Greetings, morning. It's 1 John 3, 4 through 10. I've told some of you before that this is my favorite book in the Bible, and if I ever am confused about theology, I just go to 1 John. And this passage has a context, and you might notice that each sentence stands alone as well. Powerful statements are made. 1 John 3, 4-10. Everyone who sins breaks the law. In fact, sin is lawlessness. But ye know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins, and in him is no sin. No one who listens to him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him. Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. He who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the The reason the Son of Man appeared was to destroy the devil's work. No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God's seed remains in him. He cannot go on sinning because he has been born of God. This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are. Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God, nor is anyone who does not love his brother. All I have needed thy hand hath provided." Oh Lord, how I love that line in that song. All I have needed. What a massive, massive statement that is. All I have needed. My need has been greater than the size of this universe. Because of my own sin, I have needed redemption. I have needed forgiveness. I have needed eternal life. I have needed the Son of God to become human flesh and die in my place and give me His Holy Spirit. What I have needed is a mountain of blessing beyond anything I can even conceive of. All I have needed, thy hand hath provided. Oh Lord, we thank you. Just the little needs that our bodies have, our physical needs. You have provided us with food so often we have worried. How many times over the years have we worried and yet it was silly for us to worry. You had promised to provide for us and indeed you did. Meal after meal after meal after meal after meal, night after night in a place with a place to sleep and clothes to wear. You provided us with parents. You provide us with friends. You provide us with health, with doctors, medicine, with all kinds of countless delights and joys. You provide us with hope. All I have needed. Thy hand hath provided. And what we need now, Lord, is for you to teach us We need you to work in us both to will and to act. We need you to touch our hearts and incline our affections toward what you're going to teach in this text. Father, we could learn these principles, we could be like atheists sitting here and learn these principles and be unmoved by them. Or we could be like children of God who devour them like choice morsels and are edified and built up and encouraged by them. convicted by them. Lord, we come before you as a church now battered by our own sin and in our conflict with the enemy, we have suffered defeats, many defeats. We come hanging our heads in many ways because of how often we have sinned against you and how lightly we've taken our guilt. And we need help. We need you to sanctify our souls like you promised. We pray that you would do it now through this text. John said that he wrote this so that we would not sin. Lord, I pray that you would accomplish that purpose in us, that you would help us in our battle against sin through this text. Come upon Your servant in power, I pray, that You would send Your Holy Spirit and enable me and empower me to speak in a way that would convey the truth of this text to Your people and even to my own heart. I pray this for the sake of Your glory, dear Lord, for Your name and in the name of Your Son. Amen. There are certain sins in life that are especially hard to overcome. You find that in other areas you do fine. You do. You struggle against other sins or you don't struggle. Really, they're not even a temptation for you. A lot of sins, but certain sins just seem impossible or almost seemingly impossible for you to overcome. Why is that? Why are some of them so hard? Some are easy to resist and some are so hard. I think one reason for that is because of the way that we tend to think about sin and our definition of sin, what makes it sin. If you want to grow a church really fast, one almost surefire way to do that is to minimize sin in your preaching. Don't come right out and say it's OK to sin. That'll drive some people away if you do that. But just treat sin as though it were not really any big deal. Make it so people who are living in unrepentant sin can come to your church and be made to feel like everything is okay between them and God. You do that and you will run out of parking spaces in a matter of weeks at your church. We grieve over that trend in unfaithful churches in our culture today who take sin lightly. But what should cause us to grieve even more than that is the fact that we are guilty of something very similar. Quite often, it's one of the main reasons why we struggle with the particular sins we struggle with. At the moment of temptation, our souls are just simply not convinced that that thing is really all that evil. We tell ourselves all day long that it's evil. trying to convince our souls this is wicked, this is vile, this is horrible, it's not worth it, it's bad, don't do it. But it just seems, no matter how much we tell that to ourselves, at the moment of temptation, our soul just isn't convinced. The Apostle John is going to help us in our fight against sin in this passage by teaching us what sin is and what is it about sin that makes it evil. What is it about those sins that just don't seem all that evil to you to your soul. What is it about those that really is evil? It's going to show us that, and that's going to help us in our struggle against sin. The world is hopelessly confused on this point, hopelessly confused. They do not know what sin is. They have no idea what makes sin, sin. Absolutely no idea. If naturalistic evolution were true, then Hitler would be right. The only meaningful standard for good and evil would be that which