SIN
DR. JIM DIXON
1 JOHN 1:1-10 & 1 JOHN 2:1-11
JANUARY 30, 1983
“Whatever Happened to Sin?” A few years ago, a book was written by that title. It poses a question most appropriate to our time because we live in a world and in a society where many sociologists, psychologists, and educators question the very existence of sin. People have chemical addictions and dependencies, but they have no sin. Babies are aborted. They are born out of wedlock. There is no sin. Marriages end in divorce. It is no sin. We have neurotics and psychotics. We have psychopaths, but we have no sin. We are led to believe that people are mere victims, helpless products of environmental and hereditary forces, but the Bible paints a different portrait of humankind. The Bible tells us that we are free moral agents and therefore we are responsible for our actions. We’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We must one day give an account.
In our passage of scripture for today, the Apostle John gives us three messages concerning the subject of sin, and his first message is this: sin is serious. It brings grave consequences. It causes separation. First of all, John tells us that sin causes separation from God. John said, “This is the message we have heard from the beginning. God is light. In Him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with God while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live in accordance with the truth.”
Sin breaks fellowship with God, separation. We see this in the Book of Genesis in the third chapter where Adam and Eve, immediately after they had sinned, immediately after they had partaken of the forbidden fruit, they sought to hide themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. Sin makes us want to hide from God, but we cannot hide from God.
The author of Hebrews says that before Him, no creature is hidden, but “all are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.” The psalmist writes “Wither shall I go from Thy Spirit? Wither shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend to the highest heaven, Thou art there. If I make my bed in the depths of Sheol, Thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Thou art there.” You see, we cannot hide from God, but we can hide God from ourselves and for centuries mankind has done this very well. So much so that today millions of people all over this world are no longer certain that God even exists, so far have we removed ourselves from Him.
A few weeks ago I was watching a football game. It was a bowl game. One of the coaches on the sidelines had on a headset. He was listening to a man up above in the press box, a man up there who had a view of the total field, a man who could see the total picture, and he was giving information to the coach on the sidelines to help him make decisions. Suddenly that communication was broken. He saw the coach begin to hit his headset. He took it off, he shook it. Communication was broken and there was a moment of panic. The Bible tells us that sin has that effect with respect to our communication with God above. It breaks fellowship, it breaks communication. This is serious because God is not merely the source of guidance and instruction, but God is the source of life itself. He’s the source of eternal life. He’s the source of abundant life. And when we sin, we separate ourselves from God.
C.S. Lewis, I think one of the greatest Christian writers and scholars of this century, wrote a book called “Perelandra.” In that book, he speculates what man and woman would’ve been like in a world without sin. He describes them as having a beautiful understanding of the will of God, moment by moment, discerning God’s presence perfectly, discerning God’s thoughts, able to call the fish of the sea and ride up on their backs. They had a different understanding and relationship even with the realm of nature. Of course, we live this side of the fall, this side of sin. There’s no way for us to know exactly what we were like in the innocence of our beginning, but this much is clear and John proclaims it: sin causes separation from God. It causes spiritual death. It not only causes separation from God, but sin causes separation from man.
We see this too in the book of Genesis where God says to Adam, “Where are you?” Adam said, “I heard the sound of Thee in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.” God said, “Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat of the fruit of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” Adam said, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of its fruits.” You see, sin causes enmity between people. We begin to project and transfer guilt. We begin to make accusations. Sin separates man from man.
More than a month ago, we had what a lot of people in the media are calling the great blizzard of ‘82. 24 inches of snow fell at Stapleton Airport. 29 inches of snow fell here in Littleton. My parents were visiting us from California. They wanted to be here at Christmas time. They have a little condominium over in Heather Ridge in Aurora. They were staying there and when the snow began to fall, they were fascinated by it. It was beautiful. But it soon became a problem. By the time they got in their car and tried to drive down to our house, they couldn’t even get out of their parking lot. The snow drifts had become so great. If it wasn’t for a friend in the church who had a four-wheel drive and had gone over to pick them up—it took him two hours to get my parents down to our house—we would’ve been separated.
You see, God wants us to know that sin is like a snow blizzard. At first, it holds fascination for us, but after a while, it begins to separate people from people. It begins to build drifts between us. And as sinful people, we are desperately in need of snowplows to blow those drifts away. We are separated from God and from man.
The Bible even tells us that we are separated from our own bodies because of sin. God says to Adam, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and because you have eaten of the fruit of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat, cursed is the ground because of you. In toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to you and you will eat of the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face will you earn bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. You are dust and to dust you will return.” The curse of sin is death. It causes physical death, spiritual death, a separation from God. Physical death is separation from our bodies, and this too is caused by sin.
Some years ago, a woman came into my office. She came for counseling. She sat down. I asked her what the problem was and she said, “I leave my body.” I thought that was kind of strange, but she looked normal enough. She said, “I leave my body every night.” She said, “I’m conscious of in my spirit just hovering out of the bed and floating out of the house and kind of floating over the homes in the neighborhood, looking down at them.” She wanted to know if this was one of the gifts of the Spirit. I told her it wasn’t listed in Romans or 1 Corinthians. I told her that for the Christian to be absent from the body, the Bible says, means to be present with the Lord. What she was experiencing was either psychological or it was occultic. Perhaps it was what the occultic world refers to as astral projection. It’s a very dangerous thing. But the truth is that we will all reach a point in life when we are separated from our bodies when we experience death.
Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant, the great coach at the University of Alabama, was separated from his body this week. At the age of 69 years, he died. His funeral procession as it went down the streets were lined with 700,000 people. Some have said that it was perhaps the largest funeral in the South since the death of Robert E. Lee. But Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant died. He was separated from his body. What is true of him is true of us. We all live in a sinful world and because we live in a sinful world, physical death occurs. Sin causes separation from God, from man, and even from our bodies. It causes separation from Eden. God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. And now lest he reach forth his hand and take of the tree of life and eat and live forever…” Therefore, God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man. At the east of the Garden of Eden, he placed the Cherubim, an angelic host and a flaming sword, which turns every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”
Man was banished from Eden, from paradise, because of sin. So we have this first message from John the Apostle: sin has grave consequences. It separates us from the living God. It separates us from man. It separates us from our own bodies. It separates us from Eden, from paradise, from heaven. It brings spiritual death. It brings physical death. Sin is the greatest problem confronting humankind.
John has a second message for us, and it is this: God has a solution and that solution is Jesus Christ. John says, “My little children, I’m writing this to you so that you may not sin, but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous. He is the expedition for our sins and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” We should understand that John is speaking to Christians. He is speaking to those who have already accepted Christ as Lord and Savior of life. John is saying that if you’ve entered into the kingdom of Christ, you have an advocate. That advocate is Jesus Christ, the Greek word as “parakletos.” It referred to one who would stand by our side, one who gives counsel, one who gives defense. It’s a legal term that the Greek sometimes used to refer to the courtroom.
A few weeks ago I saw a movie called “The Verdict,” starring Paul Newman. In that movie, a woman went into a hospital to deliver a child by cesarean section, a routine operation, but something very tragic happened. She went under the anesthetic and she never woke up. She remained in a coma and her brain for a period of time was denied oxygen. As far as they knew, she was a mental vegetable, and all because of medical malpractice and hospital negligence. But there was no one to represent this woman and her loved ones, no one to represent them against the powers of a corrupt hospital administration and the powers of a corrupt legal system. No one to represent her except for an alcoholic attorney who had spent years in self-pity and incompetence. But as the movie progressed, that attorney became more and more competent, and the ending to that movie was a surprise.
The truth is though that when we go to court, when we need a defense, we want the best of attorneys. Who is the best attorney that you can think of? Who is the best lawyer, the best advocate, the best defense that you can think of? There is a man named Sir Lionel Luckhoo. He is a lawyer, an attorney, the senior partner of a law firm called Luckhoo and Luckhoo down in Georgetown, Guiana. He has had 178 consecutive murder charge acquittals. Some regard him as the greatest defense attorney in all of history. But you see the defense that he offers is nothing compared to the defense that Christ offers to mankind.
John says, “Jesus Christ is our advocate.” He is our defense, but He doesn’t twist the law. He doesn’t warp God’s law. He fulfills it. We are guilty. We desperately need some defense, and He defends us. Jesus Christ defends us, the Bible says, with His own life. You see, the penalty for sin is death. We were all subject to death because of sin, spiritual death and physical death. We were in a horrible bind. Mankind needed someone to get us off the hook, someone to pay the price for us, someone to take our penalty upon himself. But it had to be a perfect person because it was perfect life that was forfeited in Eden. So the eternal Son of God enthroned in glory, left heaven and became a man. He lived a perfect life in order that He might die for us. He experienced spiritual death as He was separated from the Father on the cross and He cried out, “My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken me.” The Son of God who had fellowship, perfect fellowship with His Father from all eternity, suddenly in a moment in time was separated with His Father. He did that for you and He did that for me. Then of course, He experienced physical death as He underwent the excruciating pain of crucifixion. He did that for you and He did that for me. He loved us so much. He is our great advocate with a father.
The defense that He offers is the defense of His own life. When you stand, when your name is called in the heavenly courtroom and you’re a Christian, Jesus Christ the eternal Son of God stands up and He says, “I died for him. I died for her. I paid his price. I paid her price.” There is no advocate like that.
Many centuries ago, the King of Armenia, a man named Tigranes, along with his wife and children were taken captive by a conquering Roman general. When Tigranes and his wife and children were brought before the Roman General Tigranes fell on his face to the ground and he began to plead. He said, “Please spare my wife, spare my children.” He said, “Take my life. Do with me what you would. I am yours. Kill me, but spare my wife, spare my children.” It’s a matter of historical record that that Roman general was so moved that he spared not only the wife and children of Tigranes, but he spared the king himself. As Tigranes and his wife and children were leaving the Roman headquarters, Tigranes said to his wife, “What did you think of that Roman general?” His wife said, “I never saw him.” Tigranes said, “What do you mean you never saw him? You were standing right in front of him.” She said, “I only had eyes for the man who was willing to give his life for me.”
Throughout history, there have been many men, many women willing to give their lives for someone they love, but there’s never been anyone like Jesus Christ. He’s willing to give His life for everyone because He loves everyone. I am absolutely convinced on the basis of God’s word, that if you had been the only person on this earth, Christ would’ve come and He would’ve died for you to pay your price, to pay your penalty in order that He might be your expiation, in order that He might be your atonement. He is the great advocate for the Father.
But John has a third and final message for us concerning sin, and it concerns our response to sin, our response to God. The advocacy, the execution of Jesus Christ must be appropