Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. At Christmas, we'd rather not think about the end of life. But the eternal life Jesus makes possible for those who believe means that death is not the end. In one sense it becomes the beginning of the real life we were meant to have. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, when you say Jesus brought us the gift of life, what do you mean?
Well Dave, you know you're absolutely right. When we talk about Jesus Christ bringing us life, we're talking about eternal life. We're not just talking about physical life, which everyone has, but I need to emphasize this is where Christians need to expand their understanding of life, namely that eternal life begins now.
It's not just future. There's a connection with God that gives us life. There's a life that enables us to live life to the fullest, if I might put it that way.
And Jesus Christ came to bring us that life, the gift of life, which of course eventually will become eternal life with God. We're so glad for the many of you who support the ministry of Running to Win. I hope that it has often been a blessing to you, but some of you perhaps have never connected with us.
Would you consider a special gift as we near the end of the year? In order to do that, here's what you can do. Go to OfferMCM.com. Let me give that to you again.
Offer MCM, of course MCM stands for Moody Church Media, OfferMCM.com. We appreciate so much your prayers, your support, because as you frequently hear me say, together we are making a difference. And now let us listen to the message from God's word, Jesus, not only light, but life, and how grateful we are. Well, how are you all doing with Christmas?
I always remind you every year of the little boy who used to pray, forgive us our Christmases, even as we forgive those who Christmas against us. Christmas is a very busy time of year, and it's a time also when people begin to think about their health. And I think it's true to say that we live in a society that is somewhat obsessed with good health. There's some goodness to that. There may also be some negatives. By the way, I heard of a husband who gave his wife membership to a health club one Christmas, and he promised her that she would lose weight. Very bad, very bad Christmas present to give your wife. A year later she said, you promised that I would lose weight and I haven't lost a pound. He said, I forgot to tell you, the membership itself isn't enough.
You actually have to go there once in a while. Yes, people are obsessed with their physical health. But you know, in the end we lose that battle. Like a hen before a cobra, the time is going to come when there's nothing that we can do, no matter how we dance, no matter how we try to talk ourselves out of it, suddenly there we will be and death will come to us. Now the Bible teaches that every person who has ever lived upon the planet and who is alive today has eternal existence, eternal existence, conscious eternal existence. But there's also a category of people who will have eternal existence, but they will have what the Bible calls eternal life, eternal life, and what a difference that is.
You know, C.S. Lewis, who said some remarkable things, and I'm going to read one of those remarkable things to you. He said, every human being is in the process of becoming a noble being, noble beyond imagination, or else, alas, a vile being beyond redemption. He exhorts us to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which if you saw it now, you'd be strongly tempted to worship, or else that person might be a horror and a corruption such as you now meet if only in a nightmare. He says there are no ordinary people. It is immortals whom we joke with, whom we work with, whom we marry, whom we snub and exploit, immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
Wow. That's what happens one minute after you die, and we're all going there. But eternal life, that's what C.S.
Lewis is referring to regarding those categories who if you saw them now, they would be so tempted for us to worship them because of their beauty. Those kinds of beings, they are the ones who have eternal life. And later on in this message, if you stay with me for the next few moments, I'm going to explain to you what that eternal life is, how you can have it, and why it's something that you ought to have. I want your mouth, so to speak, spiritually speaking, to be watering and say that's exactly what I want is the eternal life that the Bible lays out for us.
That's where we are going. Well, our text today is actually in 1 John. 1 John, and if you have your Bibles, you know that 1 John is near the end of the New Testament. You have 1 John, and then you have Jude, and then you're at the book of Revelation. 1 John was written by the same man, the same apostle, who wrote the Gospel of John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. This is the same John, and he wrote three small letters, and this is known, therefore, as 1 John. Then we have 2 John and 3 John, and these are his writings.
And what I'd like us to do is to see, if we can, the aspects of eternal life that he lays out here for us, not eternal existence, but eternal life. Let's just open the text to 1 John, chapter 1, and begin reading. That which was from the beginning, which we have heard.
We have to stop. What beginning? Well, I think it's the same beginning as in John 1, 1, as the letter of John, because he says there, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. In what beginning? In the beginning for all of eternity. Because for God, there was no beginning.
In the beginning was. No matter whether you take the beginning to be creation or any other point in time, the fact is God existed before that. He existed from all of eternity, and it is this word that became flesh, as John is going to explain it to us. The first aspect is simply this, that the word is manifested. That's the translation that we have here. It says, that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked on and touched with our hands concerning the life, the life was made manifest.
Now that's an old word, isn't it? We don't use that in regular English, that we talk about something being made manifest. It really means revealed. What John is saying here is that in Jesus, in the word, God showed up. There are some of you who would say that you are seeking for God, and if you are, I'm so glad that you are listening, and the fact that you're a seeker is great because that means something good about you, and maybe something wonderful is about to happen. In the Bible, you really come to the end of your search for God because in Jesus, God is revealed. He is manifested, and John wants to talk about Jesus in his post-resurrection appearances.
