If you have your Bibles, if you could turn to 1 John, 1 John chapter 3, and our reading will be from verses 2 through 18. But as we come to what we'll be addressing this morning, we want to keep in mind what Pastor Brian brought last week. Our passage is connected thematically to the subject of the children of God, and one of the benefits of chapter divisions and verses is that we can easily locate the same place, but one of the frustrating things about chapter divisions and verses is that it can oftentimes break into the thought, and we can come to a passage, especially like today, and read verses that if detached from the greater theme can be very confusing, and we don't want to be confused. And as we know, as Pastor Brian has brought to our attention, John is writing to the Christians here because there have been false teachers. And there were those who kind of taught this secret knowledge, Gnosticism, and by doing so, they then tweaked truth along three lines. The person of Christ, and then sin, and then love. love. And so, throughout this book, John gives us, from various angles, these three diagnostic tests. How we think about Jesus Christ, how we think about morality and sin, and also how we think about our brothers and sisters in Christ and in the church. And so, last week, as we considered that great otherworldly love of God, whereby he adopted us and gave us new birth and new life and brought us into his family. Pastor Brian brought before us really aspects of the truth test about the person of Jesus Christ. And he's going to continue in the section that we'll be reading on the moral test of sin and the social test of love, but all related. to the person of Jesus Christ and his work. And so as we consider these themes this morning of the family of God and life in the family of God, we want to see it all bound up in the first coming of Christ and also the second coming and what he has done for us. And so if you are able, please stand for the reading of God's holy inspired word. And we'll begin at verse two of chapter three. Beloved, we are God's children now. And what we will be has not yet appeared. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness. Sin is lawlessness. You know that he appeared in order to take away sins and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him keeps on sinning. No one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous as he is righteous. Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. No one born of God makes a practice of sinning for God's seed abides in him and he cannot keep on sinning because he has been born of God by this. It is evident who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil. Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother. For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother's righteous. Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you. We know that we have passed out of death into life because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk, but in deed and in truth. And the Lord will bless the reading of his word. You may be seated. As we read this section, it is evident that The events of Genesis 3 and Genesis 4 are fresh in John's mind as he begins to unpack what it means to be a child of God. We have a renewed interest, it seems, in modern times of learning our ancestry. You can subscribe to Ancestry.com. You can pay some fee and then take a swab something in your mouth and send it off and you can find out something about your lineage and John Whether he was interested in that kind of stuff or not, I don't know, but he seems to be more interested in really only two families of which all humanity belongs. You are either a child of the devil or you are a child of God. And so what John is dealing with in this chapter, in this passage, is what we are by nature. And if we are children of God, it is only because of God's grace, it's only because of his mercy, It's only because of the Spirit's work in rebirthing us and putting us into the family of God. And if you're in the family of God, it shows, there's evidence. And if there is no new birth, then you belong to the family of the devil, and you then imitate your father. We imitate our parents, oftentimes, whether we want to or not, even adult children. You can say, I long to do the opposite of what my parents did when I was growing up. And yet you cannot fully escape imitating them, whether you like it or not. And so it is spiritually. We cannot but help imitate our father. And throughout God's word, we're told to be imitators of God as dear children. There's something about God as our father that has direct ramifications for how we live, for how we love, for how we act, and for how we speak. And that's what John is getting at. Now, I know that this particular passage has been used at times to often cause doubt of assurance in the lives of Christians. We even mention this at the nine o'clock service, those who may have grown up in maybe a more strict Christian environment, where there was a heavy emphasis on maybe rules and following rules. There would often be times, a coming to this passage, not necessarily beginning at verse one and beholding the great love of the Father, but beginning at verse four. where it's everyone who practices sin is lawless. And we all know that we wrestle with sin. There's not a day that goes by that we as Christians do not battle with sin. And this passage has often been used, again, out of context, but to try to push people into this realization, oh no, I must not be saved if I do this. That's not why John is writing this. John's actually writing this in order to give assurance to Christians. He's writing this to expose the false teaching of those who are presenting this secret knowledge, this view of sin that's more of an indifference. And there are going to be evidences in this section that actually are to encourage the Christian. We know that not everything that John has said about sin is in this chapter. He's already given a sense of the sin test in chapter one. Remember, he says that if you say you have not sinned or you do not sin, you're a liar and the truth is not in you. But if you do sin, what is the proper response to the chapter one sin test? You confess it. You confess your sin and there you find forgiveness and not just forgiveness from God, but you also find his cleansing, transforming work because he's faithful and just to forgive you and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. And what he's addressing here is the other side of the coin of the sin test. And that is that as Christians, we don't want to take it lightly. We don't want to dink around with sin. We don't want to mess around with it. We want to be indifferent toward it. We don't want to think that because of God's grace that we can sin with no view of displeasing Him. It's not excusable. It's inexcusable. And John is going to unpack that. But what he does is he's trying to assure the Christians that it's not you that need to doubt, it's the false teachers. And do we not know that false teaching, bad teaching, can really throw Christians for a loop? We can become confused. And that's where these believers were. And John is writing them as dear children to behold and to consider that great love of God. And so I want to just consider these two broad characteristics of the two families. The first one is the family of lawlessness or righteousness and imitating the father. We all imitate our father. We see first that the devil is the father of lawlessness. He's been practicing this from the very beginning, verse 8b. says that the devil has been sinning from the beginning, and so whoever makes a practice of it is of the devil. From the very moment of his fall, he has been willfully, conscientiously rebellious against God's authority, God's standard, and he has sought to attack the people of God, he has sought to lay hold of them and get them to live according to him. And as children of the devil, the children of the devil follow suit and they too make a practice of it. And as we see John using this word, they make a practice. He's not saying that if you commit a sin, you're a child of the devil. But if you make a practice of it, if this is the habit of your life, he's talking about nature here. He's talking about this is the realm in which you live. This is the nature you are born into. This is the one that you are in. But if you are a child of God, that's not your nature. You've been redeemed. And that's what he wants us to see, the father of righteousness is God. And behold, dear Christian, this otherworldly love of the Father, whereby He has called you out of darkness and into His marvelous light, because what have we read in this whole book? That God is light, He dwells in the light, and all those that He has redeemed walk in the light. And so what is the practice or the habit of God's children? It is that they practice righteousness. Now we know that we wrestle with sin. We know that we're tempted every day. And so John gives three hope-filled assurances to God's people that we can take in our lives and know that we are indeed children of God. And the first hope-filled reason is that Not only does God dwell in the light, but he sent his son to destroy the works of the devil, to destroy sin. And therefore, sin is incompatible with God's children. We see this in verse five. You know that he, that is Jesus, appeared in order to take away sins. This is what we think on when we think of Palm Sunday. Jesus Christ goes into Jerusalem with a single-minded focus to destroy Satan, to destroy the works of the devil, to crush the head of the serpent. You remember there, he turns to his disciples and he tells them, he says, the hour has come. You say, well, what hour? What's he talking about? The very purpose for which he came into the world. He says, the time has arrived. Let's go to Jerusalem. He says, where the son of man must be crucified. Now, why did he do that? What was he doing when he died? He was destroying Satan. He was destroying the works of the devil. He was destroying sin. And Jesus Christ came to destroy And Jesus Christ has never failed to do what he set out to do. He did not die upon the cross kind of maybe hoping he would destroy the works of the devil. He came to liberate and to free us from the tyranny of sins hold over us. And when Jesus Christ died, The power of Christ to redeem us is greater than the power of sin to hold us. And Jesus Christ there on the cross took all of our sin. all of our evil deeds, all of our evil thoughts, all of our evil motives, all of our selfishness, all of our disdain and hatred of others. And he bore it upon himself on the tree. And upon the cross, the full fury of divine wrath against sin, was poured out upon the Lord Jesus Christ. He appeared for this reason, to destroy it. And dear Christian, Jesus Christ indeed destroyed the works of the devil. That word destroy there has the idea of taking away all power. He is He has made Satan's hold, Satan's power, impotent. He's taken away all. And over you now, dear Christian, how can you be assured that you were his child? It's because sin does not have dominion in your life. Yes, Satan is still flailing around. He's still tempting. He's still seeking to, like Peter, to shake his faith. But what does Jesus say? But Peter, I'm praying for you. I'm praying for you, that you will not fall finally. And what do we see? You see in the restoration of Peter, the same thing you see as the ordinary life of God's children. Satan is seeking to devour us, to sift us as wheat. But Jesus, at the Father's right hand, our advocate, is praying for us specifically. And because of that, sin no longer holds dominion. That's why, dear Christian, we do not make a practice of sin. This is why we don't make a habit of sinning. That's why when we sin, we confess it because we look to the cross. We look to the God who sent his son. We behold the Savior there. And there he put an end to all of this sin. We see, secondly, another hope-filled reason for why we do not habitually practice sin. It is because God's children live in union with Christ. God's children live in union with Christ, verses five and six. He has come to take away sins, and in Him, in Jesus, there is no sin. So in Christ, there's no sin. In verse six, no one who abides in him keeps on sinning. Why do those who abide in Christ not keep on sinning? It's because we abide in the sinless one. This is what is so marvelous about the work of Jesus Christ there in the wilderness. Let's not pass over his temptations as though that was just insignificant to our lives. But Jesus Christ there at His baptism, you hear the