hinders or doesn't hinder evolution and natural selection. And so virtue would be killing off all the weak people, the strong people, killing off all the weak people so that the gene pool isn't so polluted. But most people, even when they claim to accept naturalistic evolution, don't buy into that philosophy, thankfully. They're inconsistent. If you press people in the world, unbelievers for a definition of sin, definition of evil. Usually they'll say, well, evil is whatever hurts people. You can tell they might not say that definition, but you can tell that's what they believe by the way they talk. Anything that hurts people is bad. Anything that doesn't hurt people is good. That's why they laugh at God's laws that prohibit what they think are victimless crimes. They think this is silly. They say, if I do this in the privacy of my own bedroom, who's it going to hurt? There's no victim and therefore it isn't evil. And if it is evil, it's not very evil. Certainly it's not as evil as those crimes that really hurt people. It's not very hard to show how inadequate that definition is because not all pain is evil, right? We pay surgeons thousands of dollars to cut us open with knives. Surgery hurts, and yet surgeons who hurt us in order to repair what's wrong in our bodies are not considered evil. They're heroes, right? There's a lot of pain that isn't evil. If there's a vicious, murderous rapist running around loose in your neighborhood, and he's just about to kidnap your daughter, and just a few feet away, he's just about to grab her, and moments before he grabbed her, some police officer comes out of nowhere, tackles him to the ground, puts him in handcuffs, and takes him off, locks him up in prison, that hurts that criminal. and creates all kinds of hardships for the man while he's in prison. And maybe it's not even in his best interest. And yet we don't say the police officer is evil because he inflicted that pain. He's a hero. There's a lot of pain that isn't evil. One woman in our congregation is currently training for an Ironman triathlon where you swim 2.4 miles, then bike 112 miles and then run a marathon 26 miles all in one race. So here we have a woman inflicting pain on herself. Is that evil? No. We actually admire athletes who can do that sort of thing. We might question their sanity, but we admire them. So it doesn't work to define evil as that which hurts people. So then what is evil? What are they left with? If you press them, if you point that out to them and you press them and ask them what is evil, then usually they'll say something like, well, evil is whatever society agrees on as being evil. When the whole culture agrees that something is bad, that makes it bad. And when they all say something is good, that makes it good and virtuous. That definition is even flimsier than the first one. By that theory, slavery in America was virtuous while everybody agreed that it was good. And when the law of the land, when most of the people agreed it was good, Supreme Court said it was good, that made it good, right? Foot binding. In China, that cruel treatment of women and young girls, when they did that, when everybody accepted it as okay, then that made it okay. When human sacrifices, bride burning, infanticide are accepted in a culture, that makes it morally good. When most Germans agreed with Hitler, then Hitler was virtuous. The popular vote method of determining morality fails because there's just simply no escaping the fact that entire cultures have been immoral. So the world's definition of good and evil completely fall apart. They don't really have any basis for saying there even is such a thing as good and evil if they don't accept God. Now, as Christians, we look at all that. We shake our heads at all that. We think, how? Can people in the world be so foolish? And yet that very same foolishness and folly finds its way very often into our own hearts much more, I think, than we care to admit. Last time you caved into some temptation of sin and part of your rationalization in your heart was. This isn't going to hurt anybody. Or. Most people would think there's nothing wrong with this. Lots of people struggle with this. It's a common thing. When you think that way, either of those ways, you are walking in the same darkness as the world when it comes to understanding the definition of sin and what it is that makes sin a bad thing. You say this isn't going to hurt anybody. What you're saying is, well, it's not as bad as other sins because it doesn't hurt anybody, which means you're falling into that definition of sin is that which hurts. Now, As I mentioned in my prayer, one of the main reasons why John wrote this book was to help us conquer sin. 1 John 2, 1. My little children, I am writing these things so that you may not sin. So that's its purpose. The entire book helps us with that, especially starting with chapter 2, verse 12 and following. In that section and right through this section that we're in now in chapter 3, John is teaching us how to overcome evil. And I actually, last week I told you we were starting a new section. Now that I'm studying him more, I realize this isn't a new section. He's still talking about this, how to overcome evil. He began by showing us that we have an advantage over Satan. And he said, don't give that advantage up by falling in love with the world. Do not love the world or anything in the world. Remember? You got your enemy in a headlock, just don't fall in love with him now. Don't love the things in the world. Then he started presenting us with a picture of the end time, the big war between Christ and the Antichrist. And the way that we stay on the right side of that war is by letting his word remain in us. That's what we covered before our big 13 week break. Then last week, John helped us in our fight against sin by teaching us about hope. Remember that? He showed us about hope. We saw in verses two and three that the great hope of the Christian is that day when we will see the Lord face to face and be transformed. That's the greatest hope there is. Whatever you have imagined to be the most magnificent, delightful hope, possible, the most pleasurable, delightful, enjoyable heaven that you can possibly imagine. Nothing anyone has ever conceived of would be as enjoyable or as delightful or as thrilling as seeing the attributes of the Lord Jesus Christ with unhindered ability to appreciate them and see what's wonderful about them. On that day, you will experience and see his attributes. You'll see and experience his love, and it will fill you with a sensation a million times more wonderful than the best love you've ever experienced on earth. You will see and experience his power, and that will fill you with awe and wonder and fear beyond anything you've ever felt. And you will experience him as a refuge, and that will give you a sensation of safety and well-being that is more delightful than anything you've ever felt, and you will behold his wisdom and experience it, and it will interest you more than anything has ever interested you before. And that same thing is true of all of his hundreds and hundreds of attributes. Seeing them will be enough to make you happy forever. Seeing the Lord Jesus Christ as he is will be enough to make you happy Forever. And when we make that our hope, that purifies us from sin, even now. We don't resist sin now and fight against sin now just because it's a no-no and it's taboo or whatever. We fight against sin because if the hope of our lives is to behold and experience what God is like, then obviously we're going to want to behold and experience what God is like now as well. And so we're going to be attracted to righteousness. So that's review. How do you defeat sin? You understand your advantage. You fight against falling in love with the world and the enemy, and you let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. And then you set your hope fully on that day when you're going to see him as he is. That brings us up to today's text. Now, in addition to those four strategies, we're going to get a fifth strategy for fighting against sin. In this text, we're going to see how having a correct understanding of what sin actually is and what makes it evil, what makes it sin, is one of the most important keys to how to overcome sin. This text is going to help us see the evil of those sins that just don't seem evil to us. So look at verse 4. Everyone doing sin... I'm going to be giving you a literal translation here. Everyone doing sin also does lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness. You want to be able to defeat sin in your life, you need to realize this sin is lawlessness. And you read that is a. You're kidding me, that's supposed to help me, sin is lawlessness, how does that help me? Isn't that a tautology just saying it's not like saying a house is a house, you know, or a unmarried man is a bachelor, I mean. Sin is lawlessness. Those are synonyms in Scripture very often. What's the point of telling me sin is lawlessness? Does John really expect that I'm going to have an attitude that says, oh, if it's just sin, I'll go ahead and do it. But if it turns out it's lawlessness, oh, then I'm not going to do it. Who thinks that way? How does knowing that sin is lawlessness help me overcome sin? The answer to that question becomes evident as you look into the meaning of the word lawlessness, a fascinating term. Sometimes that word is used as a synonym for sin, but many times it's used to refer not to sin in general, but specifically to rebellion against God and all that he's doing as the great law giver. It refers to a hostility against God and a siding with Satan against God. That's why the Antichrist is called in Thessalonians the man of lawlessness. It's the same word lawlessness. It's not just that he's the man who commits sin, he's the man of lawlessness, and then he is on the devil's side in his war against God and the devil. So when you see the word lawlessness in an end times context, you can usually be assured that this is being used in this way. And this section is very much an end times passages in two twenty eight. He talked about the second coming in chapter three verse two. We talked about Jesus appearing and are seeing him as he is and being transformed. And then earlier chapter two, he spoke at length about the fact that these are the last days and we know that the last days because of the arrival of the Antichrist. And so this is the end times context. He's been talking all along about this big war between Christ and those who oppose him. And then here he uses a word that very often refers to the rebellion of God in that war, in the end times. And on top of all that, there's another little clue in the Greek. There's a definite article in front of lawlessness. So literally it says sin is the lawlessness. It's the big lawlessness. Not just lawlessness in general, but specifically the lawlessness, the end time satanic rebellion against God lawlessness. So the point here is that what makes sin bad is the fact that it's rebellion and treason against God. It's siding with Satan in the war. There's no more serious crime than treason. The surest way to get the death penalty in just about any country is to commit treason against that country. It's just an intolerable crime. It puts the whole nation at risk. It's a crime against an entire nation of people, and so it's a serious crime. Sin is cosmic treason. It's treason against the kingdom of God. It's siding with Satan. We will have success in our fight against sin in our lives when we learn that what makes something virtuous or what makes something evil is whether or not it is for or against God, period. And the measure of how serious a sin is, how wicked a sin is, is simply how much God hates it, period. Sin is all about what happens between you and God. It's not mainly about people. And so John helps us learn how to see the evil of our sin by showing us that when we sin, we didn't just slip up. We didn't just make a mistake. We didn't just fail to have enough strength. When we sin, we join forces with the supreme enemy of God, whom he hates, Satan himself. Now, let's think through what that means. Skip down just for a minute to verse 8. Look at verse 8. He says at the end there, verse 8, the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's works. That's quite a statement. The reason the Son of God appeared. John used the word works in the sense of a mission in life, that's kind of the way he tends to use that word. For example, in John 4, 34, my food, said Jesus, is to do the work of the will of him who sent me and finish his work. It's talking about a mission in life, a life task. John 17, four, I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do. So that's the way John uses this word work. Jesus came into this world with a mission given to him by the father. Jesus mission in life was called his works. And I'm convinced that John is using the word works here in the same way to describe the devil's mission in life. The reason the Son of God came into this world was to destroy the devil's mission in life, his life's work, to oppose the devil in carrying out his mission. So the picture is not of random skirmishes from time to time between God and Satan. This is a long term, full scale war. If you want to get a handle on what Satan's works are, what his mission in life is, One clue you can get is just by his titles that scripture gives him. The devil's name is Satan. That's his proper name, which is the Hebrew word for enemy. And beyond his name, he's also called a number of other things. He's called the devil, which means slander. He's called the tempter. He's called the evil one, the deceiver, the thief, the father of lies, the murderer, ruler of an authority of the air and the God of this age and the ruler of this world. That gives us an idea of what his works are. He does all those things. Jesus said he came to steal, kill, and destroy. Look at the beginning of verse 8. The one doing sin is of the devil because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The fact that Satan has been sinning from the beginning shows that he is the originator of sin. He is the author of sin. Sin is his deal. He's the one that started it. He's the one that's perpetuating it. He's the one that's carrying it out. When you sin, you are on his side. You are carrying out his life's work, his mission. Genesis one to four, God created everything good in the serpent tempted Eve, leading to the fall, leading to the first murder. And from then until now, it's been all out war between Satan and God. That's what John's saying when he says he's been sinning from the beginning. He started it. In Matthew 13, 24, Jesus told a parable about a farmer whose enemy comes and actually sows weed seeds all the way through his fields. Have you ever been around a farm? You know, that's not just a prank. That's a serious thing. It would destroy that farmer's income for a whole year. You know, a farmer gets one paycheck a year and this guy comes and just destroys it. In verse 39 of Matthew 13, Jesus said the enemy who sows the weeds is the devil. This is one of those parables where Jesus goes ahead and just interprets it for us. The one sowing the seeds is the devil. The farmer is God. The point of the parable is that the devil's goal is to ruin the work of God. That's his mission in life, to just oppose God. That's what the devil's all about. Whatever God's doing, he's fighting against. Acts 13.10, we read that he is the enemy of everything that's right. That's how the devil decides what to do every day. Find out what's right and opposes it. His one goal is to destroy the work of God, and he does that mainly by attacking the church. That's how Satan works. He attacks the church. Satan understands that it's through the church that God has chosen to do his work on earth, and so he makes his main attack on us, and he fights us in numerous ways. Number one, Satan fights the church by holding unbelievers captive, scripture says. He holds them captive. He does all he can to prevent them from becoming saved. He blinds their minds so that they can't understand the gospel in 2 Corinthians 4 and then he snatches the gospel right out of their heart, picks it up like a bird picking up seed off the ground when they don't understand it. So he works hard to keep people lost. He works to entice us through those of us who are safe through temptation into sin. He tries to get us to sin. That's a major part of his work. He tries to fill our hearts like he did with Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5. He puts thoughts into our head and makes sin seem desirable. He dresses it up so it looks good and it doesn't look evil. And he provides us with rationalizations to make it make us think that it's OK. He turns our attention toward the pleasure connected with the sin, and he clouds our thinking about truth and he points our desires in the direction of evil. So he works, he tempts us. Number three, he appears as an angel of light to deceive us. He deceives. He comes up with doctrines in First Timothy 4.1 and deep secrets in Revelation 2.24 that just seem good and right and true. And they're appealing to us. He deceives us into thinking the hunger and thirst pangs of our souls for God are really hunger and thirst pangs for earthly pleasures. He tricks us, he outwits us and sets traps for us with his schemes. He tries to gain a place in your heart, Ephesians 4, 27, by tricking you into holding a grudge so you can have a place inside your heart. And he does all he can do to take you captive to his will. So he, he tempts us and then he deceives us. And then he attacks our faith. He introduces doubts into our minds or distracts us. So we don't remember to think about God's promises. So we're not trusting in God. He uses unbelief to attack us. That's number four, number five, discouragement. He's the accuser of the brethren. He just tries to destroy us with our own guilt. Number six, opposition. As we seek to serve God and work in the Kingdom of God, Satan hinders what we do. Everything we try to do, he tries to prevent. And very often he's successful. 1 Thessalonians 2.18, for we wanted to come to you, Paul says, but Satan stopped us. I tried many times, but Satan stopped us. What we try to do, he works to prevent, and what we finally do accomplish, When we finally do manage to do something in the kingdom, Satan tries to hit the undo button on that. He tries to undo what we do in 1 Thessalonians 3, 5. Paul was afraid that his work with the Thessalonians would be rendered useless because of the tempter. He says, I've done all this work and now it's going to be ruined. It's going to be rendered useless because of the tempter. Number seven, Satan uses suffering. He incites persecution, Revelation 210, and he uses the regular trials of life to sift us like wheat. He inflicts pain and suffering upon us and tries to use that to weaken our faith or to corrupt our love for God through a misinterpretation of the suffering. And the one who does all this, who uses all these tools, is one who is incredibly powerful. He is the ruler of the spiritual powers and authorities of the demons and the ruler of all non-Christians. Every last unbeliever is in the lap of Satan, 1 John says, doing his work. So Satan organizes all the demons, organizes all the evil spirits, and organizes all unbelievers around the world to carry out all these plans. And beyond all that, he has supernatural power, miracles, signs, and wonders. He can do them. 2 Thessalonians 2. He's so powerful. Listen to Jude one nine. Even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not dare bring slanderous accusations against him, but said the Lord rebuke you. Satan is incredibly powerful adversary and incredibly wicked. He's against everything that's good. And this text says Jesus came for the purpose of destroying that work. That's why Jesus came. Verse 4, He says, sin is lawlessness, but you know that He appeared that He might take away sins, and in Him is no sin. This is all about war. Satan pours out his vast resources into causing sin, and Jesus comes to take away sin. There's some discussion here in verse about five of whether this is talking about to take away sin mean take away our guilt through the cross or does take away sin mean sanctify us and make us sin less. I think it's talking about both Christ came into this world to fight sin from top to bottom, the actions themselves, the guilt, the penalty, the cause, the result, all of it. The point is that Jesus is totally against sin, and there is no sin in him. He fights against it, and it is antithetical to his very nature. When they ask the Miss America contestants about their goals, they always kind of chuckle when they say, Oh, I want to bring about world peace or end hunger or stuff that they say we chuckle because it's not even the most resourceful Miss America contestant has never had anywhere near the power it would take to end war or end world hunger or even make a dent in either one. But those women say that not because they actually have the power to do it power to pull it off but just because they want to be impressed. I want us to be impressed with how lofty and how wonderful are their aspirations and their goals and their desires. Are those goals really all that lofty? How lofty are there? There was a man once who did have the power to do all that. The Lord Jesus Christ with one word from his mouth could have eliminated all war forever and all hunger and all disease and all suffering and all death everywhere in the world. In fact, the day is coming when he will do all that. But if he was in an interview and they asked him what his loftiest goals are, none of those things would be on the list. Jesus had a much higher, much loftier mission than eliminating suffering and death. Jesus came into this world to eliminate sin. Because sin is worse than suffering and death. If you eliminate sin, you also eliminate suffering and death because they result from sin. But if all you do is eliminate suffering and death and do nothing about evil, you haven't accomplished anything. So fighting against sin is not a side issue for Jesus, it is the reason he came into this world. And so throughout this text, John does everything he possibly can to make as clear a distinction as possible between the two sides. There's absolutely no middle ground. When I first started studying this text, I was like, why does John keep going on and on and on saying the same thing over and over? All the way from verses 4 through 10. Well, verse 29 of chapter 2 through chapter 3, verse 10. It seems so repetitive, but what John is doing is showing us that there just can be no middle ground. Verse 7, Dear children, do not be led astray. The one doing righteousness is righteous, just as that one is righteous. And the one doing sin is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's works. You are on Jesus' side or you are on the devil's side. There is no neutral in this war. If you are doing righteousness, you are at Jesus side. If you are doing unrighteousness, if you are failing to do righteousness, you are at the devil's side doing the devil's work. And there is no middle ground. Those are the only two possibilities. You are either carrying out righteousness or you are not. In Matthew 16, 23, we find that any time, any moment when you do not have in mind the purposes of God, you are acting on Satan's behalf. Which means at that very moment, every moment of every day, you are either accomplishing God's purposes or Satan's. It's only two possibilities, every moment of every day. When Peter didn't have in mind the purposes of God, Jesus called him Satan. You might as well be Satan if you're not doing the purposes of God. So every time you sin, you are fighting against Jesus. Think about the little sins. that you just struggle with. At the moment of temptation, you can't seem to find them to be evil enough to resist them. When someone close to you does something that's irritating and you hold it against them instead of forgiving, you're fighting against the Lord Jesus Christ. When you fail to do what you know God wants you to do as a husband or as a wife, you are fighting against the Lord Jesus Christ. When you fudge the truth so that people won't look down on you or someone will be impressed with you or to save a little money, you're fighting right along Satan's side against the Holy One. When you entertain evil thoughts, resentment, anger, prideful thoughts, selfish thoughts, lust, whatever, you are joining Satan's army and taking up arms against the Lord Jesus Christ. So what is it that makes sin, sin? What is it that makes sin bad, makes it evil? The fact that it hurts people? No. The fact that society agrees that it's bad? No. The fact that it harms you and causes problems for you? No. The fact that there are consequences? No. What makes sin bad is the fact that it is cosmic treason in the most important war that there is. When we think armed robbery is especially sinful and we would never do anything like that because that hurts people. But secret pride in the heart is not as serious because it doesn't really harm anybody. That is a man centered approach saying it's good or bad based on whether it harms or doesn't harm. Sin is not sin because of its effect on man. What makes it evil is the fact that it is against God. One of the current trends in movies that I think is especially harmful is when they try to get you to root for a bad guy just because he's not as bad as some other bad guy. You notice that? They can't have good and bad anymore. It's not the black hat and the white hat anymore. It's just a crumb and then a worse crumb. And they do that because I think in large measure, Hollywood has abandoned the whole good versus evil storyline because they think it's not realistic. That's fairytale. It's too much of a fantasy. And what they don't realize is there is a there's a very real war and a conflict between good and evil, between God and Satan. There's a conflict between the most hideous, wicked, evil and the most beautiful, glorious, delightful, perfect good. What is unrealistic and what is silly and foolish and Fantasy is Hollywood's idea that evil is actually okay. If you can compare it to some worse evil That's what's unrealistic They make movies that like that to justify the evil in their own hearts They don't want to make good versus evil because they're evil So they'd rather make mild evil against worse evil But that's the ultimate fairy tale. Reality is that perfect good is fighting against total wickedness. And all unbelievers are on the side of total wickedness all the time. And as Christians, any moment you are fighting, you are doing something, you are either fighting on one side or the other. I want you to imagine just for a moment, just picture this in your mind. Over the next several years, say you and I get to witness Armageddon. And imagine that it unfolds this way. A world leader arises who develops a mind control invention that he puts out through the airwaves on TV and radio and he can influence people. People are exposed to that. They're brainwashed by it and can be easily influenced by this leader's rhetoric. And so as soon as that happens, they willingly and enthusiastically take up arms and begin fighting for this world leader and are even willing to die for his cause. And so he succeeds in uniting the world. He unites the Muslim world and the communist world. You know most Muslims they don't really buy into the literal reading of the Koran which says to kill the infidels. But but imagine this leader inspires the great majority of all the millions of Muslims around the world to take the Koran literally and they start taking up arms against Christians. And so he is this vast network of Muslim nations along with all the terrorist organizations around the world. And they join forces with The two largest standing armies in the world, right now the largest army in the world is the Chinese army with 1.6 million troops. Not far behind them is North Korea with close to a million. The United States army, by the way, is number six in the world, only about a half a million. Believe it or not, Pakistan's army is larger than ours. So imagine that China and Russia and all communist countries join forces with all the Muslim countries and the terrorist organizations and they're all united under one leader who is a military genius and a political genius. And country by country he starts taking over the world. He starts with India and he adds another million plus army and moves through Europe and Africa and Asia and South America and he just takes over the world. And when he takes over each country he is absolutely merciless and brutal against anybody that resists him. He does things so unspeakable and so horrific that you can't even watch them on TV. It just makes you sick to your stomach to even hear about these atrocities that he does to children and women and innocent people. And during this whole process, the United States sees what's happening and we send our military overseas to fight him in some of these countries. And in every single battle, the U.S. is quickly and decisively defeated. Just can't get any ground against this guy. No matter what strategy we take, we get creamed every time, every battle. In a matter of just a few years, he has taken over every country in the world except the United States. And now the big invasion occurs because now he's attacking the country that he hates the most. And so the big invasion is about to start. They're going to come from the east coast, west coast, from Mexico, from Canada, and from the air all at the same time. And so here you are in Colorado and the situation seems absolutely hopeless. You and your family are hunkered down in your basement, mortal fear. absolutely terrified, you can't get these images out of your head of these horrific, tortured things that he's done to people. And it's just a matter of hours probably, and you are scared to death. And you know they're not coming to take any prisoners, they're going to come and torture, beat, rape, terrorize, and then kill. But just before they arrive, you start hearing about this one American general who has actually had success in fighting against them. He's the only one in the whole world who has. He uses completely different techniques, techniques that seem counterintuitive at first. They don't even seem like they would work. Totally different from the normal strategies of warfare. But they really do work. Every battle this general has fought against that world leader, he's won. And it starts to give you a little bit of hope. Problem is this world leader has taken over the United States and the networks, the whole networks he's taken over and set up a channel to broadcast this mind control invention. So you tune into channel 55 on your TV and as a matter of moments, you're going to be brainwashed and you will start fighting against the good, the good general. So he's got that, this world leader has that going already. Meanwhile, the good general is going around raising an army fight and defend against this attack. So the good general comes to your house to sign you up before the words are even out of his mouth. You are signed up and ready and eager and everybody else around you is doing the same thing. The whole neighborhood, the whole city, the whole country is going this way. Everybody's signing up. So now he's got his army and then finally the invasion begins. And every single front In this invasion, every single front, this general's army successfully repels this world leader, this wicked world leader. And at one point you ask the general, why don't you just, you're doing so well against, why don't you just make an assault on him and wipe him out? And the general tells you, I'm going to do that, but I'm waiting because I want first to get, win back as many of these brainwashed people as I possibly can. Then I'll do it. And that's done to wipe him off the face of the map. The reason I asked you to imagine that little scenario is not because I believe that's what's going to happen in Armageddon. I'm quite certain that that will not happen that way. For one thing, there's no reason to believe the United States will play any role in the Battle of Armageddon unless it's just as one of the nations that attacks Israel and God's people. The point of my little story is not to suggest anything about what's going to happen in the future. The point of that story is to illustrate what is happening right now. It's a metaphor. The huge evil army illustrates Satan and all of the forces of evil and the general illustrates the Lord Jesus Christ who came into this world to destroy the works of the devil and the army that this general is gathering is the church Christians. And what John is teaching in this passage is this. After years and years of this war going on and this fighting happening, a new generation grows up and starts taking over the fight. And one day you hear a couple of these young people having a discussion and one of them says, hey, why don't we ever watch Channel 55? And you're shocked when you start hearing some of the answers. It's bad for your ears. You shouldn't watch that channel because it uses up too much electricity. 55 is just an evil number. It's bad luck. Watching that channel is bad because it wears out your remote when you start clicking on that many channels. And you're just shocked. You're appalled at this. You stand up and say, no, no, no, no! We don't watch that channel because it would be treason. It would be suicide. It would be a decision to join the most wicked, evil empire that's ever been and to fight against the greatest, most wonderful general that's ever been. That's why we don't watch that. And everywhere you look, you see young people, one after another, after another, after another, caving in to the temptation to watch Channel 55 because they don't understand what's bad about it. And so they're thinking, well, so what if I wear out the remote at the end of the world? Who cares if I use a little extra electricity? They don't understand what's at stake. They don't understand what's so bad about turning on a channel so they can't resist the temptation. You see what I'm saying? We are in an actual war. That metaphor is pointing to a real war. It's as real as any war has ever been, and the enemy we're fighting against is more powerful and more vicious and infinitely more wicked than that world leader in my analogy. And there is much, much, much, much more at stake than just people being brutalized and raped and killed. It's far more serious than just that. And there is really a channel 55. And it's called sin. And if your reasons for avoiding that channel are too small, you will not be able to avoid it. It will be too alluring. Don't stay away from sin mainly because it hurts people or because it harms you or because it's a big no-no or it's a taboo. Stay away from sin because it is cosmic treason. Sin is not bad mainly because hurts people is bad because it is taking up arms against the purest, holiest, most righteous, most beautiful, most glorious, most loving, wisest, most benevolent, most deserving, worthy being in existence. The Lord Jesus Christ. That's why there's no such thing as a small sin. Absolute oxymoron. Some sins have massive earthly consequences. Other sins seem to have no earthly consequences at all, but earthly consequences are not the measure of evil. All sin is cosmic treason against the Lord Jesus Christ who came into this world and laid down his life to fight against Satan and to destroy sin. So that's the simple point of this text. That's