1 John in Greek

The following are videos going through the Greek of 1 John verse by verse:

Introduction
1 John 1:1
1 John 1:2
1 John 1:3
1 John 1:4

God is Light
1 John 1:5
1 John 1:6
1 John 1:7
1 John 1:8
1 John 1:9
1 John 1:10

Our Advocate
1 John 2:1
1 John 2:2
1 John 2:3
1 John 2:4
1 John 2:5
1 John 2:6

The New/Old Commandment
1 John 2:7
1 John 2:8
1 John 2:9
1 John 2:10
1 John 2:11
1 John 2:12
1 John 2:13
1 John 2:14
1 John 2:15
1 John 2:16
1 John 2:17

The Last Hour
1 John 2:18
1 John 2:19
1 John 2:20
1 John 2:21
1 John 2:22
1 John 2:23
1 John 2:24
1 John 2:25
1 John 2:26
1 John 2:27

Children of God
1 John 2:28
1 John 2:29
1 John 3:1

Sermon Starters: No Fear in Love

I gave a very brief wedding charge yesterday. The couple was already married legally so the service was really a community commitment and celebration of what was already the case in the eyes of the law.

But since my brief talk could be made into a fuller sermon, here is the basic flow:

Text: 1 John 4:7-8, 16, 18
Key Verse: "There is no fear in love because perfect love casts out fear.
Key Idea: There is no need for fear in truly loving relationships

Our relationships with each other:

• Not just new or old marriages but all truly loving relationships
• The fear here is not fear of sickness, financial trouble, or nuclear war.
• It is about security in relationship and safety in commitment.
• We all mess up in relationships (give personal example or example you have heard of).
• Love means there's no need to fear when you forget to take out the trash or pick up toilet paper.
• People are quirky. We're strange. Some people are strange because they're just a little too normal.
• Of course there are times when we intentionally do wrong to those we love. This is intrinsically contrary to love and implies a lack of "perfection" in our love.
• True love can withstand even these storms. 1 Corinthians 13:7: "Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." Love is a commitment in addition to being a glue.
• Some of our habits can reflect a lack of attention to actions we could stop if we tried. We may forget certain things and thus not intentionally wrong on a specific occasion, but why haven't we been working to address our forgetfulness prior to that moment?
• Love covers a multitude of sins.

Our relationship with God

• These aspects of loving relationships also apply to our relationship with God.
• The context of 1 John 4 is actually about God rather than marriage.
• Before Christ, sin may be a matter of legality. After Christ, sin is a matter of relationship.
• We can wrong God unintentionally. But we have no reason to fear.
• Un-intention, however, can speak to something we should have been working on, if we fully loved God.
• Intentional sin against God is of course highly inappropriate. If we truly run back, however, like the Prodigal Son, we need have no fear that God will take us back.

Sermon Starters: God is greater than our hearts.

Did a short sermon for the SAGE evening service at College Wesleyan tonight. Here's the outline if it sparks some ideas for anyone.

Text: 1 John 3:18-24
"If our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts."

Introduction
I've always had a hunch that this verse didn't exactly mean what it meant to me. But I'm also convinced that God speaks to us most of the time this way through Scripture whether we really understand it or not.

As someone who grew up going to camp meetings two or three times a year, whose regular preachers were basically camp meeting style preachers, I spent a lot of my youth in endless introspection. I didn't have a lot of peace in those years.

This verse stood out to me--my "heart" seemed to repeatedly condemn me. But the verse held out hope to me. Even though I didn't feel peace, God was greater than my heart.

Point 1: God is greater than our heads.
It's difficult for us not to be in control. In America, many Americans feel completely out of control of what is happening in the country.

It is always an illusion when we think we are in control. The young often have great zeal, because they have the energy to fight every foe. I used Zwingli as an example of someone who thought everyone else was wrong but him, and he finally died in battle against the Roman Catholics. Paul himself was zealous like that before Jesus gently tapped him on the shoulder and redirected him.

Older people try to control by rules. They might even use the Bible to try to control things and make things certain. We often worry about people getting around the rules. We want to make sure there's no room in the rules for them to wiggle out.

But no one is fooling God. God knows all things. God knows what's really going on.

1 Samuel 16 - People look on what's happening on the outside. God looks on the inside.

Faith is the key. Faith is what truly defines sin (Rom. 14) and faith is what truly defines righteousness (Rom. 4). Not knowledge.

Point 2: God is greater than our hands.
Certainly God is greater than our sins (e.g., Prodigal Son). This is really what 1 John 3 meant here originally. If our hearts condemn us because we have not loved our brothers and sisters in the past, God is greater than our hearts. God has made a way for us to find atonement and forgiveness. God is greater than our sins.

But God is also greater than our weaknesses and imperfections. We in the holiness movement sometimes act like entire sanctification brings an Adamic perfection, as if we will make no mistakes or God condemns us for our mistakes.

But God is not looking for absolute perfection from us. God wants us to get an A in his class. He is not looking to fail us.

Mark 7 - God is not so much interested in what we touch on the outside. He's interested in what's going on in our motives and intentions.

Point 3: God is greater than our "hearts."
What I really heard in this verse was that God was greater than what I was feeling. Of course this is not what "heart" means in the Bible. The heart in the Bible is the seat of our true intentions and motives.

