Being Fair Dinkum

This week, we are starting a new sermon series. And as I was thinking about it further this week, I was reminded of a Bible college lecturer by the name of Johan Ferreira, who was a brilliant professor in languages and the Old Testament. And as brilliant as he was, he was as quirky as well. He had a few sayings that I'll always remember for the rest of my life. He was a South African who had been living in Australia for a very long time.

He was well into his forties, maybe early fifties at that stage, and he'd been living in Toowoomba or growing up in Toowoomba since the seventies, which is weird for a South African to have migrated that early. You don't really meet them very much. Anyway, he spoke, or at least understood and could read, ten languages. Ten languages. He married a Chinese doctor and learned fluent Mandarin as a result.

He was a principal of a Bible college, and while he was principal, he regularly undertook life-threatening mission trips to teach at underground churches in China. He had a wonderful ministry in my life as he taught me the Bible about ten years ago now. But one thing in particular that I will always remember about this man, and a saying that he would often use to challenge us, his students, to honest and open evaluation of ourselves, would be to say, "You have to be fair dinkum. You have to be fair dinkum. You have to call a spade a spade," he would say.

And every time he would say this, and I had a few classes with him, I would always smile. You know what fair dinkum is, right? It is to be real. It's to be honest.

I know Bob Murray also used to say that a lot. But I always smiled that this man who still, after forty years in a different country, knowing ten different languages, still with his strong South African accent, married to a Chinese woman speaking fluent Mandarin with his kids, would use the Aussie colloquialism "be fair dinkum" when talking about the Bible. This morning, we're going to start a sermon series on the book of the first letter of John. The first letter of John. And we'll be doing it right through to Christmas, like I said, if everything goes according to plan. But this letter is all about being fair dinkum.

It's all about being absolutely honest with yourself and with one another and with God. It will test how much we love one another. And if we really mean it when we say that, it will test how much we love God. It will challenge you to flush out whatever is unhelpful and whatever is untrue in your lives. And unapologetically, that is how today's passage, the opening verses of this letter, starts. So we're going to read that together, and we're going to read the first chapter of this book, one John.

It's called one John just, incidentally, because there are actually three letters. One John, two John, and three John, and we're just dealing with this first letter over the coming weeks. This is how the apostle John begins his letter to the Christians two thousand years ago. "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. The life appeared, we have seen it and testified to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the father and has appeared to us.

We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship is with the father and with his son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete. This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you. God is light. In him, there is no darkness at all.

If we claim to have fellowship with him, yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his son, purifies us all from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar, and his word has no place in our lives.

My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the father in our defence, Jesus Christ, the righteous one. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for the sins of the whole world." So far, our reading.

The apostle John, called the beloved apostle, wrote this letter, scholars believe, towards the end of his ministry, and it was a long, long ministry. John, we see, gives us a snapshot of what this letter is all about in the opening four verses, the prologue. He loves a good introduction. His gospel account has that wonderful opening verses, "In the beginning was the word." And we find again, "that which was from the beginning" being mentioned here, "which we have heard, which we have seen."

Similar things, similar themes, similar words coming out. The word of life is mentioned here, and Christ is referred to as the word which was from the beginning, the word which was God in John's gospel account. John's aim for this letter is found in verses three and four. He says that he stands as a witness. That he is an eyewitness of what?

Of God who came in flesh. God in flesh. The word of life, he says, which was from when? From the beginning. There was no starting point.

He was from the beginning. Now there are all sorts of allusions, like I said, to his opening prologue to his gospel as well. Here, Jesus is referred to as the word of life. The good news of Jesus, he is saying, however, is not some shadowy, vague, mysterious teaching or concept. He's not a prophet who lived long ago whose teachings are vague and distant, set in a historical context that is so far removed from ours that followers had distorted and changed his teachings in some shadowy hidden way.

No, John says, "I am his witness. I gladly tell you that I am a witness to him. We have heard. We have seen. We have physically touched this Jesus."

What did Jesus come and offer? Verse two says, "life." He has come to offer life. Now the apostle John, if you've read his gospel account, has a habit of emphasising things by repetition. He repeats things in order to make a point, and the word "life" is repeated three times in this verse.

It is a life that appeared all of a sudden. But not only did it appear, but it was experienced and witnessed. Further yet, he and those with him who saw it are now testifying to the validity of this life. He's saying that, guys, I've experienced it. I am living this life.

It is true. It is life-altering. It is a new reality. This life is something, however, that only Jesus offers. In fact, in the account of Jesus' life written by John, Jesus says what in John 14:6?

Whose Bible knowledge is good? John 14:6. "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Jesus says of himself, "I am this life. I offer and bring you this life."

