Well, good evening. We're glad that you're joining us here online tonight. This is something new for me, first time streaming, first time probably having an empty church to speak to, but we'll try to learn together here. In our time together here this evening, for those maybe joining us for the first time, We're in, our church is in the process of going through a journey series. It's entitled Journey Into Becoming a Contagious Christian. It's really a study of 1 John, and we're into lesson three here, so we're just a little ways into the book, and we trust that you'll be able to stay with us for these studies. Let's begin with a word of prayer, and then we'll look at this together. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this evening. We thank you for the opportunity we have to share in people's homes when we're not able to be out and about as we might normally be and be in church. We pray that you might help us as we seek to share truths from your word that we can apply to our own hearts and lives. Pray that you might calm our spirits and that we might not be caught up in hysteria of the moment to realize that we know God is still in control. As far as the world's concerned, it may look out of control, but you know exactly what's taken place. It may have taken us by surprise, but you were well aware of this a long time ago. And so we just pray that you'd help us to focus in on your word here tonight, and we'll thank you for your help. In Jesus' name, amen. All right, so we are looking at 1 John chapter 2 if you have a Bible close by. And we're looking at lesson 3, and that has the title of How to Know for Sure that You're a Christian. And we'll be looking together at 1 John chapter 2, verses 1 to 5. These lessons, we've been splitting them in half and taking the other half hour to take prayer requests and to pray together. But it's a little hard to do that now, so we'll focus in on our Bible study. Now, this chapter continues on, and from the previous chapter, continues talking about little children. And it tells us, as we've seen at the end of Chapter 1, there's a need for us to confess our sins and allow the blood of Jesus Christ to cleanse us of all sin. The thing is, we want to have fellowship with God. We want to have fellowship with our Heavenly Father. It's a family relationship here that we're talking about. And he begins there in verse 1 of 1 John 2, verse 1. My little children, these things I write unto you that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. Now, this little children phrase here is kind of interesting. It says, my little children, these things are read unto you that ye sin not. So John is writing these things to fellow believers because God doesn't want us to sin. He doesn't want his children to sin. And so he's made provisions here for us not to sin. And we see here that he knows that we're imperfect, That might surprise some people, but I think most of us readily admit that we haven't arrived yet. We still, even as a believer, born-again believer, we are able, capable of sinning, and yet God wants us to walk in a manner that would be pleasing to Him and walk in obedience to the Word of God. And he tells us here in this phrase, it's if we look back a little bit deeper into this phrase, my little children, comes from the Greek word techna, and it could be translated this way, my little born ones, or my little born again ones. And so he's writing to us as his children. He doesn't want us to sin. And yet none of us have reached that point of perfection. We haven't got to that point where we're no longer sinning. We can sin, we do sin, we ought not to, but the Lord knows that we're still capable and being able to do that. One preacher was talking about this, that nobody had reached perfection. And he was getting very dramatic in his explanation of it. And he asked, has anybody ever seen a perfect person? And nobody responded. And then one little fellow, kind of a Mr. Milk Toast kind of fellow, put up his hand. And the speaker said, well, have you ever met a person that was perfect? And the little fella said, no, I've never seen him, but I've heard about him. And he said, well, who is he? And the fella said, well, that was my wife's first husband. He was perfect in everything he did. Well, we can all imagine he probably heard quite a bit about how the other guy used to do things. But we have to be honest with ourselves, and none of us have arrived yet. We are not perfect. We're not sinless as yet. We ought to be heading in that direction, that there ought to be less and less sin in our lives, that bad habits, bad choices along the way are being dropped. as we continue on in our Christian life. We'll see this later on as we get into the book there in 1 John 5 and verse 18. It says, And that doesn't mean that those who are born again never sin, but the idea is that they don't practice sin. It's not an everyday occurrence. It's a part of their life that they live in sin. You stop and think about the prodigal son and how he wandered away and ended up in the pig pen. And he finally got home to his father. He didn't stay in that pig pen. He got up, he got out of there. And the reason he didn't stay is because he wasn't a pig. He didn't belong there. And we need to realize, as Ecclesiastes 7.20 says, for there is not a just man upon the earth that doeth good and sinneth not. Okay, not that misery loves company, but we're, we still are sinners. Maybe save sinners, having our sins cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ, but we still can and do sin. And so we haven't arrived yet. And so we need to learn how to deal with that as we go along. Well, back here to the lesson, and I'm going to be reading some of these because not everybody that's listening today or watching has the book that our own people do. And John mentions here the word know some 20 times here in this book. There's some things that he wants us to know, to learn, and to know beyond any shadow of a doubt. And he talks about this in chapter five, verse 13. He wants us to know that we're Christians. He wants to know that we're believers, that we're a child of God. And one of the main reasons that people aren't contagious as Christians, that's a real big word nowadays, contagious, but in a good sense, we as Christians ought to be contagious. Other people ought to want what we have. And they ought not to, though, have doubts about their salvation. And so we can know. And so there's gonna be three things that we'll talk about this week and, Lord willing, next week. First one is entitled that Lordship Test. And the idea is the Lord, Lord of our lives, is he the boss? Went on. lower God down to our level, but is he truly Lord? Is he the boss? Is he the CEO of our lives? Now John writes here, he says there in verse three, and hereby we know that we know him if we keep his commandments. Now we see here In this verse, it doesn't say that we're saved by keeping Jesus' commandments. It says we do know that we know him if we keep his commandments. And so what does verse four go on to say? Well, it talks about you or me, if we say that we know him, but we don't obey Christ's commandments. It's like we got one foot in church and the other foot in the world. We live for Jesus a couple hours a week when we're sitting in the pews, and we live like the world the rest of the week. That doesn't fly. He says there in verse four, he says, we're a liar. And the truth is not in him. So if we say that we're a Christian and we are making that choice not to keep God's commandments, then God says, we're lying. We're lying. We're lying to ourselves and maybe we're lying to other people too. And you stop and think about this here. He says, does that mean that if we ever break one of God's commandments, we're not a Christian? No, he's not saying that. That I'm not saved? No. We all sin in some way or another after becoming a Christian. And none of us have arrived as we've already seen here. But John writes here so that we wouldn't sin. He says that you sin not, okay? The desire is that we would not sin. And so that ought to be our desire here as well, that we might not sin. We get closer to the Lord, and we're not lying to ourselves or to anybody else. And he says, when we do sin, how does 1 John 1, the latter part of that verse assure us? He says, well, if any man sin, and we do, We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And so it tells us that we have an advocate. Well, you think, what's an advocate? In today's term, it might be something like a lawyer, somebody to speak up on our behalf. But let's look at that for a little bit closer. And again, this word advocate has the idea of a paraclete or a helper. We see the Holy Spirit's described that way as well. But it means those who will come alongside of you and help in time of need. Folks, we need an advocate, don't we? And we've got a Heavenly Father, and we don't lose our salvation when we sin, but there is somebody who wants us to lose it, and that's Satan. Satan, the Bible tells us, is the accuser of the brethren. In Revelation chapter 12 and verse 10, it tells us that he accuses us before God. And he's there day and night. He's saying that John wouldn't, you know, he's a sinner and you know, here's what he did wrong today. But you know, when that happens again, scripture tells us that Jesus Christ is able to step in as our advocate. And he died for us. He shed his blood for us. His blood is able to cleanse us of all our sin, past, present, and future. And yet, as the accuser, he's there accusing us. But the advocate is far greater than the accuser. Excuse me. And so we see here as Christians, we can sin. And yet the Bible tells us that if we know him, we're going to keep his commandments, as we look there in verse three. And so as God's children, we're part of the family, but how can we have assurance that we're part of God's family? He's telling us that assurance can come by keeping his commandments. Now, as we think about these commandments, More often than not, people's mind kind of goes right to the Ten Commandments, and they're looking at those ten, seeing how they do. But we need to realize that John is not trying to present some legal argument here, and he's just focusing on the Ten Commandments. Those were given to the nation of Israel, to the Jewish people, and we can learn from them as well. But we see here that as family, he's got some other commandments, some other things that he wants us to be obedient to for his children. And Galatians chapter six talks about this. It says, the family is told that we're to bear ye one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. There in First Thessalonians chapter four and verse two, Paul tells us, as the family of Christ, for ye know what commandment she gave you by the Lord Jesus. And some of those commandments mentioned in that last chapter of First Thessalonians, there's quite a number. You look at this and there's 20 some commandments in that chapter. And a few of them are things like rejoice evermore, How about it? How long in this last week have you rejoiced? What have you rejoiced over other than maybe, wow, the gas prices are down, but can't go anywhere. But he says rejoice evermore, not just when everything's going great and we don't have any problems. God wants us to be a joyful Christian. Folks, people are not attracted to a Christian who looks and acts like he just bit into a lemon, you know, that's just sour about life and everything in it. All they see is everything that's gone wrong. We look to Jesus, we don't see that's the kind of attitude he has and we shouldn't either. It tells us things like pray without ceasing. In other words, he's talking about the attitude of prayer. When you get