Up Anchor

1 John 2:27

          Some people are against education. Millions of children every day ask, “Why do I have to learn this?” They would remain in bed! Most of us at one point in our lives wish the classes and assignments would end. And one of the keys to a sharp mind in old age is to become a lifelong learner. Mental sharpness can be directly linked to learning new things.

          Learning is necessary for life. We need people studying medicine and the arts. I don’t want a person who just thinks they can operate cutting into me. I want someone with years of study and mentorship. I also don’t want to pay to go to a theater and hear someone who can’t memorize their lines performing.

          The reason learning is important is because it is the way God designed us. The moment we are born we don’t automatically download a software update that will last our lifetime, perfectly tailored to contain every bit of information we will need to fulfill God’s design for our lives. Instead, we begin learning some of the most important lessons in the first hours and days of our lives. And that learning can continue throughout life. We can earn a PhD in our 80’s!

          In our text, John highlights one aspect of the false teacher’s tactics. They have said that we don’t need teachers to understand God’s workings in the world. They say this despite the fact that they themselves are trying to teach. The contradiction is hilarious. Teachers teaching that teaching isn’t important. This sounds just like the current trend in teaching on most university campuses. There is no objective truth except the truth I am teaching that there is no objective truth.

          Well, back to the text. John tells his readers, and us, that the anointing they received, Jesus in them, would teach them. Since for John this living connection between the eternal God and we as believers is the hallmark of the Christian life, it is no wonder he says they don’t need teachers. To put it another way, the presence of the Holy Spirit in us will keep us connected to the LORD. We will be able to tell when someone is feeding us a lie. The Spirit will let us know. We will feel a check in our spirit.

          Without this confirmation, we would need official teachers. But with the Spirit’s witnessing with our spirits, an official spokesperson is not needed. In essence, these false teachers were taking away the heavenly confirmation and replacing it with their own authority. They were putting themselves in the place of the Holy Spirit. What they said was truth was truth.

          This is where so many false teachings start. They start when one person veers of course. That change in course could be due to many reasons, but primarily a disconnection from the Head, Jesus. When they no longer are connected, they must find an alternate source of direction, and Satan is all too willing to step into the gap. He will build up the individual’s ego to the point where they begin to see themselves as the source of all wisdom. They go from bad to worse.

          The anointing spoken of here is connected to remaining in Jesus. The anointing teaches truth about who Jesus is, that He is deity and coequal with the Father and the Spirit. When that connection is broken, there are no bounds to the distance they will travel from the truth.

          So beware of those who disconnect from and become their own authority. If it is new, it isn’t true. If it is true, it isn’t new.

The Purity of Truth

1 John 2:21

          There can be no place for lying in our lives. We live in a world that tolerates, perhaps even promotes lying as a way of life. Little white lies abound. We are told lying is OK if you are protecting someone. In almost every area of life, lying has become an accepted process. The truth would be too hard to handle. We tell them to protect people.

          But the truth is that most of the time we tell lies to protect ourselves. We think of politicians and cultural icons who have fallen from their positions because of the lies they told themselves. And once lies get told, they take over. Lies compound over time.

          Lies also muddy the waters of our lives. And just as it is impossible to draw a polluted glass of water from a pure stream, it is impossible to draw a lie from the truth. There are no ends justifying the means here. Truth must stand on its own, without any supporting lies. If lies are part of the foundation, the whole building is in jeopardy.

          We have heard about people who built their careers on lies written into their resume’. Finally, someone does their homework and the truth comes out. The lies put into question everything else said about that person. Deleted emails with the accompanying “trust me” won’t suffice. A polluted stream to be sure. No crashed hard drive will hide the truth.

          For John, the people who left their fellowship and began spreading lies about Jesus was too much to take. He couldn’t sit idly by and allow the Truth to be dismantled. What these people were doing said something about everything they stood for, not just what they believed about Jesus. Everything about their teaching was in question. The lie cannot come from the truth. Truth brings forth truth.

          John appeals to his reader’s knowledge of the truth. They know the Truth because they have experienced its power to transform their lives. They were in darkness, now they are in the light. They were dead, and now they are alive. The Holy Spirit has confirmed the truth in them.

          So be careful about receiving teaching from someone who abandons even one part of the Truth. Make sure the essentials of our faith remain. Don’t fight a battle over the non-essentials. But go to the death defending the identity of Jesus, fully God, fully man and alive forever more. Any watering down of our sinfulness needs to be avoided. If we are only a little sick, then we only need a little help to get better. But if we are, and we are dead, then we need resurrection from the dead to save us.

To Know Or Not to Know

1 John 2:20

          Often when you join an organization you learn its core values. Today these values are often expressed in a mission statement of some type. It might be a slogan or a catch phrase. It might be just three or four words, or it might be a long paragraph. But those few words are meant to guide the behavior of the employees and of the organization as a whole. It lets customers know what to expect and what not to expect. It serves as a simple way to keep the important things up front.

          I’m lovin it. A diamond is forever. When you care enough to send the very best. Just do it. Eat fresh. Melts in your mouth, not in your hands. Buy it. Sell it. Love it. Don’t be evil. Each one of these, and many more, catch our attention and try to get us to purchase. And if we do, we are in some way supporting the slogan. We believe the advertising. We want what the advertising is supporting.

          As John shares the Good News of the love of Christ to his readers, readers who have already accepted the Truth about Jesus, he reinforces that Truth. They know the Truth because they know Jesus. The message of the Gospel is not a teaching or a moral code. The message of the Gospel is a person: Jesus. And this is what the antichrists of John’s day had given up. They had lost their connection with Jesus.

          John says that in contrast to those who left the Gospel, his readers were connected. They know this because of the anointing they have. It is Jesus doing the anointing. And this anointing lets us know that we are connected. We know we are connected by the love we show and experience, and by the ongoing presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

          Now the character of the one anointing is Holy. This term tells us that he has supernatural power with moral behavior. The anointing we receive is not an impersonal power, a zap from the sky, a ‘beam me up’ moment. The God we serve demonstrates a power in us that changes the way we interact with each other and with Him. It changes the moral fiber of our being. It alters the course of our lives.

          For John, and for us, there is no grey area in our spiritual life. We are either in the light or walking in darkness. We are either loving other fellow Jesus-followers, or we are rejecting them. In the language of Star Wars, we are turning to the dark side. It is amazing how universal the idea of dark and light are in our culture.

          In contrast to antichrists, we know the truth. We know Jesus. But that isn’t enough. Some abstract knowledge of facts and figures or even the personal, intimate knowledge we have of Jesus isn’t enough. It must change our behavior. We must live it.

          Maybe I need to start selling bumper stickers that say, “Just Live It!”

Plain Speak

1 John 1:6

          There are times when you just have to tell the truth, no matter who gets hurt in the process. We sometimes talk about the elephant in the room as a way to express this need to talk about the uncomfortable truth that almost everyone seems to know, but no one seems willing to discuss. But someone needs to start the conversation.

          In the field of communication agreement can be a bad thing. We call it groupthink today. But there is a danger in groupthink that is named the Abilene Paradox. It goes something like this. A family is playing checkers on the porch of their Texas ranch in the late 1950’s. One member of the family suggests that they all get in the car and drive to Abilene Texas some 50 miles away and eat some pie at the dinner there. They suggest it, not because they actually want to go get pie, but because there is a lull in the conversation and think everyone is bored. No one really wants to go on the hot Texas afternoon in a non-air conditioned car, but each holds their negative opinion to themselves. They say yes out of a strange sense of support for each other. They don’t want to be the only one not enthusiastic about the trip. They don’t want to be the odd man out.

          So they make the miserable trip and eat the awful pie. Four hours later they are back home and start a discussion where the truth comes out that no one really wanted to go on the trip, but felt trapped by what they thought everyone else was thinking, namely that the trip was a good idea. They find out that no one wanted to go, but that everyone felt pressure to conform to the opinion of the group.

          John does not feel this pressure to conform. He doesn’t yield to the political correctness of his day and there was political correctness in his day. He doesn’t just say what other people want him to say, or what he thinks others want him to say. He speaks the Truth in a very straightforward and direct manner.

          The Truth that John states that is just a difficult for our world to hear today as it was back then is that there is darkness and light. There is an established moral right and moral wrong. And there is no middle ground, no grey. There are no 50 shades of anything. Light and darkness, black and white, right and wrong.