And now, many, many decades later, as John is coming to the end of his life and his ministry, he writes to these Christians and says, "I have borne testimony to this life, to this new reality. This is the one to whom I have proclaimed for all these years." And what is the essence of this life? What makes it something worth testifying about? What makes it worth proclaiming to everyone who is willing to hear it?

Verse three gives us this. "We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard so that, so that you may have fellowship with us. So that you may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship is with the father and with his son, Jesus Christ." In other words, why am I telling you about my experience with this Jesus? So that you may join with me.

So that you may join with me and have as deep a fellowship with God as I have with Him, that we may both have fellowship with God and with Christ together. He's saying, guys, come with me. Come along with me, and I'll bring you to God. So what is the purpose in these opening four verses for John writing this letter? It is to bring you closer to God in a way that you may never have experienced before.

But that only happens, according to John, by bringing you closer to the one who brought God close to us. That is Jesus Christ. And therefore, John says, I'm going to be talking a lot about Jesus, and he does. We're going to be talking a lot about Jesus these next eleven weeks. And not simply about him, but about what he taught.

And what he taught is this word of life, and this is what is going to be unpacked now. Now, before we go any further, friends, we have to pause right here at verse four. Before we go any deeper in this book, we have to ask ourselves this question: do we want to go deeper? Do we want fellowship, true genuine fellowship with God? What will that look like?

What will that mean for my life? How will it be impacted? Do I want a union and a connection with God? That is the question we have to ask ourselves. One time, I was leading a professional faith class that we do here, and incidentally, it has been advertised, I believe, this week again in our bulletin that we are running another professional faith class.

This is a basic Christianity class so that we teach what the gospel is. And I was running this with a particular group of young people one time, and somehow this conversation turned to the movie "The Matrix." Who's who's seen that movie? Hands up. Yeah.

A few hands. The movie "The Matrix." And I remember feeling so old when I mentioned that first movie of "The Matrix." It's a trilogy. The first one came out in 1999, and some of these kids had not even been born then.

And we're talking about just the amazing concept here that, you know, our whole reality, our whole sense of reality is fake. That in this world, humans were basically the slaves of robots. We were giant batteries that robots live off, and we are plugged into this massive giant machine projecting a virtual reality in our minds. We're constantly dreaming that around us is life, but it's actually a lifelong dream. Reality is something far more scary.

And in this story, however, there is a small group of individuals that break free from this. I don't know exactly how that happens, but they break free and they wake up from this machine, and they then go about undermining the scary robots of this real life, of this real existence. Now, at one point in this opening movie, the leader of this rebel group, a man called Morpheus, tries to convince his apprentice Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, of a world that is beyond his comprehension. A reality, he says, that is far outside his frame of reference that he has known all his life. A world not limited by what he can come to expect.

Rules like gravity can be broken. And he says this at one point to Neo, "I'm trying to free your mind, Neo, but I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to go through it." The apostle John is doing something very similar in this letter. He's saying that there is a reality that you may have never known or never tasted or ever experienced, but it's there.

And the challenge to us as we start this, and we have to ask that question, do I want fellowship with God in the true sense of that word? The reality is this letter can only bring you to the door. You have to enter into it. That is the challenge for us at the start of this series, at the start of this morning's message. The apostle makes it clear that his purpose is to bring his readers into fellowship with God and with other believers.

He said, "We found something amazing, guys. The best news that you will ever hear. We have seen it. We have heard it. We have touched it in the person of Jesus Christ, and we want to tell you to enter with us into this reality as well."

He says in verse four, "And if you are to do this, it will make our joy complete. It will make our joy complete." But it's more than that. It's life, and it's more than a vague concept. It is summed up in a person, Jesus Christ.

And he says, "Come join us, and we'll take you to him." Now, before we answer the question, "Are we willing?", the apostle John goes on to share just how you enter this relationship, just how you come through that door. But he begins firstly by explaining three ways you will not be able to enter. Three warnings, three obstacles that will prevent you from entering into this fellowship and intimacy with God and with other Christians.

He begins by stating emphatically these words in verse five. "This is the message." And you'll notice that as we work through this letter, he often does this. He often pauses and emphasises something. And in our Bibles, it often will have this colon at the end.

"This is the message:" colon. "God is light." And just to be clear, he adds, "God is light. In him, there is no darkness at all." Now, to point out that God is light is to draw attention to His uprightness, to His righteousness, that God always does what is right in every single situation, every single time.