voice of the Father, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. The Spirit descends upon Him and immediately He goes into the wilderness to be tempted of Satan. And you see the full fury of hell against Christ and trying to get Him to sin. All of the opposition of Satan and hell were against Jesus and what do we see Him? He overcomes temptation. He's tempted in all points like as we are, yet he is without sin. And he is the sinless one. And we, and our lives are bound up in him. And because we are in union with the sinless one, how can we keep on sinning? This is why when we sin, we're miserable. You know, there's no misery like the misery of a Christian who is sinning and not confessing. Because we can't be happy in the sin, because it's against our nature. Until we confess, and until we know that fresh pardon and the restoration of that fellowship with our Father, we're not happy. And why is it? And John says, it's because you're in union with Christ. And that is a grace of God. Sometimes you hear maybe a Christian who is struggling with assurance and it's because of this ongoing battle with sin and maybe not living in light of the full gospel of grace and forgiveness and restoration. They say, you know, I'm struggling and I just, I don't know what to think. And they come to 1 John 3. They say, look, it says, you know, whoever does this. They say, well, do you hate sin? Oh, yes. I hate sin. Is there misery and unhappiness when you've sinned and you're not confessing? Oh, yes. Oh, praise God for the grace that he has shown you. Because a child of God is not going to be content when there's that barrier. It's the same thing in the home, is it not? If there's tension in the home, so you sit down at the dinner table, and there's been maybe some smart comments, some pushing of buttons, and there's not been the apologies, and you sit down, that's not a happy meal. It's like past the potatoes. No one wants to look at each other. There's tension. Conversation is not moving smoothly. What is needed? It doesn't mean that you're outside the family. What does it mean? It means there's a barrier there. And as long as the barrier's there, you're not enjoying the fellowship. This is what Jesus says. You abide in my love by keeping my commandments. We don't enter God's love by keeping his commandments. We don't become God's children by keeping the commandments. By the new birth, he enables us to keep the commandments and we enjoy the fellowship of God. We enjoy the abiding in the love as we keep his commandments. It's all because of union with Christ. Therefore, as Christians, we don't dink around with sin. We don't mess with it. What is sin? Sin is lawlessness. It doesn't lead to lawlessness. Sin is lawlessness. It is rebellion against the God who's our Father. So how could we want to swim back in that? We are God's children. And then the third hope-filled reason is because as God's children, we have a new nature, and this is Verses nine through 10. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works. No one born of God makes a practice of sinning. Why? For God's seed abides in him. God's nature abides in him. We don't practice sin. We don't live in habitual sin because that's not what Christians do. Now do we sin? Yes. I can illustrate it this way. Growing up in our home, my dad, loved to be irrationally early to everything. And so every morning for school, we left the house at 6.46 AM. 6.46, not 6.45, not 6.47. 6.46. That got us green lights for the three lights that we had to get to the university, to which then we could get the first parking spot. walk into the cafeteria, have two minutes to kind of catch our breath before they open the doors at seven, to which we then walk through the line, sitting at our table at 7.01, eating until 7.10, out the door, 7.11. He could be in his office at 7.18, we in our class by 7.32. Every day. Now sometimes, my brother or I, made us late. And what was the response? We're not late. We're Barrett's. Barrett's aren't late. Mostly my brother would then say, looks like we are. And the point is, not that we never do things that might make us late, but Barrett's aren't late. Why? Because we're Barrett's. That's in our nature. That's who we are. That's John's argument. You have God's nature and you are God's children, and God's children don't sin. You say, well, but I do sin. Yeah, you confess it, but it is antithetical to who we are as Christians. And that's how we are to view sin. Yes, we struggle, we fall. That's not who we are. And then John transitions to another characteristic of life in the family. At the end of verse 10, he says, again, whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother. So we have a new transition here. The second characteristic of the two families is you have the family of hate or the family of love. And here he gives us contrasting illustrations. The negative, he begins with the negative, and that is don't imitate Cain, because he killed his brother. Verse 11, for this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. Hatred sprang forth from Cain, from a heart of jealousy, a heart of envy, and it resulted in the physical taking of his brother's life. Hatred comes from these sins that we can sometimes justify. John's not here gonna be talking about loving our enemy, that's in other places in Scripture. Right now, the focus in this section is love for one another. It's easy to come to this particular theme and read this and see what the scripture calls us to, what the gospel calls us to, to loving our brother and sister and say, this is fantastic, John. I really wish that all the other Christians would follow this toward me. But John is not asking us to read this with others' action, but our own. This is what the gospel calls us to do. And we're not to be like Cain, who from a heart of jealousy and envy, he and Abel brought their offerings to God, and God regarded one and disregarded the other, and instead of Cain, appealing to God and repenting, what does he do? He turns to his brother and he's filled with resent. He's filled with bitterness. He's filled with envy. And sometimes the world disdains Christians because of these reasons. I think if we're honest, I think what makes the example of Cain so startling is because we, too, can look at one another, maybe be envious, maybe be