and wide hunger for things spiritual, but not so much concern over whether the human condition must be remedied. Self-help books fly off the shelves, but few of the approaches to self help deal with the fallen nature of humans, and if they do deal with the “brokenness” of individuals, the methods of self help are supposed to be “fueled from within” by a person's own strength.

1 John would have none of this. 1 John informs us clearly that the problem is sin and no internal mechanism will fix us. Only the “atoning sacrifice” (2:2) of Jesus the Christ can redeem us and enable us to walk in the light.

Gary Long is pastor of Willow Meadows Baptist Church in Houston

Questions for discussion

Living in light of Jesus' way will call each of us ultimately to question our actions and attitudes. Would you evaluate your actions and attitudes as “other-directed” or “self-directed?” Somewhere in between?

Why do you think it was important to the writer of 1 John that there be unity around the nature of Jesus' divinity? What possible conflicts could arise when a church does not agree on who Jesus is?

How might our Christmas shopping and gift giving be changed by seeking to live in the light of Jesus' ways?

Consider the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22). To what degree do you bear each of these fruits toward others? How might evidence of these fruits in the life of the believer illustrate how we do or do not live in accordance with Jesus' ways?

Identify several movies or books that have as a baseline assumption that humans are intrinsically fallen or that humans are intrinsically good. For example, compare “Natural Born Killers” with “The Matrix,” or compare “The Lord of the Flies” with “Robinson Crusoe.”