This is the opposite of the blackness which John refers to as sin. Sin is the opposite of God's righteousness. It is everything that is counteractive to God. Instead of building up, which righteousness does, sin destroys. Sin kills and undermines and subverts. But there is no darkness. There is none of this in God.

He is all light. Later on in this series, we might talk about this a little bit more, but John's occasion for writing has to do with a heresy that was starting to trickle among the Christians of that time. A heresy that made a play and a big focus on these words of light and darkness, of knowledge and mystery, of truth and lie. And the apostle John brilliantly hijacks these words, these words that these Christians who were entering into the churches of that time, or so-called Christians rather, and spreading these rumours, he hijacks their language and he implants scriptural truth into it brilliantly. When he says, "God is light," it's a term that every reader would have understood, and it's a term that everyone would have said, "Yes.

I want that. That is a good thing. Light is worth having. The darkness, they would have known, is bad. The light is good."

He's asking them, "Do you want to experience light, purity, uprightness? Do you want to get out of the darkness? Then come to God. He is the pinnacle of light. There is no darkness where He is."

If you desire God, you will get light. And this obviously has all sorts of implications. But this is the opening warning to us as well, that if we desire God, we will get His light. If we desire God, we will also get His light, and that will demand change from us. His light will burn against the things that are dark in our hearts, the things that are dark in our minds.

In other words, to approach God is to approach light, and John highlights three obstacles that will prevent us from approaching this brilliant, radiant, holy God. The first one is found in verse six, and it centres on the claim that we already desire fellowship with God when we actually don't. It's the lie that we desire fellowship with God when we actually don't. First obstacle... sorry. I don't know if this is working.

If you could just skip forward to us, Anim, please. The first obstacle is called hypocrisy. "If anyone claims to have fellowship with God but walks in darkness," verse six, "then, since God is light, that person will never be able to approach God." Hypocrisy is saying one thing and doing another. It is the greatest self-deceit you enter into.

The idea that you can trick God, but He's not fooled. People around you will eventually see your hypocrisy too. If you say you're a believer, yet you choose to live as though God's word and God's law has no place in your life, if you live outside God's law, eventually, and it always happens, you'll be found out for who you truly are. The only person you're fooling is yourself.

This is the reality that sometimes we church goers, including myself, and I am front and centre... What we have to realise is Christianity is more than a religious comfortable feeling. The metaphor here of walking in the light is referring to the whole way of life. The whole way of living. It means that a Christian is expected.

It is expected of them to be making a steady, albeit unspectacular, progress in their life, in their morals, in their values, living righteously every day. For a person to truly have fellowship with God, they must walk in the light as God is in the light. It's not good enough to live with our eyes fixed upon a decent human standard, a way of life that is acceptable by many, to religiously follow values that shift in a changing society. To have fellowship with God means we obey God. But more than that, not simple obedience, but to love what God loves, what God has revealed in His word.

It is to accept criticism. This is the hardest part of it. It is to accept criticism from brothers and sisters that may come to you and say, "I think you need to work on this. I think an area in your life is not aligned with God." It is to accept criticism from concerned brothers and sisters who might have the audacity to come and speak with you about sin in your life.

Walking in the light will welcome rebuke. It will desire correction. And why is that? Because you realise that at the end of the day, this is not your friend's will. This is not the church's will.

This is not the pastor's will. This is God's will. Proverbs 27:6 puts it this way, "Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful." Faithful are the wounds of a friend. Someone who comes and really loves you and is willing to be absolutely honest with you rather than the platitudes of someone that doesn't really care for you.

The first obstacle to having true genuine connection with God is thinking that you are alright. That you are having fellowship with God when you are not. When you only have the desire to have fellowship with Him. And there is a difference there that is scary to realise. The second obstacle to having true fellowship with God is self-righteousness.

Verse eight, "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves." The original Greek puts it this way, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves." Now, John is talking about here an issue of having sin being more than simply committing sin. It refers to an inner principle, a lifelong indulgence in sinful acts. Now, sin points to these acts, points to a deeper issue of the heart, and this is a problem that a sinful heart will always have.

It is, if we can try and fix the symptoms, but not deal with the cause. And an unchanged heart will mean that sin always persists. Sin clings. Sin lingers. The truth is not in us, John says.

And here, John views truth dynamically. It says it takes up residence in our hearts. It becomes a part of us and changes us. But to say such a false thing as "we have no sin" makes it impossible for us to have truth. It makes it impossible for the truth to live in us.

It's not a new problem, friends, to deny sin. It is not a new problem. It's obviously been around since John's time, two thousand years ago, but there is a modern trend today that makes it very, very tricky. That claims things like what God would call sin as a disease, or a weakness, or a genetic mutation, or an unfortunate result of family environments. It is, in essence, a denial of sin. People come to regard it as their fate, or worse yet, deny that it really is a thing at all, and it's certainly not their fault.