done praying, maybe you kneel down and pray. And yet when we get up from our knees, we're still ought to be in the attitude of prayer. We can go to the Lord in a moment. And we've dealt with our sin. We don't have to confess all the last month's sins that we can remember before we can get around to asking for some help. We're prayed up. He tells us to quench not the spirit. And so there's a number of different commands that God gives us, other than the 10, that he wants us to take part in. If we're gonna have fellowship with God, he wants us to keep, to obey those commandments. And so the Christian doesn't do as he pleases, but rather he does what Christ pleases, what is gonna please the Lord. Have you thought about, do you think about that? As you plan out your day, you wake up and you start going through your mental checklist, all the things you're gonna do that day, is keeping the commandments a part of those? And thinking about what commandments those might be? Well, as we think about this, we've gotta focus in a little bit on this word keep. And it's kind of a key to understanding this verse. The word translate keep has the idea of to keep or to watch, to keep your eyes on something. And it's a navigational term. And in John's day, the sailors, they didn't have all the fancy equipment that we got nowadays, GPS and everything else, to keep on course. And so they keep their eyes on the stars. And if they were to get off course during the daytime, they could get back on course at night by looking at the stars and allowing them to help them to figure out exactly where they're at. And they can, the guy steering the ship might take a nap somewhere in there. Maybe not supposed to, but it might happen. And they get off course a little bit. And so they got to get back on course. Well, how are we going to go about doing that? Well, he's got to recognize where he's at and how he needs to change. And and so they get look at the stars and get back on course. Now, as Christians, we have some might refer to them as spiritual stars. We're not looking as astrology, looking at the stars to figure out what our future holds or anything like that. But they're markers. And the other night, my granddaughter and I were outside, and she was talking about the stars. And over our way, there's so many lights that you can't see many. But over in her neighborhood, you could look up and see the stars. There's the Big Dipper, you know? And I don't know how to tell for sure where I'm at by looking at that. those who sail the ships did, and they could tell if they're off course, and they could tell by the stars to get back on course. Well, as Christians, we too have some guides. It might be like the white lines down the highway. You start drifting over in one lane or the other, especially if you kind of go to the right, and you get off into the shoulder a little bit, and one of those roads where they've kind of roughed it up along the edges, and all of a sudden you're hearing this rrrr, You know, and you realize, whoops, I'm drifting here, gotta get back on course. Well, for us as Christians, some of those markers can be that of the commandments that God has given to us. We know we're off course spiritually when we're drifting. And during a storm, during a crisis of some kind, how about a virus coming to a neighborhood near you? There can be other things, family problems, marital problems, health problems, money problems, all kinds of different problems. But we can get off course because of some of those things. And yet, at some point, there ought to be that desire for the child of God to get back on course, to get your life back in order, to get back on your knees, to start praying again, reading your Bible, Well, I wouldn't say being in church, but we get the idea. Hopefully this doesn't last too long. But in the psalmist tells us there in Psalm 51 10, he says, he's asking the Lord, he says, create in me a clean heart, oh God, and renew a right spirit within me. And so he's asking God, I think of it like this. It's like shining your spotlight on my life And help me to see where the problems are at. Clean up my heart. Make sure there's no dirt in the corners. And give me a right spirit. And I've said, you know, sometimes I got a BA, and that's not talking about a bachelor degree of some kind. No, it's a bad attitude. Lord, I got an attitude problem. Can you help straighten me out? And, you know, he's good at that. He can help us out. And so one of the ways that we can know we're Christians is whether we're being obedient to the commandments. And again, not just the 10, but all of God's commandments. The author of this series, Tommy Hagel, shares an incident in his own life. And I'll just share that with you here. He says, I remember an incident that happened a week after I became a Christian. I was working in a gasoline station in Cato, Oklahoma, and as I was trying to remove a stuck oil filter, the wrench slipped and I smashed one of my fingers. And I didn't say, praise the Lord. Terrible, vile words came out of my mouth. And when that happened, I thought, I must not be a Christian, because Christians don't talk like that. And I became very depressed. And so after work, he said, I went and talked to my pastor, Bud Jenkins. And he says, I told him what happened. And he said, Tommy, how did you feel when you talked like that before you became a Christian? And he said, I replied, it used to make me feel better. And then he asked, well, how does it make you feel now? And he said, I feel terrible. And he said, Tommy, that's how you know you're a Christian. You can still sin, but you can't sin and enjoy it. And that's the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian. Both can sin, but a real Christian cannot enjoy his sin. A true Christian wants to get back on course. They want to deal with their sin. And that's part of the Lordship