Wanted: Christians Who Continue in Jesus

Thirty-nine years ago, in the year 1954, the Milwaukee Braves opened the National Baseball League season against the Cincinatti Reds. There were two rookies playing their first game in the major leagues that day. One of them played for the Reds, the other for the Braves.

The rookie who played for the Reds was a fellow by the name of Jim Greengrass. He had an unbelievable game that day. He hit four doubles in four times at bat, helping his team to win the game by a score of 9-8. What a way to start your major league career!

The other rookie - the fellow who played for the Braves - didn’t do anything. He went 0 for 5 at the plate. It wasn’t a very auspicious start to his career. Many more days like that and he would be sent down to the minors.

If you and I had been in the stands that day, we probably would have predicted that Jim Greengrass would end up in the Hall of Fame someday. But we would have been wrong. Jim Greengrass never ended up in the Hall of Fame, but the other rookie did. His name was Henry Aaron, and over the next 22 years, he would hit 755 home runs - more than any other player who ever played the game.

It’s not how you start out that’s important; it’s how you end up. And that is the message that God has for us today.

We have been studying the book of First John, and we have found that it talks about what it means to have fellowship with God. It means putting your faith in Jesus Christ, because he is the only way to reach God. He’s the bridge. He took away our sin when he died on the cross, and that’s what makes it possible for us to have fellowship with a God who is holy and perfect.

But what proves that you have fellowship with God? There are a lot of people today who claim to know God, but when you look at their lives, you really begin to wonder. The same was true back in the first century. There were a lot of phoneys out there.

That’s why John gave us three tests to help us discern whether or not a person genuinely has fellowship with God.

Test #1 is the test of obedience:

1 John 1:6 If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.

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.

So the measure of your fellowship with God is the measure by which you are obeying the commands of Jesus Christ. Not just the ones that are convenient, but the ones that are inconvenient, too.

The second test is the test of love:

1 John 2:9-11 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. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness; he does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded him.

A person may say that he is a Christian, he may claim to have had a born-again experience, to have made a profession of faith in Jesus Christ, but if hatred and anger toward other people are a feature of his life, then that proves that he is not a believer.

The third test is 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.

This test has to do with what you believe, and specifically, what you believe about Jesus Christ. If you do not believe that Jesus is the Son of God, if you do not believe that he is the one sent by God to take away the sin of the world, then you can’t be a Christian.

Suppose you believe that there are many ways to God, and that Jesus is just one of them. A lot of people today believe just that. And many of them call themselves Christians. But to be a true Christian means to believe that Jesus is the only way. He is the only way for Muslims, for Jews, for Hindus, for Buddhists to come into a right relationship with God.

And if you don’t believe that, then you don’t believe that Jesus is really the Savior of the world. You believe that there are many saviors, and that you can substitute any one of them for Jesus. And if you believe that, then you have no right to call yourself a Christian. Because Jesus himself said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.”

So the third test is the test of truth. What do you believe about Jesus? About who he is and what he did.

Now suppose you become a genuine Christian. You put your trust in Jesus Christ as your Savior. You begin to walk in obedience to his commands and to put his teaching into practice in your life. You begin to learn to really care about people, and to love them - even the people in your life that you find hardest to love. And you learn to appreciate just who Jesus really is as you read and study the Word of God. Great!

What message does John have for you? Simply this: Keep it up! Keep going! Keep growing in your faith. Be consistent! Keep walking with God. Don’t give up when the going gets tough.

This is exactly what he means when he says in…

1 John 2:28 And now, dear children, continue in him…

When you first become a Christian, a lot of exciting things happen to you. You get a home in heaven. You don’t have to fear death anymore. You gain a new purpose in living. Life becomes meaningful - you realize that life isn’t just an aimless exisitence of accumulating things and trying to find pleasure.

You realize that you fit into a big picture, and now you are a servant of the Almighty God. You become part of His cause - an epic struggle of good over evil. You begin to see yourself and other people in a new light. Life becomes an adventure.

But after awhile, you begin to discover that living the Christian life isn’t always thrilling and exciting. It takes commitment, and sacrifice, and sometimes it even involves suffering. And that’s when your enthusiasm for living the Christian life might begin to cool down. Instead of being spiritually hot, you become lukewarm, tepid.

And that’s when it becomes crucial to continue in Him. Because it’s not how you start out in the Christian life, it’s how you end up that matters to God. And how you end up depends on whether or not you continue in Him.

Jesus told us a story about this. He said a farmer went out to sow some seed in his field. Some of it fell on the pathway, and the birds of the air came and snatched it away. Some of it fell on rocky ground. Some of it fell among the weeds. And some of it fell on good soil.

The seed that fell on rocky ground sprang up right away. It grew faster than the other seeds, because the shallow soil warmed up more quickly. But as summer wore on, and the sun got hotter and hotter, that seed withered and died because it was shallow and had no roots.

Jesus said “That’s how many people are. They receive the Word of God with joy, and they spring up spiritually. They look like they are really growing in the faith. But when trials or persecution come, they fall away, because they have no roots.” And we can see that all around us in our society today.

There are a lot of Christians who seem to start out well, and then fall away. Let’s try to figure out why.

We live in a society that has been largely shaped by the Baby Boomers; those people who were born between the years 1946 and 1964. They set the agenda for our culture. A lot of research has been done about Baby Boomers and you can boil it all down to five characteristics. If you want to understand the Boomers and the society they have shaped, just remember these five words:

1. WOW - Baby Boomers are experience-oriented. They love thrills, excitement, and pleasure. They seek it out. They spend their dollars on things that will give them a sense of fulfillment. Baby Boomers are addicted to experience.

2. NOW - Baby Boomers focus on the present. They are not like their parents, who were willing to work hard and save money for future goals. They want it all right away, NOW. Instant gratification. Boomers don’t care a whole lot about the past or about tradition, either. They don’t feel bound by it, because today is all that matters.

3. HOW - Baby Boomers are pragmatic in their approach to life. They don’t care about theory: they want answers. If they can’t see how something will help them with a problem they have today, they won’t bother with it. You walk into a bookstore, and you’ll see hundreds of self-help books with the word “HOW” in the title. Baby Boomers are buying them, because they want solutions.

4. DOW - Baby Boomers are greedy. They are an extremely materialistic generation. They want the good life that they think only money can buy. That’s ironic, because back in the sixties, the Boomers were protesting against the materialism of their parents. But they have turned out to be more materialistic than their parents ever were.

5. OW - Baby Boomers are hurting. They’re struggling with broken marriages, broken homes, and broken lives. There are recovery groups all over the landscape, and Baby Boomers are the ones who are in them. They’ve tried to find the good life without God, and they’ve paid the consequences.

I think you can see that our culture has a number of built-in biases against a person continuing in Jesus. A person who has been raised in this culture, and who becomes a Christian, will sooner or later ask:

• Why should I continue in Jesus, when the Christian life seems at times to be so unfulfilling?

• Why should I continue in Jesus when my faith and my prayers don’t produce any apparent results in my life right now?

• Why should I continue in Jesus, when doing so calls for me to make sacrifices of my time and my money and my convenience?

• Why should I continue in Jesus when it doesn’t instantly take away the pain of all these broken relationships in my life?

John gives us the answer in verse 28: …so that when he appears we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming.

There are three things that are true of Christians who continue in Jesus:

1. Christians who continue in Jesus are Christians who are looking forward to his coming again. They are not so totally preoccuppied with the present that they think that this moment is all there is. They know that an event will happen one day that will be the greatest event in all of history - the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to this earth. And they are committed to living their lives in light of that event.

John tells us a little bit more about that great event in…

1 John 3:2-3 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. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure.

The hope of becoming like Jesus in the future is a hope that will purify our living in the present. Life, for a Christian, has a goal. The goal is to become like Jesus Christ. God is working on that goal in our lives right now, as he molds and shapes our character by the Word of God. But the process will only be completed when Jesus comes again.

In the meantime, we need to continue in Him, we need to continue allowing God to work on that project in us, so that we may be confident and unashamed before him when he comes.

2. Christians who continue in Jesus are Christians who are committed to doing what is right.

1 John 2:29 If you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of him.

Have you ever noticed how children are like their parents? Not only in their appearance, but also in their mannerisms. You can see a child’s parent in the way he smiles, or how he says something, or how he walks and carries himself. And you say to yourself, “Boy, he’s just like his Dad.”

When you do the right thing, John says, you are just like your Father. God is righteous, and when you do what is righteous, you are emulating him. Your spiritual pedigree is shown by how you live. If you are committed to righteousness in all that you do and all that you say, it shows that you have been born of God.

3. Christians who continue in Jesus are Christians who are rejected by the world.

1 John 3:1 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.

Nobody likes to be rejected. But if you are going to be a Christian who continues in Jesus, sooner or later you are going to have to grapple with this question of rejection. The day will come when you will have to make a stand that will put you at odds with the world’s value system, the world’s priorities, and the world’s opinion.

If you are going to be a Christian who continues in Jesus, you will find yourself, sooner or later, on the “outs” with the world. You won’t be popular, you won’t be well spoken of, people will misunderstand you, and will possibly even mistreat you.

How do we know this? Because this is precisely what the world did to Jesus. As long as they thought Jesus fit in with their ideas of what a Messiah should be, they loved him. As soon as it became apparent that he didn’t, they rejected him.

The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.

Continuing in Jesus calls for three things:

1. Look for his appearing

2. Commit yourself to doing what is right

3. Be prepared for some rejection.

A little while ago, I told you the story of how Henry Aaron began his career in 1954. Well, something else happened in 1954 in the world of sport. That year marked the first time that a man ever ran a mile in less than four minutes. It happened at Oxford, England, and the man who did it was Roger Bannister. His name will be remembered forever as being the first man to break that four-minute barrier.

But there was another fellow who ran in that race that day. He happened to be a good friend of Roger Bannister. His name was Chris Chattaway. Before the race, they agreed that Chattaway should go out and set a blistering pace for the first part of the race. He would be what milers call the jack-rabbit.

When the starter’s gun went off, Chattaway raced to front of the pack, and that’s where he stayed for the next couple of laps around the track. But he couldn’t keep up that pace for long, and pretty soon he tired and dropped back. That’s when Bannister made his move.

Chris Chattaway finished the race in last place, and that’s why nobody remembers his name today. Because in running the mile, it isn’t how you start out that matters, it’s how you finish.

And that is also true of being a Christian.

The way you finish depends on whether you continue in him.