Grace Church exists to glorify our Heavenly Father by
 continually making more disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Grace Church
257 Kendall Street
Burlington, WI 53105

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Excited about Encountering the Eternal 1 John 1:1-2 Get Real: A Study of 1 John Sermon #3 Soccer fans were excited to learn that David Beckham was coming to the States. Packer fans were excited to learn that Brett Farve was coming back. Bears fans were excited that they went to the Super Bowl. So what gets you excited? When was the last time that you were just beside yourself because you were so excited? Something that got you so excited that you could hardly talk? Could hardly make understandable sentences?   I have to admit that I’m not easily excitable. I can hardly think of a time in my life when I was really, really excited about something. Now Jane can really get excited about things. Jane was a cheerleader in both high school and college. Excitement and energy run in her veins. While I yawn, she yells. While I sigh in boredom, she screams with excitement. Sometimes I wish I was more like Jane.   Our good friend, John, is excited. Turn to 1 John 1:1-4 (p. 862). While our English versions hide it, these four verses are very difficult to translate from the original Greek. They rush out of John’s pen from a man who is extremely ecstatic and excited. There is such energy here that it borders on incoherence. And while we miss it, John’s original readers would have caught the energy, excitement and importance of what he was seeking to communicate! It would be like getting a letter with big, bold upper case letters and then they’re all underlined in red!! There’s no introduction like nearly every other New Testament letter. John just plunges right in.   Most of us have had the experience of speaking during an emergency, under duress or out of anxiety. Our words spill out, racing ahead of our thoughts, until we run out of breath or someone gently urges us to slow down and catch our breath. That’s how John’s preface spills out. It points to both the excitement of what John is communicating and the urgency of the situation. His ideas and words tumble out in his eagerness to express his concerns. Almost awkwardly he repeats himself. Four times he refers to what he has seen or looked at; twice to what he has heard; twice to what he proclaims. But if his wording is awkward, his goal and message are not. Clearly, John wants to underscore that what he is bearing witness to is not some figment of his imagination or some invention of his own. He hadn’t had some bad burritos and dreamed it all up. He wasn’t smoking wacky tobacky. This is real and he’s bouncing off the ceiling over it.   So what gets you excited? Do you get excited about spiritual things? Do you get excited about the fact that Jesus left heaven and took on human flesh so that He could be your Savior? Do you get excited about the incarnation? Or, have you been saved so long that it’s become a yawner…as exciting as vanilla ice cream or watching paint dry? There’s spiritual ecstasy in these four verses and John wants us to catch it. Have you caught it? Because these verses are overflowing with theology, we’re going to focus on verses 1 & 2 this morning and come back to verses 3 & 4 next Lord’s Day. How excited are you? Let’s take a test of just two questions to see if we still are excited about who Jesus is. 1. Are you excited that Jesus is a real human being? Are you excited about the fact that Jesus is a real person…just like you and me?   Media talking heads were atwitter recently with the “news” that someone has found the tomb of Jesus. Hollywood Titanic director, James Cameron, has produced a documentary about it. What was noteworthy to me though was a quote by James Cameron. Cameron said that he was excited to be associated with the film because, “We don’t have any physical record of Jesus’ existence…so what this film shows is for the first time tangible, physical, archaeological and in some cases forensic evidence.” What James Cameron was saying is that there has previously been no evidence of a “historical Jesus.”    It reminds me a bit of a story about a young preacher’s kid. Now some people say that being a “preacher’s kid” can be difficult for a child. One preacher’s kid had been told by his mother that he should wash his hands because there were germs living in the dirt he’d been playing in. This little guy looks up at his Mom, gets this really disgusted look on his face and says, “Germs? Germs? Germs? Germs and Jesus! Germs and Jesus! That’s all I ever hear around this house! And I’ve never seen either one!” At that young age, that little boy wasn’t sure he was comfortable believing in something that he hadn’t seen. Lots of people are like that.   The Conventional Wisdom of our day is “don’t believe in anything that you can’t see.” With that faulty reasoning because you can’t see Jesus, Jesus did not exist…thus, there was no historical Jesus. A high schooler in Florida was given an assignment to write a paper on a historical figure. This teen was a believer and decided to write a paper on Jesus Christ but she was instructed that this was not acceptable because Jesus was not a historical figure. Do an internet search and you’ll find web sites devoted to arguing that Jesus was not a historical figure, that He never even existed.   