the way we need to define sin in our hearts. and discern how evil something really is. Not by the consequences. That's one thing that John in this section, verses 229 through 310, is going to show us to help us overcome sin. There's some more that is even more helpful, at least for me, in this text. We don't have time to do that, so I'm going to save that for next week. But let me just close with Making one more observation about this text. I'd like to just close out our time by rejoicing about the fact that Jesus appeared in this world to destroy the work of the devil. I was thinking about this this morning, I woke up in bed and I just thought my first prayer that came out of my heart this morning was. Dear Lord, all the work. Satan is done. In my life. Thank you for destroying it. Satan tempts you, entices you, works to draw you into sin, away from the Lord. Satan deceives us, takes advantage of our sinful gullibility, the inclinations of our hearts that are really yearning to be tricked into evil because we've wanted and dozed in evil. Satan puts evil thoughts in your head. He provides rationalizations for why it would be okay to think about them. On top of all that, the devil fights against you when you seek God, when you want to have devotion, when you want to spend time in prayer, when you want to read the Bible, he fights against you, he does everything he can to make sure you're too tired. or you're too sick to get up early in the morning. He bombard you with distraction after distraction after distraction. He tries to cover your eyes. He won't let up. He won't leave you alone, even in your prayer closet. He won't let up. He tries to cover your eyes to what's to God's glory. He tries to blind you to what's so delightful and so satisfying about God. He introduces doubt after doubt in your mind when God's word makes its great claims so that you can't delight in them. He does everything he can to get you to be distracted from the things that you do believe. He tries to trick you into holding grudges. He feeds the fires of envy and greed and lust and selfishness in your heart. And he is eager to sift you as wheat. Boy, if God will give him the green light, he will rip you to shreds. He wants to keep as much painful suffering on you as he possibly can and use that to turn you away from God. He does all he can to hinder and ruin your ministry and your work in God's kingdom. He fights against that. And when you stumble, he is all over you mercilessly to discourage you and destroy you with your own guilt. That's what he's doing, and all that is being done by a being far more powerful than you and evil being is absolutely merciless. Just think of how absolutely ruined you would be at His hands if not for the Lord Jesus Christ coming to destroy all of that work. In His great mercy, He rescues us even when we so many times willingly give ourselves over to the enemy in cosmic treason against Him. He still accepts our repentance and restores us He takes back what the devil steals. We intentionally wander into the territory of temptation and then fall, and Jesus Christ still forgives. Time and time again, he rescues us from Satan's clutches when we have voluntarily given ourselves over to him, and we allow the chains to be placed on our wrists again. Jesus, once again, sets us free. We allow ourselves to be deceived in his great mercy. He enlightens us by his Holy Spirit and shows us the truth. Satan tugs at your sinful gullibility. Jesus tugs back on the righteousness of your new nature. Satan puts evil thoughts into your head, but the Lord provides the grace to dismiss those thoughts and his spirit to give you true, noble, right, lovely, admirable, excellent, praiseworthy thoughts. And he enables you to set your heart on things above. He exposes the folly of our rationalizations And when our hearts are inclined away from him, instead of the blows that we deserve in hell, he woos our hearts and draws us back. He sustains you with his great and precious promises. He works in you to will and to act so that your heart desires him. And when we seek, even in our lame, tepid, distracted, weak efforts of seeking God, he so often allows himself to be found even by those kind of efforts. And when the enemy seeks to shut our eyes to God's glory, Jesus Christ causes his glory to shine right through his closed eyelids. When Satan puts to death in you, what Satan puts to death in you, Christ reawakens. And the devil fuels the fires of sin in your heart. Jesus Christ douses those fires and fuels the fires of love for God. And he stokes the flames of righteousness and zeal for his kingdom. And after Satan's issue is weak with agonizing suffering, the good shepherd restores your soul and makes you lie down in green pastures and lead you beside quiet waters so that you might strengthen your brothers. Satan's effort to hinder the work of the ministry cannot stand against the awesome power of the Holy Spirit in your heart. And his mighty right arm lays low the nations and sends the enemy fleeing in fear if you resist him. And when he tries to kick you when you're down and destroy you with your own guilt, Jesus Christ, the atoning sacrifice for your sin is your refuge and your shield and your fortress. And he guards you and does not allow any more blows that you can take. And he intercedes for you and pleads your cause. And he picks you up and he restores your strength and puts the sword that you have cast away back in your hand. And he remains by your side in the battle. When the enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy, the Son of God laid down His life to protect His sheep. And when the murderer succeeds, the good general brings new life. That's what our Lord Jesus is doing. That's why He came into this world. That's why the Son of God appeared. That's our Lord. Let's just be loyal to Him. Let's just be loyal to Him. I'm going to invite the worship team to come back up. We're going to close.