This Life

Sunday, May 17^th, 2009

Easter 7B

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

1 John 5:9-13

9 If we receive human testimony, the testimony of God is greater; for this is the testimony of God that he has testified to his Son.  10 Those who believe in the Son of God have the testimony in their hearts. Those who do not believe in God have made him a liar by not believing in the testimony that God has given concerning his Son. 11 And this is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. 12 Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. 13 I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.. 

I love to read C.S. Lewis.  His style is so crisp, so clean, so convincing.  He speaks with an authority and in such a systematic manner that I feel like one of those cartoon characters that gets all worked up and begins running around in a tight little circle to the beat of a frantic conga drum, not really going anywhere, until the straight man hits him up ‘side the head and knocks some sense into him, and my straight man is Clive Staples Lewis.  

I'm sure PART of it is that I hear his voice in my head speaking with that British accent, and that goes a ways towards impressing me ANYWAY.  But it is his thought process that is more persuasive.  C.S. Lewis could write that the center of the earth was hollow and there were giant bats flying around in there and I would be hard put to NOT believe it.  

There are in most of our lives, unless we are of a certain cynical disposition to begin with -- or perhaps after having lived through a lifetime of disappointments -- people or organizations or sometimes newspapers or magazines, perhaps a news anchor with names like Cronkite or Brokaw, or a Radio Talk Show host like Hannity or Limbaugh, but somewhere along the line the words they spoke or wrote ‘clicked‘ somehow and we ended up hearing their voices or reading their words and readily equating them with truth.  

There is real danger in that.  When we begin to assign divine qualities to human beings.  When we half-jokingly refer to ‘taking what they say as gospel’, or similar phrasings.  You see, we are, in many ways, either too tired or too lazy to do the hard work of thinking and studying and following on our own.  I’ll be the first to admit it.  If I think something’s been worked through by someone I trust, I can very easily take that and run with it, without ever having examined closely what has been thought or said.  And that is a shortcoming I have.  It can sometimes be such a time saver to pick up an idea in toto -- in it’s entirety -- and assume, because of it’s origin, that it is a completed whole.  That there isn’t an error with the underlying suppositions, that there isn’t an ulterior motive in the idea being propounded 

John understood that.  He was facing it among the churches he was writing to.  People -- teachers, leaders, well-meaning, well-intentioned, clear thinking, soft-spoken, accomplished people were making their way into the churches and talking about what SEEMED to be the Gospel.  They used all the right words, all the right phrases, but in just slightly different ways, or they left something critical out.  They spoke of the love of God, but played down the part about what that love cost Jesus.  They spoke of the brotherhood of man, but de-emphasized the practical, down-to-earth applications that entails -- the nuts and bolts of getting along with people with whom you agree with in principle on CERTAIN principles, but with whom you otherwise have profound, even insurmountable differences.  

What John is doing is speaking to those who first believed, but who have been swayed by these false teachings.  He spells it out for them:  Those who believe the testimony of God -- the message that came to them from God through the Gospel of Jesus Christ -- know this to be true in their hearts.  those who don’t or didn’t believe it already consider not just Jesus, but God God’s self to be a liar.  

And just in case there was any doubt, John spells out just what God’s testimony about Jesus is:  God gave us eternal life, and this life is in (through) his Son Jesus.  It would seem that John is belaboring the point when he goes on to say ‘Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life‘ but he is underscoring the statement.   He’s driving the point home.  It’s not about being repetitious, it is about being clear.  

Essentially, John spends the greater part of this letter defining for his readers just what he meant when he taught them that God was love.  He didn’t teach them that Love is God, but that God’s best and first and last action in human history was born out of his love for humanity.  And that action was in God’s becoming incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ.  For John the love of God cannot be separated from the life of Jesus.  It is through that life, through his teaching, through his example, through his sacrifice, and through his resurrection that we are able to BEGIN to comprehend the depth and breadth and fullness of the love of God for us as human beings and the end to which God intended his love.  

Richard Foster, author of ‘Celebration of Discipline’, puts it this way:  

The daring goal of the Christian life is an ever-deeper re-formation of our inner personality so that it reflects more and more the glory and goodness of God; an ever more radiant conformity to the life and faith and desires and habits of Jesus; an utter transformation of our creatureliness into whole and perfect daughters and sons of God. You see, this life, this zoe that comes from God and is the salvation that is in Jesus Christ, is a character-transforming life. It does not leave us where we are but changes us as we progress from faith to faith (that is, from the faith we have to the faith we have yet to receive) and from strength to strength and from glory to glory.

God is intent upon making each of us into "a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright, stainless mirror that reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness." 

To be sure, the full realization of this "perfect reflection" awaits our glorification in heaven. But even now we need to hear the goal spoken over us again and again so that we may more consciously enter into the process that leads to this goal. God does not wait until death to initiate this process of complete transformation. It begins now, and God can and will do far more here and now than we can possibly imagine. We may not be perfect yet, but we can become a whole lot better than we are.

You see, we are so prone to settle for less than what God desires for us. We are glad enough for God to remove some irritating behavior from our personality (like a sour disposition) or some destructive addiction (like alcoholism), but it is a very different thing when God begins a fundamental restructuring of our inner affections. We may be willing to give up honors and possessions and even friends, but it touches us too closely to disown our own selves. But we simply must understand that God is not seeking to improve us, but to transform us-to show us who he really created us to be. C. S. Lewis writes that "the goal towards which [God] is beginning to guide you is absolute perfection; and no power in the whole universe, except you yourself, can prevent Him from taking you to that goal."

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist church at Emmerton?

We go into this Christ-following business with open eyes, or we have them opened by the realization that we are not simply dealing with high concepts and noble ideas, but we are dealing with the transformation of our very souls.  And that transformation, though it has eternal repercussions, bleeds over into the living of our lives  HERE AND NOW and results in a little bit of the coming Kingdom being made present where we live.  When we DO respond as Christ would, when we DO make that redemptive connection with someone -- anyone -- and show them the love that God has for them and us in the way we treat and interact with them, when we DO live this life as God wants us to:  in such a way as to reflect God’s glory almost perfectly.         

Let’s pray.