Today there are thousands of people who have embraced Scientology. Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Kirstie Alley and others are betting their lives on the theories of L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard wrote a book called Dianetics. When people began to embrace the book, Hubbard wrote others and eventually developed a complicated and bizarre set of beliefs. There’s nothing verifiable in his theories. They’re just the imaginations of a man.     The same can be said about the Book of Mormon. It gives us information about various people for whom we have no historical record. You may have even seen the commercials that tell us that Jesus appeared to people in America. However, there’s no evidence that any such thing happened. But as Christians, we don’t have to park our brains at the door to follow Jesus Christ. Jesus was not some myth.   All of us have met people who will say something like, “I don’t believe in anything that I can’t see.” I can’t see electricity but I believe in it. I can’t see gravity but I’m not jumping off the Sears Tower. Ours is an age that bows before the altar of science and while we cannot prove the existence of a historical Jesus scientifically (in that we cannot duplicate Jesus in the laboratory but we can’t duplicate Abraham Lincoln either), we can prove the existence of Jesus historically. Science is not the only legitimate yardstick for truth.   John says, “We were there at the beginning…at the incarnation, when God became man and took on human flesh.” And he is just one of the authors of the twenty-seven New Testament documents that testify of the historical Jesus. F. F. Bruce writes, “Some writers may toy with the fancy of a ‘Christ-myth,’ but they do not do so on the ground of historical evidence. The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic [or evident] for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar. It is not historians who propagate the ‘Christ-myth’ theories.” The early church fathers testified of the historicity of Jesus. Secular historians and authors like Cornelius Tacitus, Lucian of Samosata, Josephus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger and Tertullian all testify that Jesus lived in the first century. One may not trust Christ as Savior and Lord but one has to deny the insurmountable evidence to even suggest that Jesus never actually lived. It’s an undefendable position. And that’s John’s point. That’s why he gives us a CSI testimony.   But John was combating a different heresy than what we typically encounter today. Frequently, you and I run into those who will admit that Jesus existed but that He was just a man, not deity…not the God-man, i.e., Jesus Christ Superstar. But in John’s day there were those who were teaching that while Jesus was God, He never became a man. They taught that at best Jesus was merely a phantom, that while He seemed to be a man, He wasn’t a real man. Do you see now why John is so adamant about his physical descriptions? “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.”   John uses four verbs that describe his own experience with the Incarnation. He heard it--he heard the voice of Jesus teaching with God’s own authority, he heard Jesus declare to people that their sins were forgiven, he heard the sound of leaves crunching under Jesus’ feet as they walked together, he heard the sound of the whip Jesus used to drive the money changers out of the Jewish Temple. He heard it. He also saw it:  with his own eyes he witnessed the many miracles Jesus performed, he had seen Jesus’ arrest, crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. He saw it. John had also looked at it. The Greek word means to stare intently at something, to study it and contemplate what it means. John had stared in amazement at Jesus Christ after His resurrection from the grave on Easter Sunday. He gazed intently, rubbing his eyes to make sure it wasn’t some hallucination or a ghost. Finally, John had touched Jesus with his own hands. He’d placed his hand on Christ’s shoulder, he’d reached out and groped at Jesus after the resurrection to make sure he wasn’t just seeing things. Because of John and the other Apostles’ experience with Christ, they stand as reliable eyewitnesses to proclaim to us what they heard, what they saw, and what they touched. This is why John’s friends had all met untimely and brutal deaths because of this testimony. Yet, even with his closest friends killed for this testimony, John as the last living apostle, still bears witness to this reality for these Christians who seemed to be losing their way in their spiritual journey.   In this regard let me quote two well known Southern Baptist pastors from another generation. George W. Truett was fond of saying, “He was God as though He were not a man. And He was man as though He were not God. He was the God-Man. And never did a hyphen mean so much.” R. G. Lee, speaking of Christ’s dual nature said, “As in eternity He leaned upon the bosom of His Father without a mother, so in time He leaned upon the bosom of His mother without a father.”   