1 John 2, verses 18-27. Children, it is the last hour. And as you have heard that Antichrist is coming, so now many Antichrists have come. Therefore, we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us, for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out that it might become plain that they are not all of us. But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all know. I write to you not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth. Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the Antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also. Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that He made to us, eternal life. I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you, but the anointing that you receive from Him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as His anointing teaches you about everything and is true and is no lie, just as it has taught you, abide in Him. We see in this text anointed ones, overcoming Antichrist by abiding in Christ. We're talking here about abiding in Christ. As we were making our way into the barber's house on Wednesday evening for our meeting on Wednesday night, the roses that they have out in front of their house were in full bloom. So as the kids got out of the car, they ran up there and saw the roses, began to smell them. My youngest daughter, not content to just sort of get a hint of the scent, ran up there and stuck her nose full into the flower and then sucked it in just as if she was going to fill up her whole body with that smell. And then she began to bear witness to what she had just experienced and said, Daddy, Daddy, you've got to smell the flowers. So, of course, I went and had to stick my nose in the rose too and sucked it in so you could just get that smell all throughout you. Today, what we're going to do is stick our noses, so to speak, the noses of our hearts, into a particular truth of the Scripture, this flower of biblical revelation which is about abiding in Christ. And at this point in the text, as we've been working through what God is telling us through the Apostle John, we see encouragement really kind of morph into exhortation. He's been encouraging us, and really the thrust of this whole letter is encouragement. He wants each one of you to know, to have confidence and joy in knowing that you have the true God and eternal life. Despite the chaos and the confusion that sometimes you live in, sometimes that is even within the church. Do you really have the real thing? Is this real life with God? Or is this just all a bunch of made-up stuff until we look for other things? He says, no, this is real, what you have. He encourages us by saying, verse 18, You have to realize what time you live in, in God's plan. This is the last hour. Ever since Jesus came, this has been a last hour. And in that time, there are going to be many antichrists. Yes, there is an antichrist coming, but there are many antichrists, those of that spirit. And they're going to be operating in this time, and you should expect that. So when you see that happen and you run into that kind of confusion and chaos, false teaching, even as verse 19 indicates, from within the church, Don't let that throw you. Don't let that weaken your faith. Be encouraged. This is the last hour. Understand that's where you live. But also then be encouraged, he goes on to say, because not only recognizing you live in the last hour, but also the fact that God has provided for you what you need to live, to stay true to Him, to walk with Him and enjoy this. He's given you an anointing. You have an anointing. You've been anointed by the Holy One, which we talked about last Lord's Day. is the Spirit of God bearing His Word. Really, what we see with this anointing is that God has given Himself to you so that you can live in a true relationship with Him no matter what opposition you face. And as God gives Himself, of course, with Him comes His truth so that you can expose any liars. However, as we continue to meditate on this text a little bit, this anointing does not mean that you have no responsible participation in this matter of glorifying and enjoying God, walking with Him faithfully, even in the face of antichrist. We're having a partnership with God. That's the way, remember, he started off his letter. You have fellowship, partnership with God. How do you participate in that partnership? I think the old, the aged Apostle John here gives us some wise and serious exhortation now about participating in that relationship in the face of antichrists. He basically says, if we can put it into just three words, abide in Christ. You notice he comes into that in verse 24, where he switches now to a command, an imperative. Let what you heard from the beginning Abide in You. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and the Father. And this is the promise that He made to us, eternal life. And then as He begins to kind of wrap up some of His thoughts in this section before launching off into another one, He says, but the anointing, verse 27, that you received from Him abides in you. And you have no need that anyone should teach you, but as His anointing teaches you about everything, and is true and is no lie, just as it has taught you, abide in Him. So what does He come back to What you need to get and how you need to respond when it comes to this whole issue of living faithfully with God, knowing that you have the true God and eternal life, in this last hour, you need to abide in Christ. That's what it comes down to. You need to abide in Christ. So that's the command. Abide in Christ. Let what you have heard from the beginning abide in you. Now, I find that fascinating. Oh, I'd have to admit somewhat mysterious and intriguing command. And here's what made me think of this, it's a little bit like the fragrance of roses. You smell that there's so much promise in it. There's so much depth to it. And yet it's so elusive, too. Can you plumb the depths of what he's telling us here when he says abide in Christ? On one level, it's simply an obvious command. And yet, in some ways, in my own Christian life, I feel like I've been trying to figure out all that is entailed in abiding in Christ for years now. And maybe, maybe that is why the Word of God tells us to abide in Christ. Because there is so much to it. If it were anything less than that, perhaps we would be tempted to just turn it into something like a checklist. Like, the first rule is obey all rules. Okay, I get that. I do that. And we reduce our relationship with God to just something like that, if that's what God has told us. But here John doesn't allow us to do that, and he says, here's what you need to do in the face of Antichrist. You have to abide. You have to abide in Christ. And I think the reason abide is such a suggestive idea is that it really references everything about our relationship with God. Now let's just think about that for a minute before we talk about this command more specifically. It references everything about our relationship with God. Think about the relationship you have, or maybe had in the past, with childhood friends. You think back to years gone by when you were growing up and the little kids you played with in your class at school or in your neighborhood. Surely you had many childhood friends that you actually no longer know. You wouldn't recognize them if you saw them on the street today. You don't know where they live. You don't know what's happened to them in life since that time. You kind of all die in your separate ways. You have not remained in that relationship. Your lives did overlap at some point and you share some history with them, but they're essentially strangers to you today. On the other hand, you may have some childhood friends that you have kept up with over the years. You have remained in contact with them. You've kept up the relationship. Now, in order to remain in that relationship, some things are required. You have to have some kind of communication, right? You have to keep in touch with them in some way. You have to make an effort to communicate, even if that means at least just sending a Christmas card once a year sort of thing, you know, at least keep your list and send it out to everybody, say, hey, here we are, we're still alive, kind of a thing. And yet we also all know that sending a card at Christmas each year, while it is a gesture toward a relationship, it's a grateful acknowledgement maybe even of a past relationship, if that's all it is, it really isn't sufficient to constitute friendship, is it? There's a lot more that's involved in friendship. Friendship requires more than just a communication of information. It requires, yes, communication, but commitment? It requires care. And by the way, that's why Facebook doesn't constitute friendships, does it? You have Facebook friends. What does that mean? In and of itself, nothing, right? Other than maybe some of their pictures that they post on there will show up on your feed and you'll see them and now you'll know this information. But you might have people up there that you hardly even know them, really, in some ways, right? Friendship is a lot more than that. And in fact, the closer The nature of the relationship, the more important it becomes to abide in that relationship, to remain in it, to do what it takes to keep that relationship. Childhood friends may drift out of our lives. That happens, and we just expect that sort of thing, and you miss them. But there's really not much impact on your life if you don't know where Donnie or Susie from when you were five years old now lives. It doesn't make a whole lot of difference to you. On the other hand, abiding in your relationship with your immediate family, say, has huge ramifications for your life. Every dimension of your life is all wrapped up with that relationship that you enjoy with them. In fact, in some ways, it literally defines who you are. These two people, this man, this woman, are your parents. And that has shaped your life and made you who you are. You wouldn't be that without that relationship. These people are your children, if you have children here today. And that is part and parcel of who you are now today. Your life is all wrapped up in them. These kinds of relationships take the time of your life, even, and starts to make all of your life revolve around that. If you have a family here today, You just automatically, you plan the time of your life around what's going on in your family. You have to, right? We all work together here, we live together, we work, we do all these kinds of things. My whole day is now all wrapped up in these relationships right here. It just defines my life. The stuff of your life, the material possessions you have, it's all wrapped up in that relationship. Everything gets wrapped up into these kinds of relationships that are close. important relationships to us. That gives us a human kind of a picture of this abiding that the Scripture is talking about in our relationship with God. Abiding is just a way of describing what biblically is sometimes called union with Christ. It's a spiritual relationship. And by spiritual, we mean produced by the Holy Spirit. That's its character, its nature. It's a spiritual relationship between us and Christ. And it's shown in trust, in obedience, in love, in joy. Again, please don't think by calling it spiritual that we mean it's less real than other relationships. In fact, it's the opposite. It's more real than other relationships. It is more basic to you than your relationship with anybody else. In fact, it's more basic to you than your relationship with your own self. This relationship we're talking about here with Christ is more intrinsic to you, is more fundamental to who you are, than your relationship with your own body. Your body, as it now exists, will die. Now, in Christ, we look to be raised again, right? But how tightly intertwined is your identity with your body? Pretty tight, you know, pretty tight. Here's something that's tighter than that. Here's something that's closer than that. It's your union with Christ. Everything about you is wrapped up in this relationship. It's closer than children have with their parents. And the Apostle John, of course, got this, what he's teaching us here today, directly from Jesus, in John chapter 15. In fact, we ought to turn there. John chapter 15, where Jesus gives us this very truth. And he gives us a great example of being the vine and us being the branches. John chapter 15 verse 1 says, I am the true vine and my father is the vine dresser. Every branch in me, literally, that does not bear fruit, he takes away. And every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away like a branch and withers, and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. As the Father has loved Me, so have I loved you. Abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father's commandments and abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full." Let me stop there. Here's the fundamental teaching Jesus has given us about what it means to abide. It's obviously by the picture He gives us an organic and a vital union. That is, it is vital. It's living. We cannot live apart from Him. He even gives the warning here, if anyone does not abide in Him, then he's thrown away. He's like a branch that has no life in itself. You burn it up, it's not good for anything. It's not going to produce any fruit. We don't have life in ourselves. we can't produce spiritual life in ourselves. It has to come from a source, and that source is Christ. We have to be organically, or as we should put it here biblically, spiritually connected to Him if we're going to have that kind of spiritual life. This is what Jesus is teaching us here. This vital and organic union between us and Jesus Christ. He even tells us here in this passage how we go about abiding in this relationship. I participate in Christ, by verse 7, He says, His words abiding in Me. If you abide in Me and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you. So, you abide in Christ by His words remaining, dwelling, abiding in you. It also is shown in asking and receiving. As He says in verse 7, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you. It's shown in abiding in His love which means keeping His commandments. As verse 10 says, if you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father's commandments and abide in His love. Which in that, in turn, means loving one another, as He says in verse 12. This is My commandment that you love one another, as I have loved you. So that's what it looks like. How do I abide in Christ? Well, His words abide in me. I engage in this relationship of asking and receiving. I keep His commandments, thus loving one another. Now, turning back to our text here in 1 John, you can see that the particular aspect of this abiding that John has brought out is that whole aspect of Jesus that Jesus mentioned of His words abiding in us. He says in verse 24, Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. This is the message of Christ that he's talking about here. The message of Christ is to abide in you. With all the facets of abiding, John is primarily focused on the words abiding in us. As he actually said already back in chapter 2, verse 14, I write to you, young men, because you are strong and the word of God abides in you and you have overcome the evil one. This is and here's what this is crucial. That's why he's bringing this up at this point for us to get. This is the antidote to antichrist. This is what you need. If you're going to stay faithful, if you're going to know God and walk with him in this last hour, you need his words, his message abiding in you. What is going to neutralize the poisonous message of Antichrist, their deception, their counterfeits, their denials? It's going to be the message of Jesus Christ. And this has been the way it has been throughout the history of the church, from the time when John was writing, down the next generation, and the next generation, and the next generation, all the way down to our day today. False teachers depart from the people of Christ, they depart from the message of Christ, And it's the true message of Christ that keeps Christ's people. This is what was happening in John's day. These people, these antichrists departed. True anointed people abide, they remain. These antichrists were deceiving. True anointed people, they held the truth. And this is what has to happen for us today. Earlier this year, we studied, in fact, I think you'll see in your bulletin here today, The Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed. And as Justin was teaching, we got into some of the debates and the arguments and the things that were going back and forth in those days about why this was significant. And you go back and you read men like Athanasius, just after the Council of Nicaea. Men like the two Gregories, the Cappadocian fathers. These men were passionate and earnest in writing letters arguing and holding councils and debating these kinds of things, even using what we might look at today as sometimes very intemperate language. They were getting pretty heated up about some of these things. And they didn't hesitate many times to call people antichrists and such things. But what were they fighting about? And why did it matter? It's all about the person of Jesus Christ. Exactly what John says in this text, antichrists are going to come up and start denying. Who is the liar but he that denies that Jesus is the Christ? And you don't get this right, you lose everything else. These men, in fact, you pay attention to what they wrote. Men like Athanasius. And what you begin to see is they saw how this permeates everything. That if you don't get Jesus Christ right, You won't, for instance, get your ethics right. You won't know how you're supposed to live in this world. You'll get deceived in how you're supposed to live if you don't get Jesus Christ right. You see, what they saw is that we can't interpret this world from our old perspective of just the way we see it naturally. We have to interpret the world the way God is revealing himself in the personal work of Jesus Christ. And that changes everything. That even changes the way you read the Bible, by the way. That's why Athanasius would sometimes, I just lost the word I wanted to say, sometimes, in not very nice ways, call his opponents Jews. You're Jews. That's your problem. Or was that just a racist slur? What was he saying? No, he was saying, you're reading the Old Testament as if Jesus had never come in the flesh. And so you don't understand it. You're getting it all wrong. You don't understand even what's in your own Bible that you're claiming to hold to because you haven't paid attention to the dramatic difference that God has made by sending Jesus in the flesh. That changes everything here. And we've got to get that. Otherwise, you're going to go astray. You're going to go wrong. Just last night, in fact, Barb and Monica and I were talking a few things about church history, just even in our American church history. And you see that the rise of the last part of the 19th century, early part of the 20th century of what was known as theological liberalism. We call it theological liberalism because I don't want to confuse it per se with what you might think was political liberalism in our day. These were men who claimed to be Christian, all kinds of things, but in their efforts to sometimes to reconcile the claims of modern science with the Bible and the things that we now know from science, and all this, began to progressively downplay and even deny biblical truth. Much about who Jesus was. For instance, one of the flashpoints, this developed in history, became known as the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy. And sometimes one of the dividing lines that people would divide over would be the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. Was he born of a virgin? You see, the liberals came to the point of saying, Well, we know that doesn't really happen. You know, that's not the way things work. And what that was, was just the early churches reflecting back on this amazing person that they were following, Jesus, and sort of a myth that they developed to show reverence for Him and explain what an amazing... they couldn't explain what an amazing person He was. If he was just a normal guy like you and I, so we can take these truths of the Bible, I shouldn't say truths, we can take these stories in the Bible and we can say, get moral benefits from them. You know, when it teaches us that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, we can get some moral benefit from that, even though we know it wasn't actually historically true. This became a dividing point. Was Jesus born of a virgin? It kind of became a standard question, in fact, in some circles, to show the difference. Because do you accept miracles? That God can actually do things that aren't according to the way science says they have to be done? You start to deny these things, pretty soon you start to deny who Jesus Christ is. And here's why this is so crucial. theological liberalism as an example. And here's why this is so crucial in this kind of a context that John is talking about. Did these kind of men ever come out and say, we're not Christians. Let's throw out the Bible. Let's get rid of the church. We don't need that kind of stuff. They didn't do that, did they? They said, we believe the Bible. We're Christians. We're churchmen. We're going to do all these good things just like Christians have always done? We're Christians. And oftentimes, even in the debates that went on, in the denominations that were affected by this, so often they took God's truth, made it look good, and yet redefined it. One example I just thought of recently in the debates that were going on about the Bible in those days, This is in the 1920s. A pastor of a famous church in New York City, in the Northern Baptist Convention, what was known as the Northern Baptist Convention at the time. Some of the conservatives of the group, the fundamentalists, as they had become known since 1921, they got that label, fundamentalists, who were fighting for the fundamentals of the faith. The scripture is true, it's inspired, it's inerrant. and we have to hold to what God says here. And they began pushing to provide some definition and say, you have to adhere to this. We just can't have this nebulous agreement to work together somehow if we don't really teach the same doctrine, if we don't believe the same faith. In one of those, I believe it was 1923, my memory could be off on that. One of those debates, as the fundamentalists trying to forward this motion, in fact, at this point, of getting the convention to adopt the 1833 New Hampshire Baptist Confession. They were saying, this is going to be a confession. If you don't agree with this, then you can't be part of the convention. So what did Cornelius Wolfkin do? He took the convention floor and said, you know what? Of course, this is my paraphrase. We Baptists have always believed that the Bible is all we need to hold to. We don't need decrees and traditions of men. We don't need all these kinds of things like that that men have come up with over the years. All we need is the Bible. So I would say we don't need the New Hampshire Baptist Confession. We don't need all these kinds of things. We just need to hold to the Bible and we'll be fine. Now remember, this is a theological liberal saying this. Why was he saying that? Did it sound good? I mean, who's going to argue with that, right? Of course we believe the Bible. This is what we hold to. Here's a convenient way to get out of having to define anything. As long as I believe the Bible teaches it, then I'm good. I'm holding to the Bible. And you can't criticize me. You see how slippery these false teachers can get. They'll say things that sound exactly right. and mean exactly something wrong by it. The people he's writing to are dealing with just those kind of people. What do you need? What do you need in order to stay true to God, to have the true God and eternal life in this kind of situation? You need to let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. What's going to neutralize the message of the Antichrists? The message of Christ is going to do that. The true message of Christ is going to keep Christ's people. And that's why he goes on to talk about this condition following the command, let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. He says, then if, if what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father." Now, he's giving this as a condition, not in the sense of saying this may or may not happen. What he's saying is he's giving it as an explanation. This is the way things really work, and you have to understand that. That's why I'm giving this command. Why would I tell you this in the face of Antichrist? Well, let me explain to you how things work. Here's the way things work. what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then this will be true. You will abide in the Son and in the Father. It's an explanation for why God gave you the command. It really fits totally with everything we've learned from the Scripture in other places. For instance, James chapter 1, verses 21 and 22 tell us to put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted Word, which is able to save your souls." Really, John is just saying the same kind of a thing in different words, right? What's going to keep you? What's going to save you? You need the Word, and you need it received in you. Colossians 3.16 also talks about the same kind of a thing, and even giving us more insight on applying it. Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, it says. teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness, literally grace in your hearts to the Lord, to God. Pardon me. This is the way things work. This is spiritual reality here. You want to stay faithful? You want to know you have the true God? Then let the message of Christ abide in you. That's the way it works. If that happens, if that's abiding in you, then you will abide in the Son, and of course, if you're in the Son, you're in the Father. You abide in the Son and the Father. You will abide in God. You will dwell there. You'll have that relationship of union with Christ, a relationship of trust and obedience, of love and joy. Now, what does that suggest to us in terms of application? I think it's very rich, but in some ways very basic. This abiding is going to take place as you, first of all, Hear the Word. Hear the Word. Let what you have heard from the beginning abide in you, remain in you. If that happens, you're going to stay in the Son and in the Father. Hear the Word. This is what we're here for today. We're abiding, isn't it? That's what we're doing right now. We're abiding in Christ. Jeremiah Burroughs wrote this, when you come to hear the Word, if you would sanctify God's name, You must possess your souls with what it is you are going to hear. That is, you