Walking in the Light

Well, this morning I want you to take your Bibles and turn to the same passage of Scripture we looked at last week.

! And it is in the first epistle of John. Now, the first letter of John, 1 John chapter 1, and if you would find verse 5, and I'm going to read all the way to, once again, all the way to chapter 2 and verse 2.

So listen as I read, follow along in your Bibles as I read 1 John chapter 1, starting with verse 5. This is the message which we have heard from him, him being Jesus.

So this is a direct message that was given from Jesus to the apostles. And declared to you, we declared it to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all.

If we say that we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.

But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. In the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son cleanses us from all sin.

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. My little children, these things I write to you so that you may not sin.

And if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. And he himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole world.

Tremendous passage of Scripture. And again, I would remind you what I said last week, actually several weeks ago, when we first started looking at 1 John and working our way through it, I want to remind you that John's overall purpose in this letter, though he makes a number of purpose statements, I think four or maybe five in all, we can say clearly that they all relate, all those purpose statements relate to an overall purpose that is stated for us near the end of the letter.

In chapter 5 and verse 13, these things, where John said, these things I have written to you, all these things I have written to you, who believe, believe in the name of the Son of God.

And so he's writing to believers, I've written these things to you for what purpose? That you may know that you have eternal life.

That's the purpose. And so we can state it this way, John's primary purpose is that every born-again believer, every true Christian, true believer, would experience in life full assurance of salvation.

That's pretty important. It's something we don't talk about very much, something we don't think about as we ought to. That really God intends for us to have assurance of our salvation, a full assurance of it, or again, as someone has called it a no-so salvation.

This is John's purpose for writing. And so it would be good for us to really look closely at what he has to say about that. And he says quite a bit about that in this very brief letter.

T.S. Eliot. I don't know if you are familiar with that name. Probably are. Though you may not have written, read rather, some of his poetry.

A British poet. Famous one. T.S. Eliot. And in his choruses from the rock, he asked a very poignant question.

He asked, Where is the life we have lost in living? Think about that question. Pretty interesting. Where is the life we have lost, T.S. Eliot said, We have lost in living?

Well, actually, I'm not sure that T.S. Eliot ever found the correct answer for that question. In fact, I suspect that he did not. Because in another place, he went on to write, I see the path of progress for modern man.

He said, I see this. It is in his occupation with his own self. His inner being. That, I guess we could say, was T.S. Eliot's answer to his question.

Where is the life? An occupation with self. The inner being. And, of course, Eliot could not have been more wrong about that.

Because according to the Bible, and certainly according to this passage we're looking at here in John's first letter, the answer is not self. It is the Savior.

An occupation with the Savior, not self. And so, to respond to Eliot, the path of progress for modern man is in his occupation with the Savior, not in his occupation with self.

And so, the life T.S. Eliot and countless others have lost in living, the life he was talking about, that he had lost in living, is a life of fellowship with the Savior.

Fellowship with God. And I would add another word to that, qualify that, an intimate fellowship. Intimacy with God. An intimate fellowship with, as John has already told us, with the Father, and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

That is John's answer to Eliot's question. Where is the life? Where's the life? I hope you have found that answer. And you're living out that answer.

And that has everything to do with this subject of assurance. Assurance of our salvation. Now, the passage that we're looking at again, here this morning, is, I think, vitally connected to that.

If we have ears to hear it. Because, you see, the chief enemy to our assurance, well, we could begin with the chief enemy to our fellowship, our intimate fellowship with God.

And therefore, the enemy of assurance and subsequent joy, the enemy of all of that, is fully exposed here in this pretty brief passage.

We could even say that it is, John actually brings it out into the light of God's holiness, his absolute moral perfection. And so what is this enemy exposed for us here?

It's a simple little word. Three-letter word. S-I-N, sin. I know it's not a subject that we really like to talk about, think about.

It's certainly not one of those warm, fuzzy subjects that we want preachers to preach on these days. In fact, some preachers have abandoned, completely, preaching on the subject of sin. But here it is right here in the Bible.

We can't avoid that. Can't just dismiss that. I can't skip over it. Sin is an important subject. Sin is the enemy. I mean, it's the enemy in many ways.

But for the believer, in the context of the Christian life, sin is the enemy of our fellowship with God. And therefore, the enemy of full assurance of our salvation.

Someone has said that nothing is more destructive than sin. Sin fascinates, and then it assassinates. Sin thrills, and who would deny that?

Sin thrills, and then it kills. Sin is the most destructive thing of all. And even for the born-again Christian, sin can be such a destructive force in the life of the believer.

Destructive. And that's why the Bible spends so much copy on the subject of sin. It really does then. And on the subject of sin, as it relates to the believer.

Okay? Because we still have a problem with it. You do, don't you? Looking very pious. Well, I have a problem with it.

We still have the Bible deals with it over and over again, and deals with it in the context of the Christian life. So, sin is still a problem for us.

And the enemy of our fellowship with God, intimate fellowship with Him, I'm not talking about relationship. Remember, John is writing to believers. The relationship issue is already settled.

They have a relationship with God through Christ that was granted them, and they have been brought into by the grace of God.

A fellowship is a different matter, isn't it, sometimes? So, we're not talking about relationship. We're talking about fellowship with God, and the enemy of our fellowship with God, and the enemy, then, of our full assurance of salvation and subsequent joy.

The kind of joy that God wants us to have every day, that's growing, one day will be complete, that kind of joy. The enemy to that is sin.

It's sin. It's always sin. And so, John tells us here in chapter 2, verse 1, these things I write to you so that you may not sin. That you may not sin.

That's great, isn't it? So, he said, these things I've written so that you may not sin. So, we need to pay attention to what he's written here. And that's what we need.

Every single one of us. Because, again, we need help with our sin problem. We still have a problem with sin every single day.

And it always robs us of something if it's not dealt with in the way prescribed by Scripture. According to John, then, the first step is to come to grips with the reality of our own sinfulness.

That's what we talked about last week. What I call the reality of sin, we must not deny. Many in the churches there, John was writing to these churches in Asia Minor, in many of these churches, there were false teachers that were teaching something contrary to what the Bible says about sin.

And so, that's the first thing we need to consider, the reality of sin that we must not deny because many do deny it. In one way or another. To some degree or another.

even those who are professing believers, even those who are true believers, can grapple with, you know, the reality of their own sinfulness.

The reality, to fully grasp the reality of our own sinfulness, John begins with God. Begins with Him. Remember? To fully grasp the reality of our own sinfulness, we must, first of all, see the glorious character of God.

And that's why He began the way He began there in verse 5. This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you that what? What's the message? What's the truth? God is light.

And in Him is no darkness at all. He's light. He is morally perfect. He's holy. So the reality of our own sinfulness can only be correctly understood when we see it in the light of God's absolute moral perfection.

His holiness. And if we don't see it in light of that, then we'll always downgrade the extent of our sinfulness. Or we'll always misdefine what sin is.

We'll always come short in our understanding of sin. So we begin with the glorious character of God and then John moves from there to the erroneous claims of man.

Specifically, those who were in the churches there, the false teachers. And yet, even the true believers were starting to maybe kind of waver in this and buying into some version of what the false teachers were teaching.

Erroneous claims of man about sin. Number one, what they claimed, what they were teaching ignores the significance of sin.

We looked at this last week. Verse 6, if we say we have, that we have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness, we lie. We do not practice the truth.

Number two, their erroneous claims were rejecting the very existence of sin. Verse 8, if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

And thirdly, they were denying the occurrence of sin. That sin was even taking place. Verse 8, if we say that we have not sinned, not in the past, not now, we've not sinned, we're not sinning, then what?

We make Him, God, a liar because He's clearly said that all of sin have come short of the glory of God. We make Him a liar and His word is not in us.