Sometimes today it’s as if the Church has become bored with Jesus. And it’s tempting sometimes to create other messages, other goals, another focus besides this 2000 year old focus on the proclamation of the person of Jesus Christ. That’s what was happening in the Church when John wrote this letter. It’s something that really hasn’t gone away. This worldview that there must be something beyond Jesus, there must be something we can add to Him, in the first century that was called Gnosticism.   My friend, Jesus is all that we need, now and forever. It’s all too easy to get our focus off of the fundamental faith of and in Jesus Christ and instead to replace that old (and maybe we think somewhat worn out) truth with something new and fresh and alive – or so we think. Just as John’s readers needed the real Jesus, we still need the real Jesus. We need to get excited that God Himself took on human flesh and became one of us! We need to get excited about the incarnation!     And my friend, He can be as real to you as He was to His disciples. If you have received the Savior, you can have a real experience with God, just as John and the disciples did. You can experience His presence. You can enjoy His fellowship. You can rest in His strength and power and have full joy in Him. You can know His tenderness, His love, His comfort because He knows our hurts, our pains and our disappointments. You can see Him today through the eyes of faith. Friend, get excited about Jesus a real human being who’s just like you and me. 2. Are you excited that Jesus is God in human flesh? C. S. Lewis wrote, “Lying at your feet is your dog. Imagine, for the moment, that your dog and every dog is in deep distress. Some of us love dogs very much. If it would help all the dogs in the world to become like men, would you be willing to become a dog? Would you put down your human nature, leave your loved ones, your job, hobbies, your art and literature and music, and choose instead of the intimate communion with your beloved, the poor substitute of looking into the beloved’s face and wagging your tail, unable to smile or speak? Christ by becoming man limited the thing which to Him was the most precious thing in the world; his unhampered, unhindered communion with the Father.” Pop singer, Joan Osborne sang, “If God had a name, what would it be, and would you call it to his face, if you were faced with him in all His Glory, what would you ask if You had just one question…What if God was one of us. “What if God was one us?” could very well be the most important question ever asked this side of heaven, the central question in all of history. The answer to that question, if it were known, would do no less than change every conceivable aspect of life for people on planet earth.   But most people today aren’t asking about the existence of God. For most that’s a 60’s question. Today it’s rather passe. Recent Gallup polls say that 98% of Americans believe that God exists. The question of today is: Can God relate to me? “What if – What if God was one of us?” It’s a question that most people would like answered. That question could very well be what most of us want answered too. If you study the religions of the world, most emphasize our need to reach out to God or to become a god ourselves. Christianity is unique in that it teaches that God reached out to us when God became human. As John 1:14 states “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” We call this phenomenon of God becoming man the incarnation, literally “in the flesh.” God embraced humanity. In 1 John, John says that Jesus the God-Man was one of us. He writes, “The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.” “The life appeared” declares the appearing of the incarnate life here on earth as a historical reality. The life was no abstract principle but a real person. Jesus Christ was God in human flesh, one of us.   And here we have a serious problem in PC America. While most Americans believe in God or gods, they also believe that we all essentially pray to the same God – whatever we call him or her – 65% according to a recent poll. And even 48% of evangelicals believed that we all essentially pray to the same God. Among those who called themselves regular church attendees, fully 62% said that they believed all religions essentially prayed to the same God. Now this is astonishing! Within the pews of America’s churches, two-thirds of the people do not believe in the exclusive character of the Christian message, and almost half of the evangelicals say the same.   Things have not changed much in 2000 years. John was taking to task and ticking people off because he was proclaiming the exclusivity of Jesus Christ. As Acts 4:12 states, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”   John was proclaiming the incarnation, that Jesus is not another God but the God-Man – and the only way to God. Remember Jesus Himself said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).  Now that’s exclusive! As it was a problem in John’s day, it’s a problem in our PC world.   After the Columbine massacre Franklin Graham found himself in the midst of a firestorm when at a Memorial Service for the victims, he urged the mourners to seek comfort, hope and salvation through Jesus Christ. To his surprise even clergymen complained about his emphasis on Jesus. Many people get upset when you pray in the name of Jesus. I’ve been asked if I believe it is proper to still pray in the name of Jesus in a public setting. It’s amazing and even amusing that some so-called liberal, open-minded and tolerant people can become so intolerant, narrow-minded, prejudiced, and even bigoted when you pray in the name of Jesus or teach the exclusivity of Jesus.   Mark it down, they would never try to stop anyone from praying to any god they want to. They could pray to a tree if they wanted to, and some people do. So why do they want us to stop praying in the Name of Jesus? Would they ask a Buddhist not to pray in the name of Buddha or keep a Muslim from praying to Mohammed? Why is it, that it is only Jesus Christ that they don't want people praying to?   It’s the exclusivity of Jesus Christ. Jesus taught that we were all born sinners. In fact, Jesus' reason for coming to this earth was to save sinners, which included the entire human race. Only Jesus Christ the God-Man could bridge the gap between a holy God and sinful mankind.   During the Dark Ages some 6 million Christians were burned at the stake, fed to the lions in the arena, and murdered in many different ways because they refused to renounce the name of Jesus. Is history repeating itself? Are we going back to the Dark Ages of religious bigotry against the Name of Jesus? Just ask your Children if they have the freedom to mention the name of Jesus in the public schools unless it’s as a curse word. Some children have been sent home from school because they asked the blessing over their food in the name of Jesus, have passed out Christian Tracts, talked to their friends privately about Jesus Christ as their personal Savior, carried their Bibles to school or worn T-shirts with Jesus slogans on them. The list could go on and on.   You can take the Satanic Bible to school but not the Holy Bible. You can talk about Satanism, Humanism and the New Age Movement, but not about Jesus Christ. You can have “demons” as your mascot but not “Jesus Christ.”   John wrote, “The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.” What antagonizes some ought to excite us! We know the one true God. We know Jesus Christ as our personal Savior.   Friend, do you get excited about the fact that when we gather to worship, we are not worshipping the great “I hope so” but the one true God? Do you get excited about the fact that when you read your Bible, you’re reading about how God came in the flesh to save you from your sins and wants to be your Savior? Do you get excited about the fact that when you pray, you are literally touching heaven because you are praying in the name of Jesus, the 2nd person of the Godhead.   As Christians, like John, 2000 years ago, we need to be excited that God became one of us and is our Savior and Lord! And like him we need to proclaim to all who will listen of the eternal life that was with the Father and has come to earth, entered time and space and history for us! Conclusion: Dear friend, as we begin our study of this letter, are you excited that Jesus Christ knows what it is to deal with the problems and pain of human flesh, that He is the God-Man? Are you excited about the incarnation? That Jesus left the glories of heaven to enter space and time to be your Lord and Savior?   A counterfeit Christian, and sadly they’re common, is something like a counterfeit ten-dollar bill. Suppose you have a counterfeit bill and actually think it’s genuine. You use it to pay for a tank of gas. The gas station manager uses the bill to buy supplies. The supplier uses the bill to pay the grocer. The grocer bundles the bill up with forty-nine other ten-dollar bills and takes it to the bank. And the teller says, “I’m sorry, but this bill is a counterfeit.” That ten-dollar bill may have done a lot of good while it was in circulation, but when it arrived at the bank it was exposed for what it really was, and put out of circulation. We can live our lives and have everyone believing that we are a child of God. We can try to live decent and good lives and even help people. However, when the Lord, who alone determines our eternal destiny, looks at our lives, it won’t matter a whit what other people have thought of us. He will know whether we are real or counterfeit; whether we are followers or pretenders. Spiritual excitement is an indicator of whether we are for real or counterfeit.   If your Christianity is a yawner, perhaps that’s because it’s not real. So at the beginning of our study on Get Real, let me ask you a key question: On what do you base your faith? Are you building your life on an illusion? Do you really know the Lord? More importantly, does He really know you?   Many people believe in a Jesus of their own imagination and have an emotional experience that they call being born again. But when their problems are not all magically solved, or they go through difficult trials, they conclude that "Jesus didn't work," and they go back to the world. The problem is, they didn't believe in the Jesus revealed by the apostles in the New Testament, they never experienced true Christianity. True Christianity is essentially Jesus Christ—revealed in Scripture, experienced in new life, repentance and conversion!   And it’s exciting! Friend, please make sure that you've got the real deal! Let me close this morning with a real testimony of real faith by Super Bowl Champion Coach, Tony Dunge.