Will the Real Christian Please Stand Up

Some of you may remember the old TV quiz show “To Tell the Truth”. It was on CBS for years in the fifties and sixties. The concept of the show was quite simple. Contestants were introduced in threes. All of them claimed to be a certain individual who had done something unique or noteworthy. The emcee, Bud Collier, would read a description of this person’s life and accomplishments. Then it was up to the panel, by asking questions, to try to find out which contestant was telling the truth and which two were lying. Following the question period, the panelists had to vote for which contestant they thought was really the person he claimed to be. The climax of each round came when Bud Collier would ask “Would the real John Doe please stand up.”

The book of 1 John is like a biblical version of To Tell the Truth. Will the real Christian please stand up. John has given us several marks of a real Christian:

1. A real Christian deals biblically with sin in his life.

2. A real Christian seeks to obey God and do his will.

3. A real Christian loves the Father not the world.

4. A real Christian believes that Jesus is God.

5.A real Christian abides in Christ.

Today, John gives us another one: A real Christian, an authentic Christian, is one who does not continue to sin. Now you may be saying “Wait a minute. Did I hear you correctly? Are you saying that a real Christian is perfect? That he doesn’t sin?” No, that’s not what I said, and it’s not what John said.

The Bible says in 1 John 1, that Christians can and do sin. Remember the first mark of authenticity? A real Christian, recognizing that he does sin, deals biblically with that sin in his life by confessing it to God and trusting God to forgive and cleanse him. So obviously, we’re not saying that Christians never sin. But what John is saying to us here is that real Christians do not keep on sinning. We need to understand what sin is. Look at:

1 John 3:4 Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness.

Sin is when we break God’s law. Sin is when we go our own way, according to our own law. That’s what sin is. And John is saying to us in this passage that real Christians do not make a habit of doing that. They do not keep on breaking God’s laws. Sin is not their lifestyle.

Look at the verses which tell us that:

1 John 3:6 No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.

1 John 3:9 No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God.

The NIV does a good job of bringing out the force of these verses in the original Greek. The verb tenses there are present tense, the action indicated is continuous action, not single point action. John is not saying that Christians do not sin. He is saying that they do not go on sinning.

That’s very nice. Real Christians don’t go on sinning. But what do you see when you look at your life? When I look at my own life, I find that often times I do go on sinning. I find that I fight a constant battle in my life to keep my temper in check. I find that my own inherent laziness is always tripping me up. I struggle with evil thoughts. I often seem to be losing the battle against sin. It can be discouraging.

Several years ago, there was a popular Broadway musical called “Damn Yankees”. The hero of the play, a man named Joe, was an avid baseball fan of the Washington Senators. That was a pretty depressing occupation! The old joke was that Washington was first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League. Joe would root his heart out for the Senators, but in the end, they always came up empty, and the Yankees would win. Joe would cry “Damn Yankees”.

I guess that sometimes we feel that getting the victory over sin in the Christian life is like rooting for the Washington Senators. Sooner or later, no matter how hard we fight, we lose and sin wins. And with a steady diet of that kind of failure, it’s easy for us to lose perspective. We may become depressed and just stop trying. Throw in the towel.

I believe that this passage in 1 John 3 is meant to help us restore a proper perspective on the fight against sin. We need to realize that the Bible teaches us that we will be struggling with sin all our lives. We’ll never be beyond its pull. Sometimes, like the ocean, the undertow of sin will knock us off our feet. But this passage in 1 John is good news. It affirms that we will gain victory over sin in our lives and it tells us why.

There are three things that are working in your life as a Christian to help you gain victory over sin:

1. You have an identity as a child of God.

2. You have a Savior who is the Son of God.

3. You have a new nature which is the seed of God.

…and these three things help us to make progress in our fight against sin.

1. Your identity as a child of God:

1 John 3:1-2 How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

How did we become children of God? The love of God the Father made us his children through Jesus Christ.

John 1:11-12 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God

There are only two families in the world: the children of God and the children of the devil. You get to be a child of God by receiving Jesus Christ as your Savior. Jesus had some interesting conversations with the children of the devil. They were the most religious people of their day. With long flowing robes, they memorized the Scriptures and did all the right things. But they rejected Jesus. That was all it took for them to be children of the devil. Whose family are you in today?

By the way, it is vitally important that if you are a Christian, you not marry a non-Christian. Because if you marry an unbeliever, you’re marrying into the family of the devil. And I guarantee you that you are going to have some major problems with your father-in-law.

As children of God, we are in a process. The process is that God is shaping and moulding our character into the image of Jesus Christ. That is part and parcel of our identity as children of God.

Romans 8:29 For … God … predestined us to be conformed to the likeness of his Son

2 Corinthians 3:18 And we…are being transformed into his likeness

A story is told about the great sculptor Michelangelo. One day, he took delivery of a huge block of stone. As he walked around surveying it, running his hand over the rough surface, he said “Aahh… I see David in there.”

That is how God looks at us. With our rough edges and odd shapes, we don’t look very attractive. But God sees the image of his Son in us. “I see Jesus in there.” And he, the master sculptor, will chip away and polish and smooth until the image of His Son is revealed in us. That process may not always be pleasant. A block of granite, if it could, would feel pain under the sculptor’s hand. The sculptor uses sharp chisels and hammers and sandpaper. But the result is worth it. And the result brings glory not to the block of stone, but to the sculptor by revealing the image the sculptor intended.

So the fact that we are God’s children and are undergoing this process means that we will be achieving victory over sin in our lives. The hope of being like Christ will have a purifying impact on us, as it says in v. 3.

2. We have a Savior who is the Son of God.

There are two things we need to remember about Jesus with regard to sin. They are found in verse 5.

1. He appeared to take away our sins.

2. In Jesus Himself there is no sin.

His person is sinless, and His work was to remove sin. Now not only did Jesus remove the legal guilt of our all sin before God by dying on the Cross as our substitute. He is actively involved today in purifying us from the polluting influence of sin in our day to day lives. Remember

1 John 1:7 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 from all sin.

Hebrews 9:14 How much more, then, will the blood of Christ… cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!

Jesus, our Savior, has a present ministry of cleansing in the life of the Christian, and that helps us to overcome sin.

But what’s more, we understand from the Bible that Jesus was without sin in his own character. And last week, we learned that an authentic Christian abides, or remains in fellowship with Christ. Now you know as well as I do that the people you hang around with will have an impact on your character. I hope you choose your friends very carefully. Do you catch the significance of verse 6?

1 John 3:6 No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.

You see the word “lives” there in verse 6? It’s the word “meno” - abide, remain, continue. If you “hang out” with Jesus Christ on a regular basis, you’re going to find that you will gain more and more victory over sin in your life. Because Jesus is without sin, and, quite simply, he’s going start to rub off on you. Who’ve you been hanging around with lately? Might have something to do with how your Christian life is going.

There is one more factor to consider:

3. We have a new nature, which is called in v. 9 “God’s seed”.

Everybody is born with a sin nature. Take a baby. There are lots of things that you don’t need to teach a baby. You don’t need to teach him how to demand his own way. He already knows. You don’t need to teach him to be selfish. He already knows. You don’t need to teach him how to make other people miserable as he gets older. He already knows. How does he know? He has a sin nature.

Now let’s say that little baby grows up and receives Jesus Christ as his Savior and becomes a child of God. That doesn’t mean that his sin nature disappears. It’s still there. It’s still trying to exert itself. But the difference now is that he’s got a new nature. And the new nature is from God. God planted that new nature in him. It’s like God took a little piece of himself and planted it like a seed in his life. And that new nature, that seed that God planted, makes him want to do what pleases God. And that seed is growing.

There was a man who had a farm out in California. In that part of the country, avocado trees grow wild, and the farmer had a few wild avocado trees on his property. They didn’t give him any good fruit, though. Those wild avocados were dry and scrawny and tough. But one day, the farmer had a great idea. He got hold of a branch off a good avocado tree and he grafted it onto one of his wild trees. Lo and behold, the next year that branch produced the most delicious, succulent fruit he’d ever tasted. The other branches still bore the bad fruit but that one branch, because of the life in it from the good tree, bore good fruit.

That’s what it’s like for the Christian. Except better. Because God hasn’t grafted his life onto an old tree, he’s made the old tree into a new tree. He’s put his seed into our lives, and it’s growing. That’s why verse 9 says that a real Christian can’t just go on sinning as though there were no change in his life. He’s a new man. He’s got God’s seed in him.

So we’ve seen that there are three things our lives as Christians which help us to overcome sin:

1. Our identity, a child of God - He’s conforming us to Christ.

2. Our Savior, the Son of God - a friend without sin who purifies us

3. Our new nature, the seed of God - the new life in us

That is really encouraging! So although we will continue to fight against sin in our lives, we do have the assurance that we are on the winning side. And the victory comes as we simply abide in Christ and live out these truths that John has clarified for us today.

It’s November and the leaves have just about all fallen from the trees. But there are still a few that are hanging on tenaciously. The wind and the rain hasn’t loosened them. Those determined little leaves are going to stay on the trees right into winter. And the icy cold and the snowstorms of January and February aren’t going to get them either. They’ll still be there along about the end of March. And they’ll be really ugly by then. Brown and shrivelled, they look awful. In fact, you almost want to go around pulling them off one by one. But that would be silly. Because you don’t have to.

You know what’s going to finally knock those old leaves off the trees? The new leaves that bud. As the new life surges through the branches of the trees in spring, those old leaves haven’t a chance of hanging on! And they’ll fall one by one as the beautiful new leaves blossom.

That is how it is in the Christian life, dear people. As we live in God, God’s new life in us knocks the old, ugly leaves off our branches. And he’ll bring beautiful blossoms and fruit in their place. As we abide in Christ and in the Word, the old besetting sins will fall quietly away. The old unattractive behavior patterns will drop off. And we will not continue in sin. Because one of the marks of an authentic Christian is that he does not keep on sinning.

So be encouraged! Keep up the fight! Because God is at work in you.