Things That Hinder Fellowship | Part 1

From the Love Worth Finding studios in Memphis, Tennessee, I'm Byron Tyler here with Kerry Vaughn, the CEO of Love Worth Finding.

Kerry, today Adrian Rogers starts a new series, The Sweetest Fellowship, This Side of Heaven. You know, we're all in the people business. No matter what we do, how we do it, even ministry, you're in the people business, I'm in the people business.

You know what? It is all about fellowship. Well, Adrian Rogers was asked that question one time, what is the Sweetest Fellowship, This Side of Heaven? And he had this to say. Jesus said, the two greatest commandments are these, to love me. And the second is equally as important, to love people, right? To stay right vertically, right?

And to stay right horizontally. And that's, boy, that's easy to teach. It's hard to live out. It really is. I remember Adrian Rogers saying too many times that fellowship was two fellows in the same ship. You remember that?

Yeah. But when asked about this series and the importance of fellowship, he had this to say. Well, the Bible says that's very, very important. As a matter of fact, the scripture says we are not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together, but we're to be exhorting one another and so much the more as we see the day approaching. Now, I need to be exhorted. You need to be exhorted. We all need to be exhorted, and especially in these closing days as we see the day of the Lord coming, because Christians are going to be bombarded from every side with accusations, temptations, misunderstandings. And we need to exhort one another. I need to be able to say to my brother, my sister, be of good courage. Love the Lord. Jesus is coming. I love you, brother.

I love you, sister. And as we do that to one another, we become strong in the Lord. The Bible never teaches a lone ranger Christianity. We are the people of God, the church.

Now, you can push an individual brick around, but it's hard to push a temple, a building around. We need one another. We stand beside one another, on one another, under one another, and together we have strength in Jesus. Here as we start off this new series about fellowship, there's a message in the beginning here, things that hinder fellowship, part one. And, you know, there are those times that we may feel distant from God. It could be due to our sin. Adrian Rogers says our sins are the secret faults that cause moral earthquakes. And I've seen that in my life sometimes. Well, absolutely. And he also said that God will never leapfrog sin to bless anything. Or I'll say it a different way. If there's sin in the camp, God will not bless it.

Oh, yeah. And so we need to remove it and get back in right relationship with Him and get back in right relationship with others. Well, it's a trap that we can fall into if we don't deal with our sin. I mean, whether we think it's a big sin or just a small sin, it can lead us to believe in our own lies. And that's a big trap.

It's a big trap. And, of course, 1 John 1 says this, if we confess those sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us. That's the best part from all unrighteousness. Well, Kerry, we always enjoy hearing from our listeners. I believe you have somebody who has recently written into love we're finding.

Absolutely. One of my favorite ones. It says, I enjoy these broadcasts and I'm thankful for the sound instruction and gentle correction. Nowadays, too many ministries twist the Bible. Thank you for your faithfulness to Jesus and to His Word. That's so encouraging.

Well, that is great. I mean, that is really the essence of Love Worth Finding is that we broadcast the Word of God and we stand on the promises of God. Well, with today's message, things that hinder fellowship, part one, here's Adrian Rogers. Would you take God's Word and be finding 1 John? That's back near the book of the Revelation. And we're studying the book of 1 John.

It's a short book, only five chapters. We're entitling this study, The Sweetest Fellowship This Side of Heaven. And when you do what John tells you, the only way that it can get sweeter is for us just to cut out and go to glory. But we're learning how to have fellowship, the sweetest fellowship this side of heaven. And today we're going to be looking at things that hinder fellowship.

And, you know, we can have the potentiality for fellowship, but we can let things come into our lives that will defraud us of the fellowship that is our heritage in the Lord Jesus. A little boy went into a drug store and asked if he could borrow the telephone. The druggist said, fine. And the little boy dialed the grocery store in this little town. And when the grocer answered, he said, do you need a stock clerk, somebody who can come in and stock the shelves and carry the packages and so forth and sweep the floor? And the man said, no, we already have a boy who does that. And he says, well, does he do a good job?

Maybe you need someone else. Maybe he's not adequate. And the grocer said, no, he's very adequate.

