Living In Forgiveness - Part 1

Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ.

I want you to think about the way our culture works, even our evangelical culture. We're a whole generation of mistakers, not sinners. Hey, I just made a mistake. No, you sin. No, no, it's just a mistake, I think.

We're also a whole generation of victims, not violators. You see, I'm just a victim of it. Hey, I might have done that, but I have a disease.

I mean, that's the only reason I did it. You have to be careful there. Thank you for joining us today on this edition of Fellowship in the Word with Pastor Bill Gebhardt. Fellowship in the Word is the radio ministry of Fellowship Bible Church, located in Metairie, Louisiana. Let's join Pastor Bill Gebhardt now as once again he shows us how God's Word meets our world. The Prussian king, Frederick the Great, was once touring his prison in Berlin. And as he was going about the prison, the prisoners were falling on their knees, screaming out to him, and all were proclaiming their innocence.

Except for one man. He just remained silent. And so Frederick called to him and said, Why are you here? Armed robbery, Your Majesty. Are you guilty?

Yes, indeed. He says, I am guilty, Your Majesty, and I deserve the punishment. Frederick then immediately summoned the jailer and ordered him, release this guilty wretch at once.

I will not have him kept in his prison where he will corrupt all these fine, innocent people who occupy. When I read that story the first time, I thought about, wow, there is the blessing of honest confession. And also, there is the reluctance that we have, even as Christians, to do it. You see, generally, when it comes to confessing our sins, we fall into three categories. One, some of us live in a perpetual state of confessing, but not in a good way.

In other words, we live sort of defeated, joyless, unhappy lives. To Christians like that, the Christian life is simply a matter of constant guilt. Then there are a lot of other Christians who live carnal lives, licentious. And their lives, they're completely unaware or unconcerned about any of the sin in their lives.

After all, they're going to heaven, and who cares? Hopefully, most of us are in a third group, a group that desires a joyful and hopeful and faithful walk with the Lord. But also a group that's very much aware, as God said to Cain, sin is crouching at the door, and it's desiring to wreck your fellowship or your relationship with me. And we know that if we confess our sins through Christ and his finished work on the cross, that the forgiveness that we need is readily available. I've been doing a series on forgiveness. And what I said in the very first week is that forgiveness is the keystone of all relationships, our relationship with God and our relationship with each other. And I said we need that with God because all of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

There's none righteous, no, not one. And so we need God's forgiveness to have a relationship with him. We also found out in that very first message that forgiveness is just part of the very nature of God. And God also said, when I forgive you, I completely and totally forgive you. And then the second week, we dealt with this idea that even though forgiveness is a wonderful gift to us, a grace gift, it was extremely costly for Jesus Christ to secure our forgiveness. And then last week I said, when we dealt with that woman, that when you embrace the forgiveness of God in your lives, you truly embrace it and are grateful for it. Your love for Jesus Christ grows. Now this week I want to talk about something a little bit different. I want to talk about our need to live day to day in the forgiveness of God. Not just heaven bound, but day to day how important forgiveness is for us. Would you open your Bibles to 1st John chapter one, right at the end of the Bible, 1st John chapter one. The context of 1st John is found in a single word, fellowship.

That's the name on the sign out front. Fellowship. Now, the problem with that is when I say that word to most of you, hopefully not all of you, you have a very different idea what the word means. For most evangelical Christians, somehow donuts and coffee, something like that is involved, if it's fellowship.

That is not at all the New Testament word. The word is koinia. Koinia means partnership.

Koinia means intimacy. It's got this idea that when people have fellowship, you're abiding with each other, you're close. That's what John wants to talk about. Notice in verse three, he said, what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you so that you may have fellowship with us. And indeed, our fellowship is with the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. Verse six, if we say that we have fellowship with Him. Verse seven, but if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. John is talking about fellowship and predominantly later in the book, he'll talk about fellowship with one another. But here in chapter one, in other words, how do you have fellowship with God as a believer on a day in, day out basis? Jesus said it differently. Jesus said, if you abide in me and I abide in you.

