Ministries:
Adult | Teens | Children

Pastor's Pen's:
2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004
2003 | 2002 | 2001

Sermon Series:
Apostles Creed
Dealing with Feelings
Jonah
Get Real
Promised Land Living

Grace Church
257 Kendall Street
Burlington, WI 53105

(262) 763-3021

Email:
Pastor Scott Carson
carson@gracechurchwi.org

Secretary Patti Hall
pattihall@gracechurchwi.org

PASTOR'S PENS 2007

Grace Church of Burlington February 18, 2007 “The wind being in my face, tempering the heat of the sun, I had a pleasant ride to Dublin. In the evening I began expounding the deepest part of the Holy Scripture, namely the First Epistle of John...”                                                            John Wesley             It’s no accident that such a tribute to 1 John comes from an acknowledged prince of evangelical Christianity and one of the father’s of the Great Awakening, one of the greatest revivals that America has ever experienced.  1 John is not an easy letter. In fact, it’s been described as the most difficult of all of the New Testament letters. Its style, structure and thought all contribute to its complexity. Unlike the Apostle Paul, John seldom argues a case, so it’s difficult to trace a linear, logical progression of thought. The links between great ideas are not always clear and the transition is usually very gradual. English pastor, David Jackman, describes walking through 1 John like descending a spiral staircase in a large palace. As you climb the staircase, you see the same objects or paintings from a different angle, often with a new appreciation of their beauty. It’s like that in 1 John. He states and then revisits many of the same great truths. And the view gets more wonderful as you climb and the heavenly light shines more and more clearly as you reach the top. But it takes work to climb the staircase. There are few times where you are having to catch your breath.             1 John is about getting real. Throughout these five chapters three words are repeated: love, life, light. John wants us to have real love, real life and real light. He’s also dealing with imposters in the early church. That’s why we’ve dubbed this series: Get Real. In fact, to emphasize this, we considered mailing out real sugar packets to the church family. But we feared that if a few of them broke in transit, we might have a local terrorist crisis as authorities tried to determine what this powdery stuff was (our church secretary, Patti Hall, was quick to point out that it was not the best idea ☺).             Why was reality such a problem for these early Christians? Unlike most of the other New Testament writers, the Apostle John wrote to third generation Christians. Peter and Paul, James and Jude all wrote for the first and second generations of believers. John, however, as a first generation apostle, passed over two generations to write for an increasingly apostate third generation.             By its third generation nearly every movement of God needs a fresh touch of the Holy Spirit. The first generation is motivated by conviction; great truths have been grasped, and those who have espoused them have a compulsion to spread those truths abroad. They will dare all and die for them. The second generation inherits these truths, but the conviction softens into a belief. They believe the truths they have been taught; they debate them, defend them, and disseminate them, but the fire and passion have gone. By the third generation, the belief becomes little more than a strong opinion. The third generation will  trade  first-generation truth, dilute it, change it, accept counterfeits, and make room for error.  That's why John wrote for the third generation — the third generation needed a fresh revival...they needed spiritual reality.             All about him, John saw error and apostasy, the most flagrant deceptions accepted as gospel truth. John likely would have said, "It wasn't like that at all. I was there. I knew Him as well as anyone knew Him. I was one of His chosen twelve. I remember it all as though it were yesterday."             So out of his remarkably retentive memory—quickened, inspired, and energized by the Holy Spirit—John wrote his gospel to remind the church of the essential and eternal deity of Christ. Then, he wrote three short letters (1, 2 & 3 John) to remind his readers of the true humanity of the Lord Jesus.             Three major heresies had made inroads into the Church when John wrote toward the end of the first century of the Christian era.  The Ebionites denied the deity of Christ—to them He was just another created being. The Docetists denied the humanity of Christ. Believing that He had not come in the flesh, they taught that He was some kind of phantom who had no corporeal being. The Cerinthians denied the union of the two natures of Christ (the human and the divine). Their notion was that "the Christ" descended upon the man, Jesus, at the time of His baptism and departed from Him at the time of His crucifixion. John indignantly denied all three heresies.             John dwells on the past—a characteristic of old people—referring to the past some fifty times in his three letters. The word beginning occurs ten times, for that was John's ultimate answer to the heretics. He went back to the beginning, and he says, "I was there!"             For the next few months we want this eyewitness and friend of our Lord to stir our hearts. It’s too easy to have a veneer of faith without real substance. May digging into 1 John help each of us – Get Real!!