It is certainly not their fault. And this is a deception that leads to a false sense of security, a false sense of self-righteousness that "I am right no matter what I do, no matter what my situation is." Now, this term of to be self-righteous is an attempt to justify. It is an attempt to rationalise, to explain away, to give a reason for your sense of guilt, and it can come in any form. Have a listen to these words or these sayings.

"Well, I've earned this little bit of whatever I'm doing now." "That person is hurt." "Well, she probably deserved it." "What I've done isn't really that bad." "I know I shouldn't have, but I'll do it anyway."

It's believing that in some way, because you are who you are, you deserve X. You deserve forgiveness. You deserve for God to ignore it or even God to approve of what you are doing. Even when it's starkly in contrast to His revealed will. Self-righteousness is an obstacle to true connection with God because it doesn't honestly evaluate your brokenness before God who is perfect.

Now, if you've never come to that point of realising and honestly being able to evaluate your brokenness before God who is perfect, are you okay? If you have never been to the point where you've thrown yourself on the mercy of God, begging that He would spare you and forgive you of the mess that you have made of your life, if you never come to the point of absolute brokenness and a realisation of terrible nakedness before this God, you may still be wrestling with this issue of self-righteousness, that you somehow offer God a reason to love you, that you somehow still offer God reason to accept you and to forgive you. That you somehow are still on the right side of a passing grade with God. That's the second obstacle, self-righteousness. And the third one in verse ten, "If we claim, if we claim we have not sinned, we make him, who is God, out to be a liar, and his word has no place in our lives."

Friends, the whole Bible, the whole Bible, is a story of how God has gone about dealing with man. Although it has that, the whole story of the Bible is how God has come to deal with the problem of sin. Believe it or not, all of God's dealings with people in the Bible rest on the basis that they are sinners in need of salvation. To deny that we have sinned, however, is to say that God is a liar. That the story contained in this Bible is untrue.

Put negatively, John says, God has no place in our lives if we believe that. When John then adds that His word has no place in our lives, he speaks of God's revealed law, His revealed nature. And this, again, has a dynamic reality. It is active. God's word, God's law is active.

It is transformative. It transforms and enlightens us. So, in other words, those who deny that they are sinners make God out to be a liar, and they show this fact by revealing that the effective, transformative work of God's law has no place in their life. It hasn't changed them. It hasn't transformed them.

The truth of God, how He wants us to live, the joy of His salvation, the majesty of His grace, the power of His peace, these aspects have no place in our life. And so, you can say more than that: if you do not have peace as a Christian, if you do not have joy as a Christian, does the word of life exist in your heart? Straight up denial. Straight up denial that we have not sinned is the only sin that can never be forgiven. One day, there will be thousands upon thousands of souls who, when they stand before God at His judgment seat, will say to Him, "But we never sinned.

We never sinned. I was not a murderer. I was not an adulterer. I never hurt anybody. I never sinned against you."

And God will say to them, "You also never asked My opinion on that matter." And He'll turn them away. Now, friends, we need to let these tests, these three obstacles written to Christians—remember, not non-Christians—we need to let these three tests challenge our hearts this morning. It needs to sit on our minds for a while.

It needs to stew in us as we evaluate our condition before God, and then be fair dinkum. But God doesn't leave us without a solution either. Thank God. He doesn't leave us without hope. Listen to these words of affection and love.

"My dear children, I write this so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the father in our defence, Jesus Christ, the righteous one." Earlier, John had told us that he and the apostles proclaimed the message of the word of life so that his readers may enjoy fellowship with them, with God, and that their joy may be complete. And so, he says, "I don't want you to wrestle with these things.

I don't want you to live a life wading in sin because this is the very thing that will disrupt fellowship. This is the very thing that will destroy joy." So the reality is, he says, if you are a Christian, you no longer will live in sin. You no longer will wade in it and be consumed by it, not like you used to be before. Not like the others that are away from Christ, but while you'll never again wholeheartedly live in sin, you will also experience a life not completely free from it either.

In fact, the closer you move to this God of light, the more sensitive your conscience will be, and the more you'll realise that you are a sinner. And the paradox of this truth is that we now come to appreciate the fact that in our sinful state, we are unworthy to approach this great and this holy God. And you become more and more aware of this as you grow in grace. We are incapable of meeting God, the God of pure light, because we still wrestle with darkness. And so, we need help.

We need help. Otherwise, we are all doomed. But this message this morning assures us that we also do have the help we need. When we sin, John says, we have one who speaks to the father in our defence, and the word here in the Greek is "parakletos," an idea of an advocate, a counsellor. A commentator writes this: that the image is of a royal court where a supplicant, someone who approaches the king or the judge, needs someone greater than himself, one who has the ear of the king, to plead his case.

We are sinners with no good case to bring to the court. John makes that very clear, and I can feel the atmosphere this morning, man, it's pretty heavy. But we don't have a case to bring before a holy God. In every way, we are in the wrong with God, the Father, to whom we come to beg for our deliverance. And John says our deliverer is Jesus Christ.

And then he calls Him the righteous one. And this is interesting. Why doesn't he call Him the merciful one? Why doesn't he call Him the gracious one, the forgiving one? He calls Him the righteous one.

And I have found the reason for it in the very next verse. The righteous one is the one who will deliver us by going in our place. As the one who speaks in our defence, not only is He the advocate or the lawyer or the adviser who has the ear of the king, the king or the judge listens to the case, and everything points to guilty. And that is the verdict: guilty. And this advocate goes one step further and says, "I will go in their place.

I will go in their place. Take me." Verse two says that this Jesus becomes an atoning sacrifice. The theological word is "propitiation," and it means that divine punishment is dealt out on a person, on behalf of someone else, and the anger and the wrath of a righteous God is turned away.

And this turning away makes ample provision, John says. Look at that. "He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for the sins of the world." Everyone, everyone can have their sins dealt with in this way. Whether you are rich or poor, whether you are a Jew or a Gentile, whether you are white or you are Black, whether you are educated or uneducated, everyone has this advocate.

Jesus proves that He is the righteous one by doing the right thing. The best thing you will ever know. He proved to be right in all that He does because He took our fall, and we know He did that on the cross, and we will be celebrating that soon. Tim Keller writes about how life-changing this truth, which is the crux of Christianity, is. And that is why John says it right up the front.

He says, "This is where we start. This is our starting point." He says realising this truth about a saving faith, about a saving God who comes and deals with our sin rightfully, honestly, it changes our lives. He writes this: "There's no more moving a thought than that of someone giving his life to save another." In Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities," two men, Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton, both men fall in love with one woman, Lucie Manette.

But Lucy chooses to marry one of them only. She marries Charles. Later in the story, during the French Revolution, Charles is captured and he is thrown in prison, a terrible dark prison, and he awaits execution by guillotine. Sydney, the other man, is so moved by his love for Lucy that he visits Charles in prison, he drugs him, and then has him carried out. And he takes on his clothes and he goes and sits in that jail cell.

A young seamstress who's also on death row recognises, after a while, that this is not the same man. And she realises that Sydney has exchanged his place with Charles, and she is so amazed and she is so moved by this act of self-sacrifice. She asks him to hold her hand. She is so moved by this substitutionary sacrifice that it gives her hope for what lies ahead for her. And the sacrifice wasn't even for her. When we realise that Jesus did the very same thing for us, it will change you forever.

It will change the way that we regard God. How much we value His law, how much we desire to follow Him. It will change the way we regard ourselves. It will change the way we regard the world who needs to know this message. The letter of one John begins with this massive reality check.

If you truly want fellowship with God, if you truly want fellowship with the apostles who have tasted and seen Jesus, seen His goodness, who tasted first hand what He was like, then we have to come to a place where you honestly can acknowledge your brokenness. Confess your sin, turn away from it, and then put your faith in the only work that will save you. The work of Jesus on the cross. So, if you haven't received it yet, if you haven't given yourself to this yet, let these words speak to you today. Think about it and be brave enough to pray about it, and then speak to a Christian about it.

Speak to someone about it and ask them how. "How do I enter into this?" And if you're Christian, this moves me that there are so many people that need to know this. So many people that need to know that they cannot continue denying sin. That they cannot continue thinking they are good enough.

That they cannot continue living hypocritically. Christians by culture. Culture Christians by heritage that aren't Christians. We have a job to do if we are a Christian with this message. Let me pray.

Heavenly Father, we are moved by these words. We thank you that we can be fair dinkum, and it is a serious thing. It is something that we now have to enter into, and have to think about, and have to deal with. And Father, as we participate in the Lord's Supper now, it is a moment of remembrance and reflection about the great news that you have dealt with us, not according to what we deserve, but according to your love and grace, that we are completely free, and that the only thing that stands between us and you is denial. And so, Father, we come very, very honestly this morning, laying before you all our brokenness, all our iniquity, all our inability to do what you have asked us.

And we come to receive, with faith, what you offer us in Jesus Christ. Thank you for this truth. Help us to grow in it. Amen.