So, this is what we looked at last week, the reality of sin that we must never deny. Never deny it. Sin is the enemy of our assurance. Now, this morning, we need to see a second thing that is given to us by John in this incredible passage from his first letter.

And you see a second thing here because the Apostle John actually weaves together into this passage two, actually, two important truths concerning sin that we must not miss because sin is the enemy of our fellowship and assurance.

There are two truths kind of woven together here. First of all, what we've already looked at, sin's reality, but woven into John's treatment of this, identifying the reality of sin, we have sin's remedy.

The remedy for sin. We need to be reminded of that. And so, John uses the metaphors of light and darkness to highlight these truths.

And so, according to John, in the context of the believer, to walk in darkness this involves the denial of the reality of our sin. To deny it, our own sinfulness.

To walk in the light involves, we could say, the opposite of that. Not only a correct view of our own sinfulness, and we need to have that view of our own sinfulness, but also a constant awareness, acknowledgement of God's remedy for our sin.

We don't ever need to separate ourselves from that. Don't need to downgrade that or put it aside and say, well, I already know that, I don't need to consider that anymore. We need to have a constant awareness of God's remedy for our sin.

And I think that's what it means to, as John says, verse 7, to walk in the light. To walk in the light, the full light as he is in the light. So, in terms of points to the sermon, this two-part sermon, number one, the reality of sin we must never deny, which we looked at last week.

And now this morning, number two, the remedy for sin upon which we must always rely. Always. You know, if we were honest, and I hope we are, as believers, we are sometimes prone to forget about what God has done for us.

And, not only that, but what the Bible teaches that God continues to do. We're prone to forget about that. What God has done and continues to do that our sins would be forgiven and cleansed.

And this, too, this forgetfulness, this losing sight of what God has done for us in salvation, this, too, contributes to the believer's lack of assurance.

And that's why we must keep going back to it. Never tire of it. Never think, well, that's, you know, that's old news. I already know that. We need to keep going back to it, back to the truth about our salvation.

Because if you are truly saved, and you are the only one who can answer that question, if you're truly saved, and yet, right now, you might say that you're not living in the full assurance of your salvation in Christ, that is, you're kind of unstable, you're wobbling in your faith, then one of two things are happening.

Either you are denying, to some degree, denying the reality of some sin in your life, you've kind of put it aside, you're choosing to ignore it, or you possibly have somehow explained it away, and you're choosing not to take personal responsibility, all the various things that we kind of do to make an alibi for ourselves.

That could be happening. That's why you're wobbly in your faith, or you have been kind of caught up in some ongoing struggle with a certain area of sinfulness, and consequently you have begun to doubt that God will forgive you.

Is it possible for a believer to experience that? I think so. A struggle with sin, kind of caught up in a sin, and you can't seem to find victory over it, and eventually you keep asking God to forgive you, and eventually you start to begin to doubt whether God will forgive you.

I mean, how could he forgive me? I keep doing this. I keep struggling with this. And then, given a little time, you begin to doubt that you're even saved.

Have you ever experienced something like that? Some of you may be there right now. And I think that's how a believer can walk in darkness.

darkness. Not a question of relationship or salvation, though you may question it in your heart. But it's a darkness, not fully experiencing the assurance of your salvation, and that's why John's writing this letter, so that you would.

And so, if you've ever been there, you know what I'm talking about, to kind of begin to live in the doubt, a doubt, or wavering about God's forgiveness, and even doubting your own salvation.

That's darkness. That's dark. But it need not happen. That's the thing about it. It need not happen. Now, I would say, if that's where you are, and you've been there for a while, I need to say to you, first of all, you really need to examine your own heart and face the possibility that you've never, ever been saved to begin with.

And you've been living kind of in a false assurance. You certainly need to at least examine that. So that what you are experiencing is not so much doubts that you were saved sometime in the past, but rather what you're experiencing is the conviction of the Holy Spirit that you need to be saved right now.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that to you. But if you are truly saved, you can sometimes walk in darkness, in a kind of darkness, in terms of fellowship, or the lack thereof, in terms of assurance and joy, but it need not happen.

Don't limit the gospel. Don't limit the gospel. I mean, why do you think the Bible calls it the gospel of Jesus?

Gospel means what? It means good news. Good news. And so, let me just ask you, would you characterize your current outlook on your life, the way you look at your life and the way you live your life, would you characterize that as an expression of good news?

news? Or is it more like bad news? I heard Adrian Rogers say many times, some believers walk around in life with a Bible in one hand and a tombstone in the other.

He said, I've seen better looking faces on bottles of iodine than I see on some people who claim to be followers of Christ. By the way, for our younger ones, iodine used to have little, you know, skull and cross bones, you know, or poison.

You don't want to look like that, long droopy faces. You're just not living in victory. You're living in darkness. But John tells us in this passage what the problem is.

And again, this is for believers. You know, unbelievers can experience, to agree, some of these same things, but that's more the conviction of the Holy Spirit.

That's not a doubting of your salvation. But he's talking to believers. And he said, the problem is this. Either we have never fully understood as we should have understood and can't understand because we have it right here in God's Word.

We've never fully understood the significance, the full significance of our salvation. What Christ has done for us on the cross and continues to do at the right hand of God the Father.

Never fully understood the significance of it, so we need to be schooled on that. And John is schooling us on that. Or, if we did know it at one time, we have lost sight of it.

We have forgotten it, some parts of it. So let's see then what John tells us about the remedy for our sin upon which we must always rely.

1 John takes us to the cross, takes us back to the cross, the cross of Jesus, and what I will call the sacrifice that acquires our cleansing, our cleansing from sin, our cleansing actually from all sin.

That's what he says in verse 7. Look carefully verse 7. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. It's not just talking about our fellowship with one another.

We can have fellowship with one another, and if we don't have fellowship with God, that really doesn't mean anything. But it's really a commonality of fellowship with God. We have fellowship with God.

And this is what I want you to notice. The blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanses us from all sin. That's quite a statement.

It's really very simple. Many scholars have tried to make it much more complicated. Trying to find something else there, or read between the lines, or in a sense, even explain this truth away.

But it's really very simple. John takes us back to the cross. And so, are you wobbly in your faith, unstable in your faith, and go back to the cross? What happened there?

What did Jesus do for you there? Well, you say, he died there. And that is correct, right? Certainly, John is talking about that.

When John mentions the blood of Jesus Christ, it is a direct, if nothing else, but it is more than that, but if nothing else, it's a direct reference to the death of Jesus on the cross.

The blood of Jesus, where he shed his blood, there on the cross. But have you considered lately the significance of that blood as we ought to consider it?

Well, it means forgiveness, right? And you would be correct. You'd be correct. Leviticus chapter 17, verse 11, it is the blood that makes atonement.

Hebrews chapter 9, verse 22, without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. That's the significance of the blood.

And so, that's what the cross means. Jesus Christ sacrificed for sinners. But, which sins?

Well, what does John say? And the blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanses us from all sin. All sin.

Past, present, future. That's what he said. You know, I want you to think about this.

You may think, wait, I'm not sure about that, but think about this. You cannot work your way into salvation. You know that, don't you?

But neither can you sin your way out of salvation once you have it. That means I can just sin all I want to. No, I don't mean that at all.

It means that your salvation is by the grace of God. And once you're saved, you can't sin your way out of it. The blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanses us from all sin.

All sin. And by the way, in the Greek text, the verb form, you know, I like to consider the language and the grammar and try not to take us into the tall weeds, but in the Greek text, the verb cleanses is a certain form.

It's found in a certain form. It's present active indicative. What does that mean? Well, it means to convey the idea of a continuous, among other things, a continuous action.

Continuous ongoing action. So, the blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanses and keeps on cleansing us from all sin.

Great news. But I want you to notice that John doesn't leave it there. He goes on from there. Because, you know, you see, if you think that somehow this means that now your acts of sin, sin behavior no longer matter, if you believe any version of that, that sinfulness in your life really essentially no longer exists because it's all been cleansed, if you believe that, then you're really saying the same thing these false teachers were saying.

In verse 8, we have no sin. And John says you're deceiving yourself. You're deceiving yourself. And so John wants us to see a second thing.

First, the sacrifice that acquires our cleansing. And second, the sanctification, the ongoing sanctification that requires our confession.

And at first glance, and especially with what I've already said, some might think, well, there's kind of a contradiction here. what does he say there in verse 9?

He says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to, and what's that word? Cleanse. There's that word cleanse again.

Cleanse us from all unrighteousness. I thought all that's already been done. And so now here's cleanse again. Cleanse from all unrighteousness. And so what I said about verse 7, maybe that's not exactly right.

Verse 9 seems to contradict that. Verse 7 says, again, look at it, the blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanses us, keeps on cleansing us, as I've said, from all sin, past, present, and future.

And then verse 9 seems to say that confession is required for cleansing. If we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Now, which is it? Which is it? Well, in the first place, I want you to notice very clearly that confession does not cleanse us. Don't make the mistake of reading it that way.

Confession doesn't cleanse you. God does. And he does so on the basis of the blood sacrifice of his sinless son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

That's clear from verse 7. And so in the second place then, here's the best way to explain the difference between the cleansing spoken of in verse 7 and the cleansing that we clearly have highlighted here in verse 9.

Verse 7, now follow me with this and I'll try to explain it. In verse 7, that's what we would call in a technical sense forensic forgiveness.

forgiveness, in terms of a legal standing of forgiveness, forensic forgiveness. When do we receive that?

At conversion, the moment we're saved. We receive a forensic forgiveness, a legal standing before God, a standing of forgiveness of all sin based upon the blood of Jesus Christ.

So what's verse 9 talking about? Well, not just to keep in some kind of alliteration, but really this does explain it, I think, well. Verse 9 is talking about a family forgiveness.

It's a family issue that we constantly need after conversion. That's how we need to understand this. For example, imagine I'm a judge.

I've used part of this illustration before. But imagine that I am a judge. And one day, as I'm sitting there as judge behind the bench, the people are being brought to be judged, and suddenly I look and there is my son.

I won't name which one, because this is fictitious, okay? I look and there's my son. And he's standing before my bench for, let's say, a traffic violation.

You know, something like that. And so, he stands before me, I have the evidence, possibly testimony from a traffic officer or something like that, and I tap my gavel, issue my verdict, say a fine of X number of dollars.

And then imagine that I stand up from my seat, and I take off my judge's robe, lay it aside, and I walk around to where my son is standing, and I have him step aside, and I stand in his place, and I get out my bill fold, take the money, and pay the fine.

And then I go back around, put my robe back on, and I take my place as judge behind the bench, and I tap my gavel again, and I say, citizen, your sin, your crime is remitted, forgiven.

you are cleansed of all your guiltiness. You may go. And in the eyes of the law, it's done.

There's a forensic forgiveness for that crime. He's paid the penalty, or I paid it for him. You know, it's every illustration limited to some degree when you're trying to use earthly illustrations to highlight and to explain a great theological truth.

I suppose just imagine that. That's forensic forgiveness. Now, is that the end of it? Well, in the eyes of the law, it is. In the eyes of the judge, that's the end of it.

But, is that the end of it? No. Because, I'm also the boy's father. He's my son.

And, when we get home after his day in court, there's going to be a heart-to-heart talk. Right? Well, there should be. And, I'm going to say something like this, you know, son, you broke the law, violated traffic law.

And, in so doing, you've dishonored me. What do you have to say about that? And, if my son says, I didn't break any law, and if I did, it's a stupid law anyway, then what's going to happen?

Well, actually, if this were a true story, my son's going to think his world just came to an end. That's what's going to happen. But, seriously, we're going to have a broken fellowship.

He still is my son. Nothing can ever change that. I still love him. Nothing can change that. But, things are not going to be right between us.

Because, he will not confess that sin. And so, there's a broken fellowship, and we'll continue to have a brokenness in our fellowship until he confesses.

Confesses his sin. The word confess, by the way, is the Greek word homologeo, compound word.

Homo, as you well know, means same, same. Lageo, from the noun lagoth, which means word, lageo, is a verb meaning speak.

So, you put the two together, and you have same speak, or speak the same thing. That's what confession means in a biblical sense.

confession, you're not informing God. In confession, you're not negotiating with God.

In confession, you're not kind of having the opportunity to sort of nuance, kind of nuance the sin, you know, the sinfulness, you know, kind of frame it in certain words that lighten and lessen the severity of it.

Have you ever tried to do that with God? That's not confession. It's not offering some kind of alibi. God, I messed up, but I couldn't help it because, you know, so-and-so, or this or that, or whatever.

Confession is saying the same thing as God is saying. Saying what God knows. Agreeing with God. That's really the best way to understand it.

We don't associate, connect those two things in life when we're confessing something to someone. We're not agreeing with them.

We don't think of those things being equated in any way, but with God, confession is agreeing. Because, you see, your confession is not based upon your opinion about whether or not you have committed a sin or whether or not it's a serious one or not so serious.

It's not based upon our judgment or our opinion or any conclusions we've come to. It's based upon what God has already said is sin in His Word.

And what God has said about the seriousness of that sin and that it dishonors Him, that it's actually sin against Him. And in confession, we're agreeing with that. We're agreeing with that with no excuse, no alibi at all.

Now, we need to wrap this up this morning. There's a third thing, the remedy for sin upon which we must always rely. There's the sacrifice that acquires our cleansing.

sin. The blood of Jesus, God's Son, cleanses us from all sin. There's an ongoing aspect to sin and the sanctification that requires confession.

So as we sin, we confess. That is, we agree with God about it. And our fellowship is restored and kept restored in that way. And then third, possibly my favorite.

And I will say that this will actually connect us to the next thing that John is going to write in chapter 2. So we'll be back on this passage next time.

But it is connected to this issue of sin and the remedy for sin. I mean, it's very clearly connected to that. And that is what I would call the satisfaction that inspires our confidence.

John wants us to be confident in our salvation. Not a confidence based upon ourselves, but a confidence that's based solely upon the work of Christ.

That's what he's been talking about, the work of Christ. Not our work, his work. Now our confession is a response to his work. But here, it's a confidence, it's an assurance that's not rooted in our own abilities or any measure of goodness that we might think we have in us.

But it's an assurance based upon the work of Christ. So I want you to look at chapter 2 verses 1 and 2. And let's close by just walking through this tremendous truth.

First of all, John, being very fatherly, my little children, so he's very compassionate. My little children, these things I write to you, all these things I've been writing, about sin, about the lies that are being promoted in your church and what those lies really mean and about, you know, the seriousness of sin and the remedy for sin, glorious remedy.

These things I write to you so that you may not sin. I don't want you to sin. My little children don't sin. And, or, but if anyone, in the sense of you believers, if any one of you, any one of us as believers, sins, it's not a question of if, is it?

If any one of us sins, good news, we have an advocate, an advocate with the Father.

Interesting word, advocate, it is the word parakletos. And some of you may have heard that word before, like paraklete, or parakletos, and usually we think about that word in connection with the Holy Spirit.

In fact, it is used more often in the New Testament to identify the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, the divine paraklete. And the word means, again, it's a compound word, kind of a preposition and a noun.

The noun is called. The preposition is beside, alongside, para, like a para-church organization.

It's alongside of the church. Para, alongside the one called. And that is a description of the Holy Spirit, the one called alongside of us.

The Holy Spirit, the paraklete. But here, it's not a reference to the Holy Spirit. Parakletos, this advocate with the Father, who is it?

It's Jesus Christ, the righteous. Jesus Christ, the righteous, the sinless, perfect, Jesus.

He is alongside of us. He's for us. He's with us. If you sin, we have Jesus, our advocate. Advocate with the Father, and it brings up a tremendous kind of visual to imagine in some sense a holy courtroom, and God is the judge, and Jesus is our advocate, and I'm the sinner.

sinner. But I I am bought and paid for by Jesus. The blood of Jesus cleanses me from all unrighteousness, all sin.

But I continue to sin, but I continue to have an advocate with the Father who paid the price for me, and he intercedes for me as my advocate.

it's Jesus Christ, the righteous, isn't he? And he's the only one who can do it. Sinless, perfect Jesus.

And then I love the rest of this, and he himself, not by proxy, but he himself, he himself is the propitiation for our sins.

We'll get to that word propitiation, here in a minute, but you know that he, no one else could do this for us. And Jesus didn't just speak our forgiveness, he became the sacrifice that we might be forgiven.

He himself, he himself is the propitiation for our sins. That word propitiation. When's the last time you used that in a sentence?

Never. What in the world does it mean? It appears a few times, only a few times in Scripture. Propitiation. it's interesting that some of you know that the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, about 300 years before Christ came, was translated into the Greek by 70 scholars.

Some say 72. But it's called the Septuagint. Have you heard of the Septuagint? it's the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament.

And back in Exodus, when the Bible speaks about the Ark of the Covenant, you know, that's placed in the Holy of Holies, where the high priest would come in once a year on the Day of Atonement and bringing in the blood of a spotless lamb and bring that blood into the Holy of Holies and take that kind of a weed, hyssop, and take that blood and sprinkle it on the top of the Ark of the Covenant.

You know what the top of the Ark of the Covenant is called? It's called the mercy seat. And when the high priest would sprinkle the blood on top of the mercy seat, under that mercy seat, inside of the Ark of the Covenant, what was in there?

the tablets, the law, the laws that had been broken. And once a year on the Day of Atonement, the high priest would come in and sprinkle the blood of the spotless lamb on the mercy seat, and the sins, the broken laws of the people would be forgiven because of the blood on the mercy seat.

Now, it's interesting that when the scholars for the Septuagint translated mercy seat into Greek, they used the same word that appears in our text, translated propitiation.

Jesus is our propitiation. our mercy seat. And actually, it's not the idea of covering sin, or even just simply the taking away of our sin.

it actually speaks to the satisfaction required for our sin. Propitiation means satisfaction.

Who needed to be satisfied? A holy God. I've sinned, and my sin is against God, a holy God who cannot just let sin go unjudged.

His holiness must be satisfied, otherwise we're doomed. And who was the satisfaction for a holy God?

Jesus. Jesus himself is our satisfaction to satisfy a holy God, actually to take the wrath of God for our sin.

He satisfied the wrath of God, quenched it, because he took all of it for you, for me. Wonderful truth. He himself is the propitiation for our sins.

What does John want us to have as believers? Full assurance, confidence, actually the word confidence didn't really go far enough, assurance of our salvation, to not doubt it, to live in it, in full confidence, not wavering or being wobbly, knowing, because we know, that Jesus is our satisfaction, a satisfaction for our sin, and not for ours only, he said, and I want to end with this last part of it, but also for the whole world.

Now, dear people, that does not mean that everyone is going to be saved, ultimately. universalism in the sense of universal salvation, not at all. If the word universal goes with any part of that, it is the universal savior.

He is the only savior for the whole world, because he is the only propitiation, only satisfaction for sin.

and if you have believed in him and by his grace and through faith, you've been saved, born again, you can have confidence.

sin. Does that make a difference when it comes to sin? John said, I'm writing this, I don't want you to sin.

Don't sin. But when you do, remember you have an advocate with the father. It's Jesus Christ, the righteous.

and he is the satisfaction for your sin.