But it's the same idea. The idea is how do you walk close to God day in and day out? That's what he picks up in verse five.

And he says, but I want to tell you something right off the bat. God sets the terms of fellowship. God sets them. Verse five, this is the message we have heard from Him and announced to you. God is light. And in Him, there's no darkness at all.

You'll see in the context what He means by this. God is light. God is the perfection of character. There is no darkness in God at all. It speaks of God's moral purity, the absence of sin. God will have nothing to do with anything that is corruptible or contaminating.

He is holy. It also speaks of God's perfect truth, the light of the Word of God, the light of the truth of God. In the Bible, you'll often find when people do not believe the truth, the Bible describes it as living in darkness. And thirdly, it also speaks of the life-giving power of light.

Life flourishes in the light. What John is saying is this. He cannot change for the better, and He will not change for the worse in His day in, day out relationship with you. If you're going to have fellowship with God, it's got to be on God's terms. That's what He's going to say. Now, I know what you might be thinking. Well, isn't that kind of understood?

No. I mean, that makes sense, doesn't it? Not to Christians. See, Christians struggle with this. Christians sometimes think that we can determine the terms of our fellowship with God.

We'll decide. In fact, John says this in this first chapter, and he uses the same phrase three times. Verse 6, if we say, verse 8, if we say, verse 10, if we say. In other words, apparently John says, look, there's some of you that are going to say, no, no, no, no, God's light, I understand it. But if we say, and then he sets the terms for the fellowship.

The first one's in verse 6. If we say that we have fellowship with God, and yet walk, and walk is always a metaphor for live. If we live in the darkness, we lie, and we do not practice the truth.

Now, the inference is clear. There were believers then, and there are believers now that say they have fellowship with God, and they live in the darkness. And John says, and by the way, that makes you a liar. You see, and he's interesting here that what he says, this idea of walking means a pattern, a lifestyle. He's not talking about an individual act. He's not talking about that. He's talking about when we live in the darkness, when we take a sinful idea and we perpetuate it and stay in the state of it.

That's what he's referring to here. By the way, that happens often, and people still claim to have fellowship with God. I remember years and years ago, a person was deciding to go into a state of sin, and I found out about it, so I called them. And I talked to this person, and I said, I understand this is what you're doing. And this person listened to what I had to say, and then said, well, look, it's pretty simple, and they gave me a theological lesson. And the lesson was, here's their theological premise, God wants me happy.

This makes me happy. So therefore, God's in this. You know what that is? That's a lie. That's a lie.

We're capable of that. I remember when Velma and I were students at Dallas Seminary, there was a pastor in a church that we had attended in our first or second year seminary, and a very, very gifted pastor. And he was married, and he had five kids. I remember that. And he decided to leave his wife and his five kids, and decided to go live with a woman who was a councillee of his. And the elders of the church found out about it, of course, when the pastor leaves and moves in with someone else. And they went and confronted him with it. And his statement to them was, look, you don't understand, my fellowship with Jesus Christ is sweeter now than it's ever been before. You know what that is?

That's a lie. Now, he may have enjoyed his sin, but there's not a chance that he was having fellowship with Jesus Christ, living in a perpetual state of sin. Notice that we are capable of that kind of thing. Verse eight. In verse eight, he says, If we say we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.

Now, please understand, I think what he means here. We find this out through the gospel, John. If we say that we have no sin, I don't think the person is talking about perfection. Like, you know, I never, never, never sin. The word that phrase have no sin is used four times in the gospel of John. And every time the implication in the gospel of John is I bear no guilt for my sin at all. I bear no guilt.

I have no sin because I have no guilt. It's just a phrase that is used. By the way, that's kind of big in our culture. I mean, I want you to think about the way our culture works.

Even our evangelical culture. We're a whole generation of mistakers, not sinners. Hey, I just made a mistake. No, you sinned. No, no, just a mistake, I think.

We're also a whole generation of victims, not violators. You see, I'm just a victim of it. Hey, I might have done that, but I have a disease. You see, and it's not, I mean, that's the only reason I did it.

You have to be careful there. A few years ago, a man named Luther Luke Castile walked into a pub in Elgin, Illinois, with four guns, determined to repay an insult that he had received in that bar. He opened fire while laughing and shouting, I'm the king, I'm a natural born killer. And within moments, two people were dead and 16 others laid wounded.

The victims were total strangers. At his trial, he was asked by the prosecutor if he had any remorse. He said, any feeling I have in that regard, I'll keep between myself and the Lord. He says, as ironic as it sounds, I'm a passionate and giving person. I like to think I'm a pretty good person. I'm not one who would hurt anyone who doesn't provoke me.

What's his message? I'm not guilty. I'm not guilty. Jeremiah 17 and verse 9, the heart of a person, the heart of a man is desperately wicked, deceitful above all things. Who does our heart deceive?

Us. Now, I don't think many of you would get four guns and go into the bar and shoot it up for an insult. But I think some of you have said things like this. Hey, yeah, no wonder I'm miserable at work. My boss provokes me. You ever said that? My mother-in-law makes me mad.

You ever say anything like that? They made me mad. Really, I have no guilt. It's their fault. So and so really knows how to push my buttons. I have no guilt. They did it.

They had it coming. You ever said anything like that? And by the way, if you're married, you know you use this almost as an art form. Well, yes, I'm doing blank. But you, you are doing all this and that's why I'm doing this. I don't bear guilt here.

You know what that is? Deceit. If we say we bear no guilt, have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, the truth's not in us. You see, we make up our own conditions for our relationship with God. Verse 10. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. Let me paraphrase verse 10 in sort of modern English. Sin isn't my problem because I've redefined it. That's not sin. You see, we can do that. We can take something that God says is sin and we say, no, no, that's not sin.

I'll give you an example. In Mark chapter 7, Jesus is confronting the Pharisees and they did this quite often, but they were commanded by the Lord to honor their parents. And that meant to take care of their parents and their parents' old age. So what the Pharisees decided was, well, look, I really don't want to do that because there goes all my money. So I'll tell you what I'm doing. I'm going to pledge my money to the temple when I'm dead. And I can use it any way I want until then. And I'll call it Korban. And Jesus confronted it. And so being greedy, which is sinful, and dishonoring your parents, which is sinful, they said, no, no, it's not sin at all. It's Korban. I pledge this money to God at the temple.

So I don't have to do any of this stuff. We can redefine those kind of terms. Now, we may not deal with Korban, but how many times have you heard a young Christian couple say, hey, we're in love. We're not fornicating.

We're in love. I redefined it. Or how about the mantra of so many Christian businessmen?

Everybody in the business world operates this way. Really? Yeah. So even though I'm doing that, it's not sinful because everybody's doing it. By the way, isn't that the one you tried when you were a little kid? I mean, that was the drum I tried to beat. Hey, look, everybody else was doing it. And what did your parents say to you? If everybody else jumped off a bridge.

You know the funny part about that is most kids probably would jump. You see, that's redefining it. These are all dealing with fellowship. If we say that sin in my life is no big deal and I can tolerate it and so can God, or if we say that we don't have any guilt, somebody else provoked it, or if we say sin isn't a problem because I've redefined it.

If that happens, the Word of God here says you're a liar, you're deceived, and you call and make God a liar. So the question is then how do I walk with the Lord? How do I have fellowship day in and day out? How do I abide in Christ?

How do I take full benefit of what it means to be a believer in Jesus Christ? And there you see this in verse 7 and verse 9. First, verse 7, the conditions of fellowship with God. He said, 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. If we live righteously, not perfectly, by the way, He's not talking about perfection here, otherwise there'd be no reason for the blood of Jesus, His Son, to cleanse us from all sin. He's not talking about that. He's talking about not abiding in the darkness, living righteously.

Every single epistle that Paul writes, that's what Paul writes about. Hey, you know the way you used to be? Don't be that way anymore.

That's what he says. And basically what Paul says, you know what you are in Christ? Act that way. You see, you're a child of God, then act like a child of God. You're declared righteous by God, then live righteously. Let me give you one example that Ephesians, we'll come back to 1 John, Ephesians chapter 5. Paul says it differently, but it's the same thing in these first eight verses. He says, Therefore, be imitators of God. Obviously, he's not talking about perfection as beloved children. The way children imitate their parents and live or walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave himself up for us an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.

Now watch. But immorality, he says, or any impurity or greed must not even be named among you, as he says, is proper among saints. And there must be no filthiness and silly talk or coarse gestures which are not fitting, but rather, he says, the giving of thanks.

Verse 7, he says, Therefore, do not be partakers with them. You were formerly darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk or live as children of the light.

That's one of the ways we do it. You see, one of the great things that happened when you became a Christian is that the Spirit of God came to reside in you. So you know what that means? It means you now can live righteously. It's a battle.

We all know that. But I can actually live righteously. And so he says, well, then live that way. Now back to the second condition, a very important one, because we will never do it perfectly, is verse 9. He then says in verse 9, If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Now, to some, this has become an extremely confusing verse.

And you can understand it on a certain level. Whenever we became a Christian and we put our trust in Jesus Christ and His finished work on the cross, we were told that our sins were forgiven, correct? All of our past sins, all of our present sins, and all of our future sins.

And that's true. So then why is he saying here that we need to confess our sins? Let me give you some examples of how others have responded. One radio personality said, If you practice this verse, you live in daily insecurity and always doubt whether your sins are ever going to be forgiven. Another author wrote this, To practice 1 John 1-9 reveals your unbelief. They're missing the point.

It's sincere but misguided. There is a context here. In fact, they try to interpret that and say this is for unbelievers.

Well, that wouldn't make much sense in the context. Look at the words that are used. First of all, John is writing. In verse 6, we. In verse 7, we. In verse 8, we. Verse 10, we. Verse 9, we.

Now, who are the we? Verse 1 of chapter 2, My little children, I am writing these things to you. These are believers. This is clearly not unbelievers that he's talking about at all. And he says, My little children, I am writing these things to you that you may not sin.

Well, we are the only ones that have that capacity. So John says that's what I'm writing for. And John isn't confused by this because look at verse 12 of chapter 2. John understands the judicial forgiveness that we received. He said, I am writing to you, little children, because your sins have been forgiven you for his name's sake, have been forgiven past perfect tense, an action in the past that the results continue forever. John's not talking about judicial forgiveness here, which is from the penalty of sin, which is separation from God. John is talking about relational forgiveness here.

Some have called it parental forgiveness in my day-to-day relationship with God. That's oneplace.com, and you can listen to Fellowship in the Word online. At that website, you will find not only today's broadcast, but also many of our previous audio programs as well. At Fellowship in the Word, we are thankful for those who financially support our ministry and make this broadcast possible. We ask all of our listeners to prayerfully consider how you might help this radio ministry continue its broadcast on this radio station by supporting us monthly or with just a one-time gift. Support for our ministry can be sent to Fellowship in the Word 4600 Clearview Parkway, Metairie, Louisiana 7006. If you would be interested in hearing today's message in its original format, that is as a sermon that Pastor Bill delivered during a Sunday morning service at Fellowship Bible Church, then you should visit our website, fbcnola.org.

That's fbcnola.org. At our website, you will find hundreds of Pastor Bill's sermons. You can browse through our sermon archives to find the sermon series you are looking for, or you can search by title. Once you find the message you are looking for, you can listen online, or if you prefer, you can download the sermon and listen at your own convenience. And remember, you can do all of this absolutely free of charge. Once again, our website is fbcnola.org. For Pastor Bill Gebhardt, I'm Jason Gebhardt, thanking you for listening to Fellowship in the Word.