According to the Scriptures

Guest (Male): Next, on According to the Scriptures, discover how to have authentic fellowship and relationship with God.

Guest (Male): We are glad you've joined us here today for According to the Scriptures as we embark on a brand new series in First John. We're calling it Authentic Fellowship with God. Today, Pastor Damian Kyle will lay the groundwork for this important study, and you'll see that there are some reasons behind the writing of this epistle, like to correct some false doctrines in the early church. Here is Pastor Damian Kyle with the details.

Damian Kyle: This morning we begin a new series in First John, a series entitled Authentic Fellowship with God. I want to give you a little bit of a background as is needed in the beginning of any book. Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, this letter was written by the Apostle John. He was called by Jesus along with Peter and Andrew, and his older brother James. Each of them were fishermen. Jesus called to them to follow Him and become fishers of men. They followed Him and then ultimately became apostles, and John himself became one of the twelve.

John was without a doubt the youngest of the twelve, being called probably just in his teenage years when he left his father's business and then headed out to follow Jesus. Here we are when we come to First John. It's decades later from those events, and John is an old man by ancient standards. This was written somewhere between 85 and 95 AD, some 55 to 65 years after that event of his calling, and 55 to 65 years after Jesus' ascension into heaven following His completion of His three and a half-year public ministry.

He had seen a lot by that time. He is even able to look back upon what Jesus prophesied of, and that is the destruction of the temple in the city of Jerusalem in 70 AD and a destruction of a large part of the city as a result of the Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire. At the time that he wrote this, John was the sole surviving apostle. According to church history, all of the other apostles had by this time died, and not only died but died martyrs' deaths in their calling.

For a sense of perspective related to time, John writes this letter fully twenty years after the execution of the Apostle Paul. The Holy Spirit's contribution to the New Testament through the Apostle John consists of the Gospel according to John, also of the Revelation, and then First, Second, and Third letters of John. If John's Gospel has been a blessing to you in your Christian walk, and if the Revelation has been helpful to you, then we can be confident that his letters are going to be as well.

Perhaps more than any other books in the New Testament, other than maybe the book of Hebrews and the book of Revelation, it's important to understand what John is focusing on in writing his first epistle. If we don't understand what he's wanting to accomplish in this letter, we'll be fairly lost in any kind of coherent understanding of it, much less having the letter become a friend to us for the rest of our Christian lives. John wrote this letter to correct a number of false doctrines that were beginning to circulate in the early church.

They were being advanced by those that claimed to be Christians. They were advancing false doctrines that had to do with Jesus in particular and thus with Christianity in general. They were redefining it. These false doctrines were beginning to spread in John's day. Though in germ form in his day, they would in the second and third centuries bloom into their fullness and then become known as Gnosticism in large part. He deals with more false doctrine here than just the false doctrine of the Gnostics, but clearly he is addressing Gnostic teaching.

The name Gnosticism comes from the Greek word gnosis, and it means to know. These were people who came along and they declared that they were in the know. They had special knowledge about God and special knowledge about Jesus. They claimed to have superior knowledge concerning spiritual things and to possess even a knowledge of Jesus that was greater than the apostles themselves. Among other things, the Gnostics taught that matter, whether we're talking about the physical universe or the human body, was evil.

The spirit, with a lowercase s, the non-material part of a human being, what they would call the divine spark that was in every human being, that spirit was good. This teaching that all matter including the human body was bad and that the spirit was good ended up producing two very different camps within Gnosticism to this very day. Gnosticism is alive and well to this day, even what is called Christian Gnosticism.

The first camp was those who, in the light of the fact that the body was evil and the spirit was good, committed themselves to asceticism, to legalism related to their bodies. If the body is evil and the spirit is good, then we've got to deny our body appetites by means of a life of asceticism, of legalism, even self-flagellation or self-torture they would put themselves through. They became separatists. They limited their contact with the world as much as possible.

They did not engage in sex because they considered women to be the origin of evil. They determined to attend to the flesh and the material world around them as minimally as they possibly could. A second group that developed in the light of this teaching of Gnosticism gave themselves over under the same truth to complete debauchery. They immersed themselves wholeheartedly into sin and into wickedness. They rationalized that since the spirit and the body are two distinctive parts of each human being, and that the spirit was good and the body couldn't be anything but bad, that one could engage in any and all sin with the body and yet still remain spiritual.

The spiritual part of their life couldn't be affected by whatever they did with their body. This Gnostic Christianity, which isn't Christianity at all, tended to produce in one kind of person a Christian who will embrace a false, excessive, unbiblical view and practice of separation concerning the world around us. They will take God's definition of separation from the world and Jesus' definition of what is to be our separation as Christians from the world.

Jesus' definition is that we are in the world, but we are not of the world. That's the perfect balance. Jesus knew what he was talking about when he said it and he prayed it to the Father on the night before his crucifixion in John chapter 17. He prayed before the cross concerning the disciples, "They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not pray that you should take them out of the world, but that you should keep them from the evil one." These Gnostics were determined to avoid even the smallest engagement with the world around them.

The problem in the light of the New Testament and Jesus' teaching is how do you engage in that kind of a man-made separation and still fulfill the Great Commission? Jesus said, "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I've commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." Their separation would have completely eliminated and made nothing of Jesus' command related to the Great Commission.

How in the world would that kind of a false separation allow us to be what Jesus intends us to be as Christians in the world? We are the light of the world. We are an influence in the world that we're in. We are the salt of the earth. Let your light so shine before men, not in some kind of a monastery or some kind of a closet or hut that you would live in, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. What do we do with Jesus' example? He lived the most Christian life you could ever live.

He went into a house in Matthew chapter nine and sat down at a table to eat. Behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples. The Pharisees saw it and they said to the disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" Jesus heard it and he said to them, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means: I desire mercy and not sacrifice, for I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."

We're very wise in taking any definition that anybody else comes up with outside of the Bible or any definition of holiness that we come up with on our own and running it through the life of Jesus as he's revealed in the scriptures. Only then will we be safe. He lived the holiest life anybody has ever lived, and yet was completely free from this kind of legalism or separation. The biggest problem with Gnostic-induced legalism or separation, and really with all legalism, is not only that it's wrong, but that it doesn't work.

Legalism makes the demands of scripture upon us as Christians, which are wonderful, but takes those demands and makes them even more demanding and severe than the Bible teaches. It is often an attempt to try and make myself holy from the outside in. The idea is that if I can change enough about my outward appearance, enough about my outward actions, and change enough in terms of these man-made, self-made definitions of holiness, then somehow it will produce a holiness within my life.

It is an endeavor to change from the outside in. The problem with this is that it will never work. When it doesn't produce that inward holiness, if I'm in this camp, I will determine that it's because I haven't become legalistic enough or separated enough. I will add to my own definitions of outward holiness, and I'll make it even more demanding. It becomes this vicious circle that a person finds themselves in until the legalist's legalism becomes so demanding that all of their time is spent and their entire focus is upon themselves, upon keeping these rules that they've come up with.

They have no time left for a relationship with God or any kind of a significant relationship with other people. This blows up the two greatest commandments of the Old Testament which Jesus affirmed into the New Testament: to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourself. Christianity is entirely different from this kind of thing in that God chooses to make us holy from the inside out.

We become a Christian by being born again. It's a spiritual birth. The Holy Spirit comes into my life, into your life. He changes our lives. He changes our hearts. He begins to change our thinking and our desires. He gives us the will to do and the power to do of God's good pleasure. He gives us a desire to live for God, then the power to live for God, and that then changes how we live our lives outwardly. The change begins inside by the Holy Spirit, then it's revealed outwardly. That is what Christianity is.

In another kind of person, a Gnostic-influenced Christianity will produce a Christian whose lives are marked by engaging in willful, deliberate sin. They will be convinced that they are entirely right with God. They have no concern for obeying God's commandments, no conviction of wrongdoing related to sin, and they are unrepentant. They will believe in their own mind and their own rationalization that there is inside of me something that is devoted to God. My heart and my mind is devoted to God.