But it is certainly true that God is greater than our feelings. You might remember the old train from Campus Crusade: fact - faith - feeling. The idea was that even when we don't have feelings, the facts of the Bible stand.

In reality these all get mixed up. We don't actually have access to the facts without faith, and faith is a confidence in God, not merely a set of beliefs. Confidence is ultimately a choice, but it sure helps to have feelings behind it.

But when you are experiencing doubts:

• It's true, read the Scriptures. Read the prayers of the psalms. Trust in the facts of God's love for you.
• Prepare for times when you are not feeling the facts by creating a milestone journal. Write down your memories of those times when you experienced God the most. If your feelings ever begin to cloud the facts, read your milestone journal.
• If your feelings ever so cloud the facts and your past victories, remember that God often uses the body of Christ to have faith for us.

My professor David Seamands in seminary talked out how sometimes our antennae are not working. Somehow we've been knocked off the station. God often uses other Christians to fix the antenna, to get us back in tune.

Conclusion
I was surprised once to hear a story about a church leader I had considered a super-spiritual-hero as a child. I heard that at one point when he was very old, he lost his feeling of faith for a time. Another believer told the spiritual giant that he would have faith for him. This is a mystery. There are even times when God calls us to have faith for others.

There may be times in your spiritual life when your heart "condemns" you. In those times, remember that God is greater than your heart. He is greater than your head, your understanding. He is greater than your weaknesses. He is greater than your doubt.

He can even have faith for you.

Sin in 1 John

Some of you have heard it all before, but since I had to crank this out for some Sunday School literature, I thought I would share it.
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1 John has several things to say about sin, some of which may seem confusing at first. On the one hand, most contemporary Christians do not bat an eye when they read 1 John 1:8: “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” Christianity today is very accepting of sin as a regular feature in a believer’s life. Accordingly, many think this verse not only confirms the presence of sin in the Christian life; they see it as a strong rebuke to anyone who would suggest the contrary.

This same person might then get a bit confused when they get to 1 John 3:9: “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God.” “Wait a minute,” we think. “How can 1 John 3:9 and 1 John 1:8 be in the same book? These two verses seem to say exactly the opposite!

The first thing we need to keep in mind is that 1 John is not a textbook about what Christians believe. It is a real letter written for real people in a real situation. When John says things like, “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer” (3:15), both John and his audience pictured specific individuals in their minds. 1 John 2:19 clues us into the fact that this church had recently undergone a split. John says of those who left, “[T]hey did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us.”

So what does it mean to sin in this context? It does not mean, as we hear so often, “to miss the mark,” as if sin in 1 John referred to anything short of absolute perfection. 1 John itself tells us what it has in mind when it talks about sin: “All wrongdoing is sin” (5:17). Sin for John has to do with action, “doing” sin, doing wrong. In particular, it has to do with wronging others. “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?” (3:17).

John divides these “wrong doings” into two categories. First, he says, “If anyone sees his brother commit a sin that does not lead to death, he should pray and God will give him life” (5:16). Then John goes on: “There is a sin that leads to death. I am not saying that he should pray about that.” It is hard to know exactly what John means by “death” here, but in light of the recent church split, he probably means spiritual death. If so, then apparently some wrongdoing can completely sever our relationship with God. Other wrongdoing only harms it—that is if we confess it (1:9) or have godly brothers and sisters praying for us (5:16).

Who were these individuals who had committed sins that led to death? Most scholars think they belonged to a group called the Gnostics. Gnostics thought that the physical world was evil and so had difficulty believing that Jesus had truly taken on human flesh when he was on earth. John says, “Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God” (4:2-3).

The problems with this belief went deep. If Jesus did not die in the flesh, then you could not find forgiveness for your sins. You had no “atoning sacrifice” (2:2). We do not know exactly how the Gnostics might have answered this objection. It is just possible that they responded by saying, “We have not sinned” (1:10) or “We are without sin” (1:8). In other words, “We do not actually need Jesus’ death to atone for our sins.”

Now we have come full circle. 1 John 1:8 pictures someone who in effect denies any need for Christ’s atoning death in the first place, someone who says they have never sinned at all. 1:8 does not say, “If we claim to never sin.” The Greek says, “If we say we do not have sin.” It pictures someone who sees no need for Christ’s atonement in the first place. The verse is not about doing sin. It is about having sin from the past.

1 John 3:9 does not contradict this claim in any way. Rather, it states straightforwardly what the default Christian standard is. Those who are born of God do not sin (3:9; 5:18). Instead, those who are born of God practice righteousness (2:29). John is giving us the caption under a Christian’s picture. The caption should read “doer of righteousness,” not “doer of sin.”

Throughout 2:28-3:10, John uses the Greek present tense to make these comments, which gives them an ongoing or habitual sense. When he says the person born of God does not sin, he means that his or her lifestyle in general is not prone to doing wrong. Rather, it is prone to doing the right thing. What is the right thing? It is “the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another” (3:11).

1 John gives us the perfect balance in a Christian understanding of sinning. All have sinned; all have done wrong. Every single person needs Christ as an atoning sacrifice. At the same time, doing wrong is not the default mode for a believer. The very fact that we are born of God’s seed makes it obvious that wrongdoing should not be normal for a Christian. John writes so that the audience will not sin. “But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One” (2:1).