are going to hear the Word of God. And did you get what he just said? Possess your souls. Of course, that's an older language of it. But take a hold of yourself with realizing what it is I'm actually hearing now. It is the Word of God that I am hearing. And I am receiving it into myself. That's what I'm doing right now. With all humility and sincerity, you gratefully receive the teaching and the preaching of the Word of God. You see, folks, we tend to think of these kinds of things as extrinsic to ourselves. We've turned our relationship with God into the model of a computer or a machine. without necessary spiritual connections. So we think of the preaching and teaching of the Word as hearing information, bits of data that I then take in and use according to my program and spit out certain things. That's not at all an adequate picture of who we are as people. There's a living, vital relationship going on here. You are receiving God's Word when you hear it in faith right now. Let me say this to you on the basis of what we've learned in 1 John, not to mention other places in Scripture. If you receive God's Word in faith, you are receiving, you're welcoming His Spirit. That's what you're doing. In this very moment, right now, if you are receiving God's Word as it is preached, then you are receiving God's Spirit. Not in the sense that you didn't have the Spirit before. But again, we think of having the Spirit as just an inert kind of transaction. Here's the stuff, and God gives you this stuff, and you put it in your bank or your safe called your heart, and you lock it up there, and then you have it. Is that the way relationships are? Is that the way we as humans are? Like I tried to illustrate earlier, and even on a human level with relationships, they are things you have to abide in in order to have them. You don't have the relationship if you don't abide in it. Do you see that? When two people no longer communicate, when they no longer commit to one another, when they no longer care about one another, they can't then turn around and say, well, we have a relationship. What? I mean, you did at one point, but you don't now. The very nature of what's going on here is a very active thing. By the way, one of the reasons I believe that the charismatic movement has captured so many people's imaginations in our day and age is because we've thought of our Christianity as a static thing, and we're looking for something that feels alive and real. And we don't realize we have what's alive and real right now. That is, when I gather to hear the Word of God, I am receiving it into myself. I'm making it a part of my heart. I'm living and dwelling in that active relationship with God by His Spirit. I'm abiding in Christ. for me to reject that, to turn away from this, is to, to one degree or another, to turn away from my relationship with Christ. That's why sometimes I meet people, if you're trying to talk to them on a spiritual level, and they say, I'm a Christian. And I'll ask them something like, oh yeah, okay, what church do you go to? Oh, I don't go to church. don't ever do that kind of thing, haven't done it for years, if they ever did it, but they're a Christian. That doesn't compute. How do you abide in Christ? It's kind of like asking, how do you stay good friends with somebody? If you choose never to talk to them, to have anything to do with them, you don't, right? You can't have it. This is active. This is living. When you receive God's Word in faith, you are receiving Him. That's why we want the Word. We hear the Word. We read and study the Word. Do you do that? Do you look at God's gift to you and the Word as God communicating Himself to you? He's sharing Himself with you in His Word. Do you read it like that? a commitment to that kind of abiding that you're constantly taking in and engaging with His Word. Reading it, the whole thing, and then reading in depth. Have a plan for studying the Scriptures. Have a plan for reading through the Scriptures. As I often try to encourage people, read through it once a year, but there's lots of other plans too. But whatever you do, read through it and read through it all. The whole thing, cover to cover, is God's Word. And God is communicating Himself to you. When you close that, and ignore it, read the newspaper, listen to the radio, do whatever else, but you don't want this. How can you say you're abiding? That's not the way it works. Read the Word, study the Word. Study it alone, study it in concert with God's people, which are all just aspects of meditation upon the Word. What is meditation? It's making it a part of who we are. We're sort of like, to use the metaphor of food, we digest the Word and take it into ourselves so it literally makes us who we are. We derive our strength from it. We derive our life from it. The Puritan pastor Thomas Watson said, the reason we come away so cold from reading the Word is because we do not warm ourselves to the fire of meditation. We don't make it a part of who we are. We don't abide. That's why John gives us exactly what we need, this exhortation. Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. This is what you need if you're going to stay true to God and have all that He means for you. Another way of meditation, by the way, as Colossians 3.16 says, which I mentioned earlier, is to use great psalms and hymns to meditate on the Word. Use great psalms and hymns to meditate. I'm just saying, for instance, Psalm 42. Is that not a prayer you can pray? Is that not what can course through your heart and your mind and your affections, even, in the music? Saying, all of who I am is engaged with this. With God. Meditate on the Word. And then work that out into obedience. Always obey the Word. That's part of abiding. Always obey the Word. Again, in some ways, so simple. But that's how you come to know. That's how you come to know God. Obedience is the great opener of eyes. I think it was George McDonald who might have said that. Obedience is the great opener of eyes. There are so many things in your life with God that you literally will not understand and won't be able to grasp until you just walk with Him in obedience and keep doing what He says, and keep doing what He says, and keep doing what He says. And then you'll look back and think, oh, I get that now in a way that I never used to. You know, I maybe didn't even understand why God's... Even something I've mentioned already in this message. Why does God set it up to where His people are supposed to gather all the time and go through all these things like singing and preaching and praying? You know, doesn't repetition make things kind of dull, meaningless? We shouldn't do that all the time. God seems to set it up to think we need to keep doing this all the time. And you know what? It's the people who obey. Even if from the beginning of Christian life they don't understand why this is so significant, they just commit themselves. God wants me to do this. I do it. And so I faithfully come with His people. I faithfully hear preaching, even if it's mediocre. I faithfully sing, even if the congregation doesn't sound like what I hear on the CD. Keep doing these things that don't seem so glamorous and so wonderful and so exciting about how to know God. They're not like the big conferences I see where everything is so glitzy and amazing. I just keep doing what God says. That's abiding, and that's how you come to know Him. That's developing, that's pressing into this relationship you have with God. So my challenge to you today, really, is just this. Keep your fellowship with God. Invest yourself. Invest yourself, body and soul, into your relationship with God. Delight yourself. That's the way the psalmist described it. Delight yourself in the Lord. Don't mistake that for always feeling good about everything you're doing in your spiritual life. Any more than you would in any other relationship in life. But delighting yourself is intentionally savoring. It is opening your eyes to see. In some ways, this is what people who like great art of whatever kind do. You ever watch somebody look at a painting and wonder, what do they see there? I'm, of course, talking about painting that has worthwhile qualities to it. It's funny that it doesn't. It doesn't have anything really to see there. But you can tell the difference between, say, people who don't really know what they're looking for. They just kind of look at a painting. Hmm, interesting. Walk on. And there's somebody else who will sit there and look at that. They'll observe the color. They'll observe the lines, they'll observe the composition. They'll pay attention to how the painter has drawn your attention to certain things. And before long, they'll start to, if you will, feel a kind of understanding about this painting. Because I'm engaging, in effect, with what this artist was communicating through what he painted right there. I'm not just walking by and saying, oh, nice painting. Same kind of a thing in our Christian lives. We see what God is painting, and we observe it, and we pay attention to it. And we look at how God is working, and we look in His Word, and we come to try to understand that, and we're thinking it through, we're meditating on it, we're conforming our lives to it, we're responding, giving ourselves to it, delighting ourselves in the Lord. That's what's going on here. So yes, we do live in the last hour, and there are many antichrists. But God has given Himself to you. He has anointed you with His Spirit, bearing His Word, and now His Spirit and Word must abide in you, and you abide in Him. And so in order to arouse yourself to this activity, to this active abiding, this active abiding, consider what you have, as verse 25 says, when you abide in the Father and in the Son. When you abide, when you remain in the Father and in the Son, what do you have? What do you really get from that? And this is the promise that He made to us. Eternal life. This is what John says you get from that. Folks, you're going to abide somewhere. You always will. And you're going to end up abiding in what you think is going to give you life. What you think is really going to satisfy you. That's what you're going to invest yourself in. You're going to pour your energy into it. You're going to pour your meditation into it. You're going to learn all about it. You're going to do it. You're going to practice it. That's abiding in something. Some people abide in the army. Some people abide in computers. Some people abide in all kinds of... Whatever you believe is going to give you life, that's where you're going to pour yourself into. And what the scripture is telling us today is, well, here's where you're going to find life. The real thing. Eternal kind of life. It's in the Son and in the Father. So, let what you have heard from the beginning remain in you.