They believe my relationship with God is completely unaffected by what I do outwardly with my body. When they're confronted with the inconsistency of that related to the teaching of the Bible, they will typically respond, "You're telling me that I am wrong, but I have never felt closer to God in my whole life." Or they'll say something like, "What I do with my body does not affect my soul. It has no bearing on my relationship with God." This also includes the person who adheres to the idea that what we believe and how we live our lives are two entirely different things.

They're completely unrelated to one another. At this point, somebody might think, "What you're describing in this latter group, that sounds like me, but I've never heard of Gnosticism before in my life, so it can't be speaking about me." We have to realize a person can stumble upon Gnostic truth on their own in the same way the Gnostics did two thousand years ago on their own. There's nothing new under the sun. A person who calls themselves a Christian or has this understanding of Christianity can be engaged in what anybody else would recognize as pure Gnosticism.

They are ignorant of that, but recognize that's entirely the life the Gnostics were living two thousand years ago. Concerning their beliefs related to Jesus, the Gnostics rejected the idea of Jesus' incarnation, that he was, as we sing at Christmas, veiled in flesh the Godhead see. Instead, they believed that he only seemed to have a human body. He was really a phantom of sorts. Since in their view all matter was evil, it was inconceivable to them that God would inhabit human flesh as the Bible teaches and teaches for good reason.

They also rejected Jesus' death and resurrection as the Christ. They taught that the Christ was a divine influence that came upon Jesus at his water baptism and then departed from him in the Garden of Gethsemane before his death upon the cross. The idea is that some man named Jesus died upon the cross, but the Christ didn't actually suffer or die and that his resurrection was not a physical one but a spiritual one. They have all kinds of goofy ideas about Jesus, and it isn't the Gnostics alone.

All of these beliefs are completely contrary to the scriptures. What John is going to do is he's going to blow all this up in the course of his letter. He's not going to do it by making us experts in Gnosticism or in error as Christians, but just by clearly presenting Jesus to us, exalting Jesus before us, and in doing so, to provide us with one of the most beautiful descriptions of Jesus in this epistle to be found in all of the Bible. He describes to us as Christians how to have an authentic fellowship and relationship with God as opposed to the fanciful imaginations of the Gnostics or any of the other errors and false teachers that fill church history.

That brings us to the main subject of this book and that's what we're going to make the focus of our series through it. There's a unifying theme through the entire letter of First John. Among Bible scholars, Bible students, and Christians as a whole, anybody that teaches the Bible, First John is notorious for being impossible to outline in any kind of a coherent fashion. If you don't think it's impossible to outline it for teaching, then go home this afternoon and try and outline it.

There's a lot of repetition in it, not vain repetition. John jumps all over the place in the course of this letter, and so it doesn't have this easy, rational, linear kind of thinking that so much marked the Apostle Paul as the Holy Spirit inspired his writings. Through the years, I've read the outlines of First John fashioned by many Bible teachers and scholars, and every one of them is so different from the others. As I look at them, trying to learn myself, I'm left at the end of my examination of them as confused as ever related to what is the single thread that goes through the entire letter that unites the entire thing.

I'm convinced that the key that unlocks the intent and the fullness of First John is very simple. It's given to us at the outset of the letter in verse three where John writes, "That which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ."

Guest (Male): We'll pick up from this point next time here on According to the Scriptures, as Pastor Damian talks more about authentic fellowship with God. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Modesto. If you'd like to obtain this series called Authentic Fellowship with God on CD, give us a call at 209-545-5530. That's 209-545-5530.

I should also mention Pastor Damian's messages are found at accordingtothescriptures.com as well as oneplace.com and on most of the major podcast platforms. So if you missed one or two messages on the radio, you can always catch up. It'd be an honor to pray for you, so keep those prayer requests coming. Leave a comment or prayer request at accordingtothescriptures.com or email us at atts@ccmodesto.com. Your financial support is greatly appreciated and it helps us bring Pastor Damian's message to the radio on stations like this all across the nation. If you'd like to make a donation to the ministry, please visit accordingtothescriptures.com. Let's see together what the main focus of First John really is.