test. Penetrating question that Jesus asks about his Lordship there in Luke chapter six, verse 46. He says, why call me Lord and do not the things which I say? He says, how can you say I'm your Lord and yet you don't pay any attention to me? You go off and do your own thing. He says, you need to be obedient to my commands. And so if we can sin and there's no regret on our part, that we don't have a desire to repent, to turn from our sin and not go back to it again, and get back on course spiritually, then the Bible says, you very likely aren't a Christian. You might have that name and you're stuck in your head, and think because of other things that you do, you're a Christian, but he's saying, man, if you sin and it doesn't bother you, you don't see any reason to get back in a right relationship with the Lord, then something's wrong there. And yet he says, if sin breaks our hearts, I mean, it really troubles us, that indicates that we really do want to obey God's word and his commands. And so John puts it like this, he says, There in verse five. But whoso keepeth his word in him, verily or truly, is the love of God perfected. Hereby know we that we are in him. Okay, or we're in the family. And so every Christian needs to have that desire to keep God's commandments, to be obedient to the word of God. How about it, friends? Can you stop, think about it? When you sin, does it bother you? Do you have a desire to repent, to turn away from your sin, to confess, to admit it to God, not try to give it some politically correct name or dress it up or, you know, shove it off and saying, well, everybody else is doing it, or I'm better than so-and-so, no. We admit, like that, the publican there, when there's the religious fellow and the publican, the tax collector, you know, one's saying, what a great guy I am, the other one's saying, I'm a nasty guy, Lord, please forgive me. How do we respond? Are we obedient to God and to his word? Do we even know what it says? Do we open the book? It's not just how big your Bible is, but how much dust is on it. Do you open it up? Do you read it? Do you apply it to your own life and heart? And so this verse five is important here. That keepeth the word. And that person, that's where God's love's centered in that person's heart and life. And so we might need to take some inventory of our life. And, you know, some of you may have been down in the basement or wherever you have some canned goods stored, looking, seeing, you know, do I have enough canned goods? Do I have enough of this, that, and the other thing to keep us, you know, especially when everybody's making a run on the grocery store? Well, how about an inventory of your own heart and life? What's your attitude towards sin? Does it bother you when you sin? Does it trouble you? Does it break your heart because you know that that's breaking the fellowship with your Heavenly Father? I didn't say you lose your salvation, but it breaks the fellowship. It's just like a parent and a child, and they have a fight of some kind or another. Well, the fellowship's kind of broken. Nobody's saying much to one another. He's still the father, still the parent, still the child. They're not out of the family. They don't disown him and throw him out of the family. No, he's still one of the children, but they need to work on that relationship. Somebody probably needs to apologize to the other. And so do we cry out to God, I'm wrong, what I did was wrong, to admit to it. Lord, please forgive me, cleanse me. It's on that basis that the Lord will restore our fellowship with him. And that can give us assurance that we truly are one of God's children. Not just because somebody else said so, but because our life says so. Well, we're going to stop here. I trust you'll be able to be with us again next week as we continue on with this study here in 1 John 2. And if you're able to tune in, we're going to try to keep the same hours. This ended up being earlier than our normal Wednesday night Bible study. Maybe next week. We'll see if it's gonna be at 7 or when if you're trying to listen live stream but we're gonna try to do a sunny school at 915 and the morning service at 1030 just like our regular times. So we'll try to have a little bit of a little bit of semblance of order in our lives, even if the rest of it's a little crazy. Well, let's close in a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you for loving us. We thank you for sharing through your Apostle John that you don't want us to sin and that you want to continue on having fellowship with us. But sin in our lives does break that fellowship, breaks the communication line. Kind of like the old telephone when we used to have a cord on it. Like somebody come along and cut the cord. Communication's broken. And we need to confess that sin, admit it to God, allow him to cleanse us and restore us to right fellowship with him. And Lord, we pray that you continue to help us to grow in our love for you. And we pray that we might get to the point where we hate sin as much as you do. Realize that that caused your son, the Lord Jesus, to have to die on a cross for not any sins of his own, but for all of our sins, sins of the world that were placed on him. And yet he can save us. He's able to forgive us of our sin and give us that gift of eternal life if we will but trust in Jesus Christ alone for our salvation. Not in all the things that we do, not in our works of any kind, but in what Jesus Christ did there on the cross. He was our substitute. He died for us. He shed his blood, and that blood can cleanse us of our sin. Again, it's not because Jesus died we all get to go to heaven. No, it's only those who believe, that place their faith and trust in Jesus Christ alone for their salvation. Again, we thank you for being with us tonight, and we trust that you'll be with us again soon. May the Lord bless you.