jealous, look at the gifts they have, look at the friends they have, look at the personality they have. I'm not like that. And all we know, we're great when weeping with others weep. We get that. But do we rejoice when others rejoice? When we see another Christian have a particular gift or blessing, are we genuinely happy? When we see Christians getting on, do we rejoice or do we just Resent from looking in on the outside And that this is where this is where the gospel comes in and it shapes how we view one another And so John says imitate Jesus he laid down his life for you So we have in verse two the second coming of Christ that fuels our pursuit of holiness and in verses four to 18 we have the death of Jesus Christ as that which fuels our holiness and fuels our love one for another. Remember one time to my shame I was struggling with a bit of jealousy and envy toward a particular situation back in Greenville. And so I thought, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to preach on the Sermon on the Mount. And when it gets to this section about love, oh, they're going to get hammered. Oh, they'll see it. I can't wait to get past the beatitudes and get to this section. And then you get there. And they're like, holy smokes, who's the one who needs this? Not them, but it's our own heart. We can create ways to justify our envy, our jealousy, but here's Jesus. Here's Jesus. What is Paul's argument in Philippians? This is the one who is in the form of God. He did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped or held onto for selfish ambition. But he took upon himself the form of a servant to become obedient unto death, but not just any death, the most humiliating, excruciating, cursed death of the cross. Why? For our greatest need. And that great work of Jesus Christ is what John says, by this we know love, that he laid down his life for us. We ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. Sinclair Ferguson made the comment, if you're gonna be stubborn, out stubborn the believers by wanting to lay down your life first for them. And you look at Jesus in the passage we read in John 13. Again, they're not wearing nice, fresh, clean socks with brand new shoes with Dr. Scholls inserted. And they're wearing sandals. They're going across nasty streets. They go in, they're having their dinner, and nobody was at the door washing their feet. They sit down and just quietly, quietly, Jesus, the master, the Lord, just quietly stands up, wraps the towel around him, grabs the basin of water, and begins to clean feet. And then he says, as I've done, so you do. And so we can kind of meander around, and we can look around and see various needs. And if we ever think, well, that's someone else's job, I don't need to do that. It's not like Jesus. It's not like Jesus. And so, in a sense, look, we've got different personalities. We've got different interests. Now, everyone here is easy to love. Now, Christians outside of here, sometimes weird personality, sometimes hard to love. We got differences. Do we let those differences of interest, personality, whatever, be that which to us we can say, yeah, I don't really need to love them. They didn't say hi to me first. They walked by me in the hallway. Now, we don't know what was in their mind. So part of this is not assuming. What about those who have legitimately Her us. How do we see them? We see them in Christ. There's a Puritan who made the statement, I think it was Thomas Watson, I never want to remove my love upon whom Christ does not remove his. And so if you are blood-bought saints united to Christ, and I, blood-bought saint united to Christ, how could we be at odds? And he calls us to the gospel again, pointing us to Christ. And so how do we do this? The so what of it all, how shall we then live? One, by keeping Christ's advents in the forefront of our minds and our hearts. Christ came once to destroy the works of the devil. He has conquered sin. He has paid the penalty of our sin. And he's coming again. and we look to him by faith now, and then by sight, and then seeing him as he is, we become like him. And so what John's doing is he's connecting sanctification and glorification. What we behold by Christ now and become like him incrementally will be finally and fully completed when he returns and we see him as he is. Such is the power of Christ's beauty and glory and majesty that just seeing him with our eyes transforms us to be like him. And so where do we look now? To know how we are to live and to know how we are to love, we look to the Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for us. And then we live according to our new nature. We remember who's and who we are. We belong to God our Father. God's life-giving life has enlivened us to holiness. And then we live according to our new disposition, God's love-giving love. enables us to love one another. And so as we live our lives going from one day to the next, may we do so beholding Christ and as we look at one another, let us praise God that we belong to the family. Let us long to belong to that family and to live according to it. May Jesus Christ be all and may when others see us, We live with the motto of John the Baptist, may we decrease and may he increase. May Jesus Christ be preeminent among us as we live for him. Let us pray. Our gracious God and heavenly father, we do thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ. Lord, we do pray that you would Grant to us greater clarity to behold the beauty of Jesus Christ in his first advent and what he has done for us in entering Jerusalem on that Palm Sunday in order to destroy Satan, to destroy the works of the devil, to render them powerless against the children of God. Lord, may we live in light of all that is ours as members of the family of God. Lord, we thank you for the new birth. Lord, we thank you for the power of Christ in us. We thank you for the enabling spirit that is in us. And Lord, we pray that we would live in love in a manner worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We thank you, Lord, for the gospel. Lord, we thank you for the hopeful return of Jesus Christ when we will see him as he is and become like him and there for all eternity, we will enjoy his presence and we will know what it is to feast in the house of Zion. Lord, we pray this in Christ's name, amen.