Here to Take Away Our Sins
In Communion, we experience God and our fellowship with Him. How humbly he comes among us! During many of our Communion celebrations, in our praying we say, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. He tells us he will. Let anticipation of this second coming have its full spiritual and moral effect. For John Stott, “the fact of His first appearing and the hope of His second [coming] are both strong incentives to holiness.”[1] Holiness. In our times, who aspires to holiness? Take time to be holy. Live different from the world. It is difficult. And it is blessed by the assurance of the presence and love of God, as from this table. “And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when he appears we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming” (2:28). Confident. Unashamed. These are words for life lived in the light. The world wants to apply those words to darkness, lives in and for darkness. Nike Satan sneakers, for example. People are so good at being bad! When bad is the new good . . . what can you do?
Jesus says abide with me. We pray abide in us. Gathered as the church, we are blessed by a shared experience of God; we share our experience of God. This Sacrament is a physical experience of spiritual reality: Christ feeds our souls just as our bodies are fed with food and drink, fed for health, growth, and life. Christ is our love. The Spirit is our endurance. God is our righteousness.
This Sacrament is for a reminder that any sacrifice we make for holiness, for righteousness, will have its blessed result. We aren’t losing anything when we lose ourselves for God. As we decline the fictions of flesh, fun, and freedom the world is selling, we look to God in Jesus Christ with confidence, unashamed. Now that’s an experience!
I spoke of obedience a couple Sundays ago. We know the point isn’t to talk but to do. Our too frequent grief is that we don’t do this obedience, this faithfulness, this love, though we haven’t been willfully derelict! Our confidence is never in our performance but in what Christ has done, is doing, and promises to do for us. This table is his assurance that he does abide with us, and he always will. What he has begun in us he will finish.
“[E]veryone who does what is right has been born of him” (2:29). He is the righteousness in those who do what is right, loving God entirely and one another. With him in you, with you, you can. You can dare to be different. William Barclay puts it this way: “The profession a man makes will always be proved or disproved by his practice.”[2] Walking the walk. You will know them by their fruit. Stott adds that “The child exhibits the parent’s character because he shares the parent’s nature.”[3] Certainly, this is true of Christ Jesus. In him, through this bread and juice, we share in the nature of our Father in heaven. This is a holy mystery, revealed to us, by faith. Welcome this bread and juice: Christ giving you a gift beyond price! By faith, bread and juice become a true sharing, a spiritual sharing, in the nature of God. Let us exhibit His nature. His nature is love. His nature is truth. In him there is no darkness at all.
Beloved, this bread and this juice—what wondrous love is this! “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” (3:1). Child of God is a term that many of us use too often in a well-meaning way. “The universal fatherhood of God is not taught in the Bible,” Stott writes, “except in the vague, physical sense that God is the Creator of all [. . . .] But in the intimate, spiritual sense God is not the Father of all men, and all men are not His children.”[4] We don’t want to think about it that way, though, because it doesn’t seem kind; it doesn’t seem loving. There’s just something about this Truth we’ve been talking about that doesn’t seem loving. And that’s exactly how the world wants you to feel. As the heart goes, so goes the thinking. God shows us what it is to be loving. Love does not look like what the world wants to dupe us into believing.
It’s no small thing to have been adopted by God. We fling our arms wide for our children. In the ordinary course of things, we do not choose our children. In adoption, we choose. I think of adoption as God’s wide-armed love for the children He has chosen. The love-miracle is not confined to His choosing; the miracle is also in His enabling us to respond in kind. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.
I have spoken of our purifying fellowship. John tells us, “All who have this hope in him [for Christ’s return] purify themselves, just as he is pure” (3:3). Stott writes that “the Christian who fixes his hope [. . .] upon Christ’s return, will purify himself, not ceremonially but morally”[5]: not in exterior matters, but inwardly. Church is not a spectator sport. Church does not happen, does not live, does not grow or go without your participation. Go all in! We’re all in this, together. What we are about, together, is inward, moral transformation that comes by grace through faith. Salvation looks like something here below, too.
This Sacrament is an invitation to participation, koinonia. This Sacrament is a moral decision. Do you desire the righteousness of Christ? We’re being offered holiness, being called to be holy. Think. Feel. Pray. Stott is clear: “we have a part to play in purifying ourselves from [sin’s] power.”[6] This is life or death business. Impurity is the world’s currency. God is here.
Christ alive and at work in us purifies us. Our part is to make the moral choices, the faith choices, along each stage of the journey, that take us where Christ guides and lead us where he calls. That won’t be where our innate inclinations and flesh-minded desires want to take us. He calls us out of the world, the mire and mud. We may often feel that we lack the confidence, courage, or faith to make these choices, let alone see them through. To receive this bread and this juice is to say Yes to this purification from the stains of the world, Yes to the brilliant purity of God, bright creation light, Yes to Spirit-born, Spirit-enabled endurance. We receive Christ’s gift, relying not upon our own confidence, courage, or faith, but upon his. Our reliance is upon the gifts he gives.
Purity is difficult, for us. Purity is different from us. We don’t have it in us, but we can have Christ in us. Christ is difficult for us. Christ is different from us. The world, and the church co-opted by the world, are always making Christ easier, purity simpler, the faith and the practice of it more like the very best of the world’s values. Beloved, the world’s values are not God’s values. Do not love the world’s values, even the best of them. Love God.
God’s love for us is here. We are His children, now, because of Jesus Christ. “[Y]ou know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins. And in him is no sin” (3:5): complete, perfect, pure, brilliant holiness. Emmanuel did not come merely to be a model for our conduct. He came to teach us love, viscerally, shockingly, life-alteringly. He calls us to remember, here, that love removes sin. Love does not cover sin, does not excuse sin. Love does not call sin a prettier, more diplomatic name. He takes away our sin, hefts it up from us, washes it away from us; he talks us out of it. He can. He wants to. He saves his blood-brothers and sisters. We needed saving. Where we had been going, what we had been doing, how we had been thinking . . . we needed saving. We all need saving.
“No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him” (3:6). That sounds hard, doesn’t it? Even unloving! We all stumble our willful way into sin, still. I don’t yet live exactly as God would have me do. Stott clarifies what John is after: he “is arguing rather the incongruity than the impossibility of sin in the Christian.”[7] We always have hope, beloved: God has claimed us, sealed us for Himself, in Christ. He has written His name upon our hearts.
John urges us to keep on the path of purification. Yes, we stumble, tumble into the mud. We don’t wallow there. We bang our shins and bump our heads in the dark. We don’t stay there. We don’t call the mud and the dark our home. We don’t make a willful, shameless habit of sin. We don’t justify the sin we do; we do not claim sin is not sin but blessing! Drawing upon Calvin, Stott writes that “It is not that Christians are ‘wholly free from all vice’ but that they ‘heartily strive to form their lives in obedience to God.’”[8] Heartily. Heartily. To choose to continue in sin is neither to have seen or known him. “The man who knows that God is at the end of the road,” Barclay tells us, “will make all life a preparation to meet him.”[9] We prepare by a hearty meal. Let us heartily enjoy a foretaste of that meeting in this bread, this juice, this cleansing, saving offering, given for love, given for us.
To the God of all grace, who calls you to share God’s eternal glory in union with Christ, be the power forever!
[1] J. R. W. Stott. Epistles of John. Tyndale NT Commentaries. London: Tyndale, 1964. 116.
[2] William Barclay. Letters of John and Jude. Daily Study Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975. 72.
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