We're very satisfied with the boy that we have. The little fellow said, well, thank you. And he hung up. And the druggist said, well, he said, I'm sorry, son, that you didn't get the job. No, he said, you don't understand.

I already have the job over there. I was just checking up on myself. I wanted to see if he really appreciated me. Now, what I want you to do today is to check up on yourself and see if there is in your heart and in your life something that is keeping you from having the sweetest fellowship this side of heaven. That something is most likely sin.

It is secret faults that cause moral earthquakes. And we're going to be talking today about secret faults, things that we hide, things that we disguise, things that keep us from fellowship with God. We will now, chapter one and verse five. This then is the message which we have heard of him and declare unto you that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his son cleanseth us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.

And the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all, and I love that word all, from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

My little children, these things write unto you that ye sin not, and if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father Jesus Christ the righteous, that he is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. And hereby we do know that we know him if we keep his commandments. He that saith I know him and keepeth not his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth his word in him verily is the love of God perfected. Hereby know we that we are in him.

He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked. Now, we're talking about things that keep us from fellowship, primarily secret faults, hidden sins. You know, the Bible is the only book in the world that has the answer to the problem of sin, and the way to deal with sin primarily with specificity is to recognize sin for what it is. We have a generation today that doesn't even like the word sin. The word sin is out of date. About the only sin today is to call sin, sin.

We want to call sin anything. We want to call it a mistake, a misjudgment, but Jesus did not die for errors. He did not die for mistakes. He did not die for misjudgments.

Jesus died for sin. Now, we live in a day of behavioristic psychology, where the psychologist says that we're just a sum total of our genes and chromosomes and environment, and so man is not wicked. He's weak. He's not sinful. He's sick. He's not evil.

He is ill. And so therefore, we never really deal with the problem because we never really get to the root of the problem. We've been spurred on by evolution. We've been taught that man was not created, that he evolved from some primordial soup. They never tell us where the soup came from, but we have sort of, from a one-cell organism, that life spontaneously began in some primordial soup. Well, if that's true, we've come from soup to nuts.

I can tell you that. Man did not evolve. Man was created in the image of God, and man sinned willfully. And sin is not an accident.

It's not an incident. It is high treason against God. You see, if you don't understand sin for what it is, you will never ever deal with sin and understand the remedy that God has provided. If you think that sin is merely a problem to be fixed, you're going to be looking for a cure rather than forgiveness and cleansing. You're going to try to compensate for sin or commiserate with sin, but thank God for 1 John that tells us how to deal with the sin problem and to have fellowship with God. Folks, I'm telling you, the boys and girls in school today and many of our adults, as I've seen by watching television, have lost the concept of sin today.

They don't understand what sin is. The evolutionist says we're just on our way upward and, you know, time will kill the beast within us. Just give us time and we will progress on and on.

Well, I'm not a cousin of King Kong, and you can believe that if you want to. Education says that what we need to do is just educate people. If we get more learning, then we'll be able to deal with the sin problem. Is that true? What about Nazi Germany? They were highly educated, the Nazis. What is happening on some of our universities today?

They have become cesspools of sin and higher learning at the same time. When I was in college, I had a professor who taught psychology and logic. I admired him very much. He was one of the most intelligent men I've ever met.

He had a brain full, but he committed suicide, my college professor. Science says that perhaps by genetic engineering we can just breed this thing out of man until finally we create the bionic woman and the superman and a different race. And we're actually trying to do that now with genetic engineering, and parents are trying to arrange the... prearrange the birth of the children. The sociologist says, well, we'll just change the environment, and then man will be better. Well, if this is true, we would expect people who live in the best environment not to be bothered with sin.

But that's just not true. Sin is no respecter of environment, whether it's the ghetto or the high rise. And I remind you that man fell in the Garden of Eden.

You can't have a better environment than that. The psychologist and the psychiatrist are just saying, well, these are feelings that we've generated within ourselves, and we need to get rid of the guilt feelings. That's not the guilt feelings we need to get rid of. It's the guilt that causes the feelings. Thank God for this word. I'm telling you, folks, listen to me.

Listen to me. The only book, the only book, the only book, the only book that has the answer to the sin problem is God's Word. Now, this is what we're dealing with today is the sin problem.

It is the secret faults that cause the moral earthquakes. Now, how does God deal with sin? Well, when I receive Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, when I repent of my sin, I trust him.

I receive by faith the Lord Jesus Christ. I am born again, and then as a result of that, sin judicially, judicially, now listen to the word, judicially, legally, is dealt with forever and ever. Hebrews 8, verse 12, For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness and their sins and their iniquities. I will remember no more. When you get saved, every sin past, present, and future is buried in the grave of God's forgetfulness.

Now, you need to understand that. Isaiah, chapter 43, and verse 25, I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake. I will not remember thy sins.

Folks, that's good news. That is the gospel of grace. Jeremiah 31, verse 34, For I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more. Isaiah 1, 18, Come now and let us reason together, saith the Lord, though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow, though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. Now, when God says that he will remember our iniquities no more, does that mean that God cannot recall them?

No, no, no. God is not talking about an intellectual remembrance. God says, I will remember their sin against them no more. God remembers our sin, but he remembers them as sins that have been forgiven and therefore forgotten as sins. And in the same way, I can never forget the sin that I have committed intellectually, but when I remember that sin, I don't remember it as a sin held against me. I remember it as a sin forgiven and forgotten by the grace of God.

Thank God for that. Now, that's the way God deals with us judicially. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin. If God would have put one half of one sin on my judicial record, one half of one sin would be enough to damn me and doom me forever. Therefore, I cannot behave my way into heaven. If I'm going to be saved, I've got to be saved by the grace of God.

You agree with that. Now, that's the way God deals with our sins judicially. But then how does God deal with our sins day by day?

If I'm saved by grace and kept by grace and no sin will ever be brought up against me anymore and my sin is buried in the grave of God's forgetfulness, how does God deal with me, Adrian, day by day when I'm proud or arrogant or when I tell a lie, when I exaggerate, when I have a lustful look, how does God deal with me day by day? Not as judge, but as father. As father. Now, we're not talking about legal judgment, but we're talking about in this chapter God dealing with us in a parental way. You see, we have two vital relationships as a Christian.

One is sonship. When I'm born into the family of God, sonship is established and sonship will never change. In a parallel way, I was born into the Rogers family. Nothing can ever undo that. Conceived, born, I am a Rogers.

I'm Adrian Rogers. When the sun, the moon, the stars have grown cold, what happened when I was born still is an event. It can never, ever be undone. That's the way it is when you're born again, that once you're born into the family of God, you're in the family of God. That relationship we call sonship, but there's another relationship that can change and that is called fellowship. Now, John here is not talking about sonship. John here is talking about fellowship. You see, I am my father's son and when I was growing up, I always had relationship, but I didn't always have fellowship. There'd be times when my dad would tell me to do thus and thus or not to do thus and thus and I would do what he told me not to do and didn't do what he told me to do and there would be sometimes a rupture in fellowship and my dad would carry me out. We didn't have a woodshed, but we did have a pump house.

Carry me out to the pump house and apply the board of education to the seed of knowledge. My dad, don't get the wrong idea, he never whipped us on an empty stomach. He just turned us over. And there's where he did it. Now, he did that because he loved me. As a matter of fact, the Bible says, whom the father loves, he chastens and scourges every son whom he receives. Sonship is established by birth. Fellowship by conduct. Now, what John is talking about here in this book and the forgiveness of sin and the cleansing of our daily sins, he's not dealing with us as judge, but he is dealing with us as father.

This is the way that the father deals with his son. For example, look, if you will, in verse 3. That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you that you may have fellowship with us. And truly, our fellowship is with the father and with his son, Jesus Christ. So he's not talking about judicial or legal forgiveness here.

He's talking about parental forgiveness. Even as Jesus Christ taught us when he taught us to pray, our father forgive us our trespasses. You see, this is a family prayer. We're talking now about how to have fellowship with God. Many of you are saved.

You're on the way to heaven, but you're going second class because you are not enjoying that fellowship, that koinonia that we were talking about so long ago. Now, having set the stage, I want us to see now how we can restore that fellowship, how we can get rid of those secret faults, those hidden sins that divide us from the father's smile and the father's face and have that sweet, wonderful fellowship with God. Now, the first thing I want you to see is how God convicts of sin, how the father convicts of sin. Notice in verse 5, look at it. This then is the message which we have heard of him and declared unto you that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another. And the blood of Jesus Christ his son cleanseth us from all sin. Now, take your Bible and I want you to look at some verses here.

Look at the times he talks about lying here. Look in verse 6. If we say that we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie, just to underscore that. Then look, if you will, in verse 8. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

Then look in verse 10. If we say that we do not sin, we make him a liar. Each time he says, if we say, if we say, if we say. Now, what he's saying is this. We're saying one thing and doing another. We are pretending here. And what he's talking about here is what I want to call the evolution of a lie.

I want you to notice the three steps that follow each one of these if we say. First of all, we may lie to deny sin, verses 5 and 6. If we say we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie. Now, that's what happens in church.

I mean, here we are. Every one of you looks so holy. Every one of you looks so clean. Each looks so happy in Jesus. But do you think everyone has his or her heart right with God this morning?

They're not. I've been preaching long enough to know that is not true. I've been preaching long enough to know that people can come in church, hold a Bible in their hands, sing the songs, nod their heads and say amen, and down in their heart, things are not right. If we say we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie.

There's some living lies sitting on seats in this building this morning. And you know in your heart that you are playing a game. You're playing the church game. You're playing a role.

But that's what happens. We get sin in our hearts. It may be big, it may be small, but it is there. And we come to church. We go to Sunday school. We teach the class. We sing in the choir. We do whatever we do. But there's that secret fault.

There's that secret fault. If we say that we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie. Now, what happens when a man does that? After he does that for a while, do you know what happens to him? He gets to believing his own lie.

Now, notice what he says here. Look at the next step here in verse 8. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. When you set out to deceive somebody else, do you know who you're going to deceive most of all? You are going to deceive yourself. And a man who deceives himself is, well, he's on the verge of a mental breakdown.

When a man cannot even believe himself, when he blurs the distinction between light and dark, between truth and the lie, and there are many of you who have begun to say to yourself, after you've stonewalled God for a while and after you have moved in and out of the fellowship and nothing seems to happen, you still sing in the choir, you still teach the Sunday school class, you still are in the congregation, you still shake hands, you still buddy with all the people, what do you say? Well, maybe it's not sin at all. Maybe I'm all right. Maybe it was just an error.

Maybe it's psychological idiosyncrasy. Or maybe God doesn't call that a sin, and maybe I am a pretty good fellow. And so you begin to smooth over your sin, and the second step in the evolution of a lie, first of all, we deceive others. Then we deceive ourselves. And then finally, we lie to God. We lie to others, then we lie to ourselves, and then we lie to God.

Look, if you will, here, down in verse 10. He says here, if we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. Well, you see, when we call God a liar, we're the ones who's lying. Isn't that true? Because God cannot lie.

And so God brings us under conviction, and we say, oh, no, no, God, you're wrong. It was a mistake. It was an error. It was a glandular malfunction.

It was the environment. It is legitimate resentment. It is righteous indignation, whatever it is. And we don't let the Holy Spirit of God convict us of that sin. First of all, we lie to others, then we lie to ourselves, and then we have the unmitigated gall and audacity to stonewall God and to lie to Almighty God.

We lie to deny sin, we lie to deceive self, and we lie to defy the Savior. Now, when we do that, fellowship is completely broken. It is gone. We have stepped out of the light. We're over in the darkness. Now, how does God bring us back? Well, God will not bring us back unless we expose ourselves to the light.

You stay over here in the darkness, there will never be any conviction. But if you as a child of God will just step back into the light, God will shine the light of His holiness upon your life, and God will bring you under conviction. And coming up tomorrow, we'll hear part two of this important message. But maybe today you have questions about who Jesus is, what He means to you, how you can begin a relationship with God through Christ. Go to our Discover Jesus page at lwf.org slash radio, and you'll find resources and materials that will answer questions you may have about your faith. Again, go to lwf.org slash radio and click Discover Jesus. Now, if you'd like to start receiving daily devotions and links to our program, make sure you sign up for our daily heartbeat emails at lwf.org slash radio. And we hope you'll join us for part two of Things That Hinder Fellowship, coming up next time right here on Love Worth Finding.