          As John said, God is light without any darkness. And if we claim to be connected to Him, we can’t live our lives in darkness. If we do, we lie to ourselves, to others, and to God. There is no place for grey.

          I remember as a kid going to the public swimming pool. I remember when they would blow the whistle to signal that everyone had to get out of the pool and I would try to keep my feet in the water. By comparison to my whole body, my feet were such a small part. But the lifeguard wouldn’t even let our fingers be in the water. Out of the pool meant just that. Everyone had to have every part out of the pool. In or out, no partials.

          John says it is this way in our life of faith. We can’t be dippers in God’s pool. We must be all in. We can’t pretend. Light or darkness. And in God there is no darkness, only light. So we must walk only in light.

          If John were alive today and in the political arena he would talk about the 100 Trillion dollar debt that we owe that we can’t possibly repay. He would talk about the actual threat of Islam as it is believed and practiced by a large segment of Muslims around the world. He would talk about the greed of the few that enslaves the many in poverty. He would talk about the sexual crime and slaughter of innocents, including those in the womb.

          For John and for us there is right and wrong and the LORD has defined it. We don’t get to use our Crayola big box to color the world to suit our behavior. We either walk in light or darkness. And the LORD has spoken clearly on the important issues. Are we willing to accept His color palette?

Speaking

Psalm 15:1-5

          Has what you said ever gotten you in trouble? Welcome to the human race! Unless you never say anything, either with body language or with the tone of your grunts, you will make mistakes in your communication. Wars have been started over words. Drawing a picture can get you killed. What you say in a BLOG can get your arrested. Can you wait a minute, there is someone pounding on my door.

          The focus of today’s text is verses two and three. We discovered that the qualification for entering the LORD’s presence is perfection, that none of us is qualified to enter. This is the overarching answer to David’s question of who will get to heaven. But then David lets us know that what we do matters. It is not simply what we have in our minds, our thoughts and intentions, but what we do with the rest of our body that make the difference.

          So David starts with the most rebellious part of our body, the tongue. There are four statements about what we say in these two verses, twice as many as the other examples of righteous and blameless living. Twice as many statements, twice as important. Or maybe twice as difficult to master.

          The first gets many people in trouble. We are to speak the truth from the heart. Some people take this to mean that we are brutally honest, with the emphasis on brutal. They say what they perceive as the truth with such directness that it injures those who are on the receiving end. That is not what this is talking about. When truth is spoken it must take into account the hearer. Truth must be spoken from the deepest part of who we are to the deepest part of who they are. If we speak it in such a way that it never reaches their heart, it wasn’t spoken from our heart. If we really want them to receive what we have to say, it must come from our heart. We might say it isn’t coming from their head. Speaking truth takes into account the hearer’s capacity to hear our message.

          The other side of this line of our text is that we are to be speaking truth, not our truth, but His truth. Not truth as we see it from our perspective. We need to make sure what we speak to another person’s heart is the truth. But often we shade the truth in a way that we benefit from its application. But truth is an equal opportunity offender. Truth steps on everyone’s toes.

          This ties into the next line dealing with slander, the use of our words to color someone else as the bad person. Remember, ninety percent of what we communicate is not what we say with our words. It is our body language and the tone of our voice that carry the lion’s share of communication. Our words can say that we trust the neighbor, but the roll of our eyes sends a stronger message of mistrust. You can say “trust him” as a question, a command, a sarcastic snipe, or a reassuring encouragement.

          The next two lines of verse three expand slander toward other people. Slander can end up doing harm to other people. When we don’t speak the truth from the heart we end up hurting others. It can be as destructive as if you stabbed them with a knife or hacked into their bank account and stole their money. What gets said in the press can ruin a business or a family.

          You see, we are responsible for not just what we say and how we say it, but also to some extend how it is received. We have a responsibility to know the hearer and their heart condition, and speak the truth to them in the best possible way so that they are able to hear the truth. And in the process we have the responsibility to protect others from what other people might hear about them as the truth is spoken. We don’t want our telling to injure them.

          Speaking the truth can be difficult, but we must learn to do it. But we need help. We must do this perfectly. We must be blameless. Lord, help us!