That is, after Jesus was raised from the dead. You'll notice it says, that which we have seen, that which we have heard, he begins by hearing. He says, we actually heard Jesus speak. Now, creation speaks about God, but it does it with a great deal of ambiguity.
In creation, you would never know that God loved the world given all of the various kinds of natural disasters in the world. It speaks about God. It speaks about his love and his judgment, but you couldn't figure him out. But Jesus actually spoke to us, so he says, we were alive, we knew him, we heard him, and then it says, we have seen him with our eyes. And just imagine Jesus making this statement as he does in John chapter 14, he who has seen me has seen the Father. Oh, that's so important. If you want to see God, you read the New Testament, you read about Jesus. And then he goes on and he says, whom we have touched. Now, why would he say whom we have touched?
Why is that important? Well, you know, during these days, there was platonic philosophy. Do you remember the days of the Da Vinci Code and the Gnostic Jesus?
Gnosticism was basically an attempt to unify Christianity with Greek philosophy, particularly Plato's philosophy. And that's why the Gnostic Gospels, and I have in my possession a Gnostic Bible because I wrote a book about the Da Vinci Code. When you read it, it makes no pretense to be a historical document.
It makes no reference to cities, towns, rivers, and so forth. It is not like the New Testament. It is the musings of platonic scholars trying to unify the Bible with Platonism. And because Plato says that all matter is evil, it was unthinkable in the minds of people that God could become a man.
It would be like saying God is becoming evil. And so they believe that when Jesus showed up, he wasn't really a man. And so they tried to take away the humanity of Jesus and say that he was some kind of an appearance, he was some kind of an apparition. And that's why in the Gnostic Gospels they put into the mouth of Jesus anything that they want, because he's not a Jesus who died on the cross and was raised. So John is saying, we actually saw him and we touched him.
He was real. The most explosive verse in the Bible is not John 3.16, though that's the most known and the most beautiful and the most Gospel-centered, but the one that just shattered the philosophical world of the day is actually John 1.14, and the Word became flesh. God became man. Unthinkable to the Greeks, but thankfully known to us as God, a very God. My wife, soon after we were married, Rebecca worked at Allstate, actually, as a secretary, and she had a boss who once said to her, you know, if when I die, I show up and God is there, I'm going to ask him, well, where have you been? Well, where have you been? Certainly he should have seen God in creation, and that should have created within this man's a desire to seek for God.
That's number one. But God will say to him someday, I did show up. I did show up. Jesus came to reveal the Father and whoever saw him saw the Father because in Jesus, God showed up. And this man, born in the United States of America, would have no excuse because he could go into a bookstore, he could buy a Bible, he could go to churches that preach the Gospel. If he were really seeking God, God was there for the finding. But he said, I want to say to God, where have you been? Well, I'll tell you where he's been. He's been here on earth. He was in Bethlehem and he died on the cross. That's where he's been.
You remember Phil Donahue, those talk shows that he used to have? One day he said, you know, if God loved the world, why did he send his son to die? Why didn't he do it himself? Phil, in Jesus, he did it himself. God was in flesh reconciling the world unto himself. So John says the life was manifested. And then he says thirdly, in the third aspect, the life was proclaimed. You'll notice he says it is this word. He uses the word we. We've heard, we've seen, we've handled, we've touched him, and we now testify and proclaim to you this eternal life.
I think it's verse two. We proclaim it to you. And why wouldn't you proclaim a message like this and spread it abroad? Now, the first time this particular message was proclaimed, it was by angels on the outskirts of Bethlehem. And then later on the shepherds themselves proclaimed the good news.
And then beyond that even, we have, of course, the wise men. But they didn't understand everything that John understood, because they didn't understand the death and the burial and the resurrection of Jesus with the clarity with which John did, because he was there for all of the events. And so he says we proclaim this message to you, first of all, by words, by words, because you need to know the gospel. You need to know that Jesus died for sinners and that his death is a substitute for those who believe on him. So you proclaim it. But you also have a sense of authenticity. You proclaim it with your life. In chapter two, you'll notice at the bottom of the page in my Bible, at least, you'll notice that John says, verse six, whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. Why wouldn't a Christian who's come to saving faith in Christ, who understands the glories of the gospel, why wouldn't he share it with his colleagues at work?
To me, it is unthinkable that you wouldn't. To give him a book to read or a small booklet and say, look, read this booklet and then we'll talk about it in two weeks. Let's go out for lunch and let's talk about it. And to share the good news, remember in 2 Kings 7, Old Testament, there are four lepers and they are dying, they are starving. And they say, we're going to go to the camp of the Syrians and if they kill us, that's fine, we're dying anyway, but they might take care of us. And they go into the camp and they discover that there is no Syrian there because what happened is they had had a false report and they all ran and they left all of their food and all of their belongings and all of their money.
And so these four guys are just having the most unbelievable party. You just read about it. I read it this morning.
I mean, they are hauling off stuff for themselves and then they think, you know, we're not doing this right. We ought to actually tell other people what we found. A great idea. How can you know Christ and not proclaim him? That is to say, share him with your colleagues and those at work. Of course, you've been changed. You understand the gospel. You understand the need. You understand the predicament that people are in.
You know that Jesus is the answer to their predicament. And you and I, perhaps not sharing with others the good news of the gospel. So first of all, he says, God was revealed.
He was manifest. Secondly, he says, we proclaimed the message and we shared it. And then third, he says, we enjoyed this eternal life.
We enjoyed this eternal life. This past week, someone said to me, and I do not remember who, whether it was a staff member or someone else, they said something like this, I'm surprised at the number of people at Moody Church to whom I talk who do not understand the gospel and who probably therefore are not saved. Wow, I thought to myself, that's disappointing because I thought I preached the gospel almost every Sunday, virtually every Sunday.
If you're listening for it, I think you know that it's here. So what I'm going to do is to take just a moment so that you better understand eternal life and then the purpose of eternal life. And I want you to leave here absolutely excited about eternal life and to let you know what Christmas is all about. Well, this eternal life begins by being born again. Six times in this little letter of three or four chapters, John mentions the phrase born again. He says, if a person is born again, he who was born of God does not do this. He that is born of God lives this way.
Who in the world is this person who's born of God? Many years ago, Rebecca and I were in Germany and we rented a car and we drove to Herrnhut. You know, that's where the Moravians lived. And I wanted to go to the cemetery there. They lived there in the 1700s and the reason choir listen carefully why I wanted to go to the cemetery is because the Moravians were so into music. Sometimes they sang music up to six hours at a time and they were buried in accordance with the choirs. For example, you belong to that choir. This is your plot to be buried. Could you imagine a cemetery here in Chicago? This is the Moody Church Choir from the year 1970 to 1990. And then you have the other folks buried over here because I suppose in the day of resurrection, they'd just all get up and be ready to sing and everybody be on tune and they'd be ready to go. Tim, you've got a job to do.
Get them ready, not just for tonight's concert, but a little bit beyond it. So anyway, we're looking for the cemetery and through a stroke of providence that I will not take time to tell you about, it was just of God. We met a man who was on his way to the cemetery and who had a key to take us into a tower in the cemetery. Now he spoke only German, so I had no alternative but to try my German on him.
And as we're walking along, I knew that I had this guy only for five or 10 minutes. So obviously I wanted to share the gospel with him. So I began asking him in German whether or not he was Wiedergeborn.
Did you hear that? Whether or not he was born again. And he said to me, born again? He said, I was born once. Why would I want to be born twice?
I just smiled. That's exactly what Nicodemus said to Jesus. Jesus said, you must be born again. He says, well, can I enter into my mother's womb and be born a second time?
He said, obviously not. So I had to explain to him he had to be born of the Holy Spirit through personal faith in Christ. And I said to him in broken German that it doesn't happen through baptism, it doesn't happen through confirmation, it doesn't happen by going to church. You know, there used to be an evangelist by the name of Billy Sunday. Maybe you've not heard of him, but in the 1920s, great evangelist, he was actually buried here. And when I came to Moody Church, a woman wrote me a letter who remembered Billy Sunday. I suppose by now she is in heaven, but she said he used to hop from this platform that I'm standing on to the lower one without using the stairs and vice versa, because he was into baseball and he'd say, you know, hit a home run for Jesus, slide into home plate. He must have been a very interesting guy to listen to. But I remember a quote from Billy Sunday because he was right on when he said this, going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than driving a wheelbarrow into a garage and it becoming a car.
And Billy Sunday was right. You're not born again by going to church, though to go to church is good, by listening to sermons, by admiring Jesus. You're born again by faith when you recognize that you need a savior and you transfer all of your trust to what Jesus Christ did for you on the cross. Now, and when that happens, something else happens. It is not just that God creates within us a new nature so that we begin loving God, et cetera, though all that happens and we become partakers of the divine nature and God gives us brand new loves and we begin to love Jesus and we begin to love God, all that happens, but something else happens.
And this is why it's so critical for you to listen to this message. And that is that the whole sin issue between us and God is actually resolved and taken out of the way. And that, of course, is only something that Jesus can do because, because, listen to me carefully, for us to meet God, we have to meet him on his terms, not ours. Well, my friend, this is Pastor Lutzer. And you know, when we talk about Jesus Christ being the life, isn't it wonderful that he actually enables us to live through the difficulties of this world as well as taking us to himself in the world to come? I'm holding in my hand a letter that we received from someone who has tried to commit suicide because of depression. And he goes on to say, I have prayed for a long time for God to restore me. And you folks have become an instrument of the holy God in that process.
That's why Running to Win exists. Would you consider helping us as we come to the end of the year, making a very special gift to the ministry of Running to Win? I like to remind people that this ministry goes to 20 different countries, thousands upon thousands of people, but it's dependent on people just like you. Here's what you can do. Go to offermcm.com. I'll give that to you again, but here's also a phone number, 1-888-218-9337. Offer MCM, MCM of course stands for Moody Church Media, offermcm.com or 888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois 60614. Jesus said, I am the way, the truth and the life for those who believe that life is an eternal one. Next time, being thankful for that new life. Thanks for listening. For Dr. Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.
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