Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

A few weeks ago I came home from work and saw a strange, bright light emanating from underneath the door to my office.

When I went in I discovered that the light was coming from the Christmas present Selah got from my cousin Heather—an AeroGarden.

Have you seen these?

It’s a small hydroponic garden that grows herbs, veggies, etc. with full-spectrum light and liquid plant food.

Selah had been trying to figure out a place where the light wouldn’t be a nuisance (and where the cat wouldn’t try to eat the plants!), and my office turned out to be a good spot.

(So now I’ve got instant access to all the mint, basil, parsley and dill that I want when I’m working from home!)

Selah is very diligent to make sure the water and fertilizer are replenished, and the light cycles on and off to keep the plants healthy.

There won’t be any fresh basil for cooking if the light goes off or the water runs out, right?

And if you take one of those pods out of the device, it will shrivel and die—it needs to live in the grower.

Sounds a lot like the passage we read from John’s Gospel earlier--

John 15:4–5 (ESV)

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.

John revisits that same command to abide in Christ here in our passage this morning:

1 John 2:28 (ESV)

And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming.

I think that this command to abide in Christ is very important for us to hear, because I think there is a dangerous misconception that some people have about what it means to be a Christian.

There is a mindset among some folks that becoming a Christian means “asking Jesus into your heart” or “accepting Jesus as your Savior” or (if you’re a good Calvinist!)

“receiving Jesus as your Savior”.

When you do that, you have become a Christian.

And that’s certainly true, as far as it goes—the Apostle John records Jesus’ words in his Gospel, John 5:24:

John 5:24 (ESV)

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.

He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.

So calling out in repentance and faith for Jesus Christ to save you by His death, burial and resurrection is a “one-time”, singular event.

You have “passed from death to life” at the moment when you hear and believe the Gospel.

But the problem comes when people take that “one-time” event and count it as their entire relationship with Christ.

In other words, “Yeah, I prayed a prayer at church one Sunday thirty years ago, so I’m a Christian.”

“I signed a commitment card at a revival service once; I’m a Christian.”

“I threw a pine cone into the bonfire at a youth group camping trip once; I’m a Christian...”

But John makes it plain here (as Jesus did in our Gospel reading) that you are not a Christian because you had a one-time spiritual encounter where you affirmed the Gospel, but otherwise your life has gone on unchanged and uninterrupted.

The proof that your Christian faith is genuine lies in the fact that it is an inescapable part of every facet of your life!

This is what Jesus means when He says that we need to abide in Him—live in Him, live our lives in such a way that Who He is and what He has done for us and what He says in His Word is as vital to our lives as a branch is to a vine, that we can no more live without Him at the center of our lives than a sprig of mint will survive when you uproot it from its source of light and nourishment.

John has just warned his readers here in 1 John 2 to refute and resist the spirit of antichrist that denies Jesus is fully God and fully man—and here in the rest of this chapter and into Chapter 3 he builds on that argument: If Jesus really is fully God and fully man, then you can abide in Him!

You can depend on Him for every facet of your life, you can receive forgiveness for your past and cleansing from your guilt and shame, you can depend on Him for wisdom to meet the day-to-day challenges of living in this fallen world, you can be assured you will grow more like Him as you walk with Him, and you know that you will have all eternity with Him when this life ends.

(NONE of that would be possible if the antichrists are right, and He is not fully God and fully man!)

So what John wants to show us in these verses this morning is that because Jesus is not who the spirit of antichrist says He is—because He is fully God and fully man—then abiding in Him brings great blessings to your life.

He lists several of those blessings through the end of Chapter 2 and into Chapter 3.

So what I aim to show you this morning from these verses is that

ABIDING in Christ produces the ABUNDANT BLESSINGS of the Christian life

When you abide in Christ—when who He is and what He has done and what He says is as vital to your life as a vine is to its branches—your life will be characterized by these things.

First, in verse 28 John says that you will have the blessing of

I. CONFIDENCE at Jesus’ COMING (1 John 2:28)

1 John 2:28 (ESV)

And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming.

The way John composes this statement it’s easy to be put in mind of those videos that are so popular of little kids standing at an airport watching their dad come home from military deployment—that’s the kind of meeting that John wants his readers to have.

A meeting with Christ that is

Full of JOY (cp. 1 Peter 1:6-7)

There’s no self-consciousness, no second-guessing in a child when she sees her Daddy walking down that jetway toward her, is there?

Christian, that’s what a life spent abiding in Christ produces in you!

You can look forward to the day that He comes (and that day is getting closer every day!) with joy and excitement because of the beautiful fruit that will appear in you on that day.

The Apostle Peter writes about that moment when Christ arrives:

1 Peter 1:6–7 (ESV)

In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

When Jesus arrives someday, you who have been abiding in Him, drawing your entire existence from who He is and what He has done and what He has said—you will shine like pure gold when He arrives!

The “praise, glory and honor” Peter writes about is the praise, glory and honor that will be yours when you shine with Christ’s glory reflected in your life through the refining fires of trials and tribulations you have lived through here in this life!

The blessing of abiding in Christ means confidence at His appearing—full of joy and

Free from SHAME (Mark 8:38)

John says that if you abide in Christ in this life, you will not “shrink from Him in shame at His coming”.

He takes this warning from what he heard Jesus Himself say.

In Mark’s Gospel, Chapter 8, we read:

Mark 8:38 (ESV)

For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

In other words, if your entire experience of Christianity comes from walking down an aisle at a crusade or signing a commitment card or repeating a Sinner’s Prayer, and you have no other interest or experience of Christ or His life, then the arrival of Christ someday will not be full of joy for you; it will be a moment of shameful exposure.

We’ve all seen the sitcom plots where one character makes a big show of knowing some important celebrity in order to impress his friends; but in reality he doesn’t know the celebrity at all.

And then invariably there comes a point in the plot when the actual celebrity does show up and the hapless pretender is exposed for the fraud he is.

John says here, live your life abiding in Christ so that you won’t be exposed as a fraud when Jesus comes!

Don’t sit back and say that because you prayed a prayer one day that you’re “all good”, and that you are a Christian.

Because if all you ever did was “pray a prayer”, then on the day He returns he will look at you and say, “Do I know you?” (Matt.

7:23).

Don’t live a lie; abide in Christ now so that you won’t be exposed as a fraud when He arrives!

Abiding in Christ produces the abundant blessings of the Christian life—confidence at His coming, and

II.

CERTAINTY that you are God’s CHILD (1 John 2:29-3:1)

Look at verse 29 to see where that certainty comes from:

1 John 2:29 (ESV)

If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of him.

John is the only Gospel writer who records Jesus’ conversation with the Pharisee Nicodemus—the whole conversation revolved around Jesus’ insistence that Nicodemus be “born again”:

John 3:3 (ESV)

Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

John picks up that thread from his Gospel here in verse 29—the only way to “see the kingdom of God”, the only way to “practice righteousness” is to start over with a brand-new life in Jesus Christ.

Only when you have been born again by salvation can you produce any kind of righteousness—Jesus says in Matthew 7:18:

Matthew 7:18 (ESV)

A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit.

And so John says here, “Look at your life—if you see the ‘good fruit’ of the righteousness of God working in you, then you can have certainty that

You are born of His NATURE

John says, “Look at the peace in your life where there used to be anxiety, look at the love in your life where there used to be hatred, look at the contentment in your life where there used to be envy and bitterness, look at your delight in God where there used to be indifference (or even hostility)—those good fruits of righteousness cannot be produced by a diseased tree!

You can be sure that if you see those evidences of the righteousness of God in your life it’s not because you’ve “turned over a new leaf”—it’s because God has chopped down the old diseased tree of sin and planted you as a new, healthy tree that bears the fruit of His righteousness!

When you are living and abiding in Christ you bear the fruits of His righteousness that demonstrate that you are born of His nature—and John says that you have that certainty that you are His child because

You bear His NAME

Look at verse 1 of Chapter 3:

1 John 3:1 (ESV)

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.

The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.

Consider the name that you used to bear, before you knew Jesus Christ as Savior, when you used to live at the mercy of your lusts and desires, carrying out whatever whim your brain or belly demanded—God’s Word says that you were “by nature a child of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Ephesians 2:3).

But what name do you bear now? “Child of God!” To go from an object of His loathing to an object of His love, to go from a target of His wrath to the recipient of His tender mercy and love and delight:

Ephesians 2:4–5 (ESV)

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ...