Wanted: Christians who Confess Jesus

Get in your canoe and paddle up the Hudson River. After you pass Albany, you’ll come to the Mohawk River. Take a left at the Mohawk, and follow it west. You’ll be following the route that the early settlers took when they opened up New York State. Like a string of beads across central New York, you’ll come to the places they founded - Utica, Rome, Syracuse, Auburn, Rochester.

Did you know that, about 160 years ago, those towns were the scene of a great spiritual revival. Fiery preachers like Charles Finney held tent meetings from town to town. Thousands of people’s lives were changed as they got right with God. In fact, the flames of revival were so intense that by 1840, people began to call that area of central New York the “burned over” district.

But then something very strange happened in the years that followed. And what happened there, in central New York in the middle of the nineteenth century, has a very important spiritual lesson for us today. In fact, what happened there has a lot to do with the spiritual condition of America today.

We’ve been studying the book of 1 John. We have been working our way through chapter 2. We learned in the first chapter that John wrote this letter to tell us what it means to have fellowship with God through his Son, Jesus Christ.

Jesus came to reveal to us what God is like. And we can know God; we can enter into relationship with God, through Jesus Christ His Son. Jesus shed his blood to take away our sin - it is our sin which separates us from God. So Jesus opened up the way for us to have fellowship with God.

In chapter 2, John gives us three tests of whether or not we really do have fellowship with God.

1. The Test of Obedience:

1 John 2:3-4 We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, “I know him,” but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him.

The first test of whether you really know God is this: Are you doing what he tells you to do? Are you building your life on the principles of God’s Word? Are you putting the teaching of Jesus into practice in your life? If you are, that demonstrates that you really do have fellowship with God. If you are not, it doesn’t matter that you claim to be a Christian, you are only fooling yourself.

2. The Test of Love:

1 John 2:9-10 Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble.

Jesus said “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples: if you love one another.” Love is the mark of the Christian in the eyes of the world. They’re not listening to what we say; they’re looking at what we do, and especially how we treat other people.

This is the second test of whether you truly know God - do you love people? Is your focus outward on others, rather than inward on yourself? Do you relate to people on the basis of what you can do for them, rather than what they can do for you? Do you use people, or do you love them?

3. The Test of Truth:

1 John 2:22-23 Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist—he denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.

The third test of whether you really know God is this: What do you believe about Jesus Christ?

Way back in my first year of college, my philosophy professor asked us a question: He said “What’s more important: What you believe, or how you live?” Most of the class answered “How you live.” He said “Wrong. What you believe is more important than how you live, because what you believe determines how you live.”

That’s what John is getting at here in this third test. What you believe, and specifically what you believe about Jesus Christ, will determine how you live. Your theology will determine your lifestyle.

For example, if you believe that there is no God, then your lifestyle will show it. You’ll live according to your own set of rules; you’ll try to figure out what’s best for you. You’ll make up your own moral code, and you’ll say to other people “Don’t impose your morals on me.” You’ll become your own little god operating in your own little universe.

A lot of people in America have done exactly that. They have become their own gods. That’s why our nation is sinking in a swamp of moral relativism. That’s why the glue holding our society together is rapidly coming unstuck. Because people have forgotten that there is a God in heaven who has given us a set of moral absolutes by which to live. So everyone does that which is right in his own eyes. Belief determines behavior.

Now I’m not suggesting that everybody in America has become an atheist. Far from it. Surveys show that the spiritual dimension of life matters very much to many Americans, even though they may not go to church. TIME magazine recently featured an article about how the Baby Boomers - the generation that supposedly forgot God - are coming back to spirituality.

But it’s a selective kind of spirituality. People today want to believe in God, but they want to pick and choose what they believe about Him. You’ve probably heard people say “Oh I believe in God, I just don’t happen to believe that church is very important.” Or they say, “I believe in God, but I don’t believe that he would ever send anyone to hell.”

What we are seeing in America today is a smorgasbord spirituality - pick the items that you want, just the way you’d select the options on a new car. You’ve got a big menu of choices.

You can blend in elements from other religions, if you like. If you want to believe in Jesus, but you also want to believe in re-incarnation, go ahead. Nobody’s stopping you. Choose the beliefs that make you feel good, and meet your needs. Pass up any doctrines that you find inconvenient, or make you feel uncomfortable. By doing this, you can assemble your very own custom-built belief system, with a god of your own invention.

Sounds pretty avant-garde, doesn’t it? But guess what! That is precisely what happened in central New York a hundred and sixty years ago. They had a great religious revival, and people went back to the Bible. But some of them went back with a smorgasbord mentality, to pick and choose what they wanted to believe.

A young man named Joseph Smith attended one of those revivals. He was stirred spiritually. But instead of accepting what he found in the Bible as all the truth he needed, Smith began to seek visions and dreams. Pretty soon, he was claiming that God had given him a special revelation that superseded the Bible. He wrote a book about it, called the Book of Mormon. And the rest is history. The Mormon church is one of the fastest growing churches in America today.

In the little town of Hydeville in upstate New York, there were two sisters named Maggie and Kate Fox. They were respectable church-going ladies, well thought of in their community. One day in 1848, they heard some knocking sounds in their bedroom. They assumed that those sounds were made by the spirits of dead people who were trying to communicate with them.

So they founded a movement called the Spiritist movement. At its peak, that movement claimed 10 million adherents in North America, and it’s still around today. New Age channelers are spiritists. You can go down to Sunrise Highway and drop into a little shop near Atlantic Ave. and have your fortune told. That’s a form of spiritism. You can turn on your TV and watch dial-a-psychic programs where you can call in and find out what numbers to play in the lottery. That’s a form of spiritism.

People who call themselves Christians dabble in this stuff. Apparently none of them knows or cares that the Bible says that spiritism is an abomination to the Lord.

You’ve all seen the pictures of what happened in Waco, Texas. But cults and communes are nothing new. In 1848, the same year that the Fox sisters were doing their thing, a man called John Humphrey Noyes founded a religious commune near Utica, New York.

They called it the Oneida community. They became famous for producing fine silverware. That commune drew a lot of very devout people from many churches in the area: Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians - they all signed up.

But soon, they began to go outside the boundaries of the Bible. They began to practice communal marriage. The leader of the group, John Humphrey Noyes, began to teach that he himself was sinless, and that Jesus Christ had already returned to earth. Sounds a lot like David Koresh, doesn’t he?

False religions like Mormonism; occult practices like Spiritism; cults and communes like the Oneida Community, or the Branch Davidian Fellowship - this is what happens when you set aside the truth of the Word of God, or twist its teaching to suit your own desires. You end up with something that is not only non-Christian, it is anti-Christian.

1 John 2:18 Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour.

The word antichrist doesn’t just mean “against Christ”; it also means “instead of Christ”. These false teachers, these “antichrists”, offer up a doctrine that is not only against Christ; it is a substitute for Christ. If you believe their teaching, you don’t need Jesus Christ anymore. Their way of salvation doesn’t depend upon the sacrifice of the Son of God on the cross.

The hallmark of any cult, or false religious system, is that it devalues the person and work of Jesus Christ. and puts someone or something else in his place. If you don’t get anything else out of this sermon, please remember this: The hallmark of any cult, or false religious system, is that it devalues the person and work of Jesus Christ. as given to us in the Bible, and puts someone or something else in his place.

I have known many fine church-going people - I have had personal friends, even - who have gotten swallowed up in cults, because they forgot this. Those poor people in Waco, Texas - they all came from church backgrounds, you know. They were Baptists, and Methodists, and Seventh Day Adventists. But they took their eyes off the Jesus Christ of the Bible, and put a man named David Koresh in his place.

None of those people, whose bodies are charred beyond recognition, started out with that as their intent. But over a period of time, they allowed themselves to be captured and captivated by a very persuasive, charismatic man who claimed to be teaching them the Word of God.

They began to put him in the place of Jesus Christ. And what they believed ultimately determined how they lived. They gave up their money to him. They gave up their wives and children to him. And ultimately they laid down their lives for him.

1 John 2:22 Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist—he denies the Father and the Son.

David Koresh was a liar. He denied that Jesus was the Christ. He said that he himself was the Christ - the Anointed One of God, the Savior of the world. And they believed him. It all boiled down to what they believed.

This is the test of truth. You cannot claim to have fellowship with God if you deny that Jesus is the Christ. If you deny that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Holy Son of God, then you are denying God’s Word. You are calling God a liar. And you are also turning your back on your only hope of salvation, for the Bible says…

Acts 4:12 “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”

It is fashionable these days for people to admire Jesus, to say what a wonderful teacher and moral example he was, but to deny that he was the Son of God. It’s politically correct to say that people of all religious faiths will someday wind up in heaven. But what about what Jesus said in John 14:6?

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.”

Somebody should have told Jesus that that wasn’t a politically correct thing to say. They should have rebuked him for being narrow and intolerant toward people of other faiths.

In some Christian circles today, scholars and academics are writing books casting doubt on whether Jesus ever really said things like that. Indeed, they are questioning whether there ever was a man named Jesus of Nazareth. They are hinting that the Jesus we read about in the Bible may have been a figment of the apostles’ imagination.

Don’t you believe it. The Bible has been around for thousands of years. It has outlived all of its critics, and it will outlive those who are denying Christ today.

Isaiah 40:8 The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever.

In light of that, the thing you need to ask yourself today is “Where do I stand in relation to the revealed truth of the Word of God? Do I pass this test of truth?” Do I believe what the Bible says about Jesus? Do I believe that he really is the Son of God? Do I believe that he died on the cross to pay the penalty for my sin? Do I believe that in doing so, he opened up the way for me to have fellowship with God? Do I believe that he rose from the dead, went back to heaven, and is going to come again some day as Lord and King over all the earth?

These are crucial questions - the most important questions a person could ever ask. Because the answers determine where you stand in relation to God. The world needs Christians who confess Jesus - the Jesus of the Bible. Remember, what you believe about Him will determine everything else about you. It’s important to believe the truth.

My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.

I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name.

On Christ the solid Rock I stand; All other ground is sinking sand.

All other ground is sinking sand.

Let’s sing it together - Hymn 404