Tag: 1 John

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Healing Shame

When we feel hurt we often run from the church, which is traffic because that is the one place where we should feel safe. One reason we often do not is because of shame.

The word shame itself has its roots in the ancient word for “to cover” and is deeply rooted in notions of privacy. There are physical aspects to shame – humans are the only animals who blush. But beyond these intellectual understandings of shame, we want to understand what God has to say about our shame.

The past has a way of bubbling up like hives. Shame that is hidden well reemerge. We hide in at least two ways.

First, we hide from God. That is silly of course, because we cannot actually hide from God. It’s an ancient story, though – we see Adam and Eve going from feeling no shame to hiding their bodies from God and from each other. But more than its impossibility, it is also unnecessary. God forgives – Jesus himself forgave the crowd and the soldiers and the politicians who murdered him, and he will forgive you for anything you may have done.

There are two basic forms of shame. Genuine Shame is that shame we feel after having done something truly outside of morality. It begins as guilt and evolves into shame – moving from feeling bad about what we have done to feeling bad about who we are. This is where confession and repentance comes in.

There is also False Shame – shame put on us by our surroundings, shame put on us by others even when we have not done anything wrong. This is the shame felt by the abused, put on by abusers, or the shame of family expectations unmet – shame that does not stem from wrongdoing but mismatched expectations or manipulation. This shame, too, must be brought to Christ.

Going back to Genuine Shame, though, scripture gives clear direction. Psalm 32 says:

When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD.” And you forgave the guilt of my sin.

Psalm 32:3-5

There will be times, though, where we do not know whether we are feeling genuine shame or false shame. Is this real sin, or shame brought on by society or those around us? In those times, we can fall back on the Holy Spirit. John writes:

As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you don’t need anyone to teach you. Instead, his anointing teaches you about all things and is true and is not a lie; just as it has taught you, remain in him.

1 John 2:27

We feel shame about sex, we feel shame about money, we feel shame about how we treat our children, we feel shame about lies we tell, we feel shame about drugs & alcohol, we feel shame about having been abused. If you feel shame about any of these things, know that you are not alone. Many of us have either struggled with the same sins or felt the same false shame for many of the same reasons.

In all these cases we need community, we need to share our burdens with others. You may be burned by this at some point but true healing happens in community.

If you have shame buried deep – and nearly all of us do – bring it to God and bring it to your brothers and sisters. We are the beloved of God and He wants us to bring healing to each other of all our shame, false, genuine and that which could be either.

— Sermon Notes, Alison Robison, Renew Church Lynnwood, WA, July 7, 2024

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Do We Know Christ? – 1 John 2:1-6

We’ve been reading John’s epistle where he has shared his eyewitness knowledge of how God wants a relationship with us and made a way to make that happen through Christ.

Now John is writing about how that plays out. Christ is both our advocate, our parakletos – the term means a helper or a legal representative – and our propitiation, our hilasmos, the sacrifice made to make us right with God. It’s like our lawyer or even the police officer giving us a ticket taking on the penalty we owe.

The third word that deserves closer attention is “abide” or “meno” – this is what Christ enables for us, staying, remaining within the grace of God, making our home within His presence.

This all helps us understand one of the key things John is trying to convey, namely how we are to deal with our own sin. He has just told us that all we have to do with our sins is to confess and repent, which naturally leads to the idea that we can avoid changing our behavior and just repent at intervals. But this is like a child who doesn’t worry about dirty diapers, since they are going to get changed anyway. But like that child we are to grow and develop. We are to be focused on living a life that pleases God, like an athlete trains (1 Cor 9). John’s goal and ours is that we do not sin.

But! If we do sin, Christ Himself is advocate and sacrifice for us and for those of the whole world.

That’s the backdrop against which John goes deeper into the discussion of sin. If we say we know Christ in this way, but make no effort to keep His commandments? Then we don’t actually know him and in fact are lying, possibly to ourselves as well. What are these commandments? Christ sums it up as “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.” If we do not love like this, or put ourselves towards that love, then we likely have not really engaged Him as our advocate and propitiation.

Compare this love to romantic love, that draws you to spend more and more time with the object of your affection, that draws you to bend your own desires even personality more and more towards them. How much more should a love for God Himself bend us towards Him and His commandments.

This is difficult. Serving is difficult. Giving money is difficult. Loving our neighbor is difficult. Loving our enemies is even more difficult, let alone those who persecute us! Not just love, but even forgive. And part of those commands is to pass on the knowledge of Christ and His commands (the Great Commission). John tells us we can know if we are Christian if we follow these commands but he never says it’s going to be easy.

– Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, September 19, 2021

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Assurance and Fellowship – 1 John 1:1-4

The apostle John wrote this letter in part to help the people of the church have assurance of their salvation, and to help test the faith of others as well. It is also a letter oriented directly towards God, with 184 references to the Godhead – a higher concentration than any other book in the bible. Likewise, the word “love” as both a noun and a verb is used 46 times. The word “know” is used many times as well – again, focused on enabling believers to know, to have confidence in their salvation. This is closely related to the word “abide” used many times – also used in John’s gospel frequently – as is “fellowship”.

John writes to “little children” – seeking as a father to assure his children of the promises they have in the true Father. But it is also there to help perceive the truth of the faith of others. Some people get offended at the notion of questioning someone’s faith, but there are times where it is important to know who is influencing you, and where that influence ultimately comes from.

John speaks specifically to the concept of influence from “anti-Christ” sources. In particular, the early strains of gnostic thought were becoming influential and John is writing in part to combat that.

John begins his letter in a way that echoes the beginning of his gospel – in the beginning. In the gospel, “in the beginning was the Word.” Here, he speaks to what he saw, heard, touched – the Word made flesh, the “word of life.” The word “touched” here can mean both to physically touch and also to seek after – it is used by Jesus in Luke after his resurrection to push his disciples to explicitly understand his physical resurrection. This is a clear broadside against the gnostic beliefs about the evil of matter and the notion that Jesus was some kind of spirit or phantom.

In verse 2, John continues with the themes from his gospel – Jesus as the light of life made manifest by God the father. We are all seeking that true life, “life abundantly” as John tells us Jesus calls it in John 10.

In verse three, John walks through what that life looks like and why he is sharing all this – fellowship between believers and between believers and the Father and the Son. This must be greater than what the world offers, because it comes with the power of the God of the universe behind it.

He wraps this section fleshing out that reason for writing – to make his joy complete. To bring other Christians to a fuller knowledge of God’s love is what brings his joy to overflowing. To whom and how are we proclaiming this fuller knowledge?

We can also pray for that fellowship within our church to be unhindered, and to share our testimony as John shares his own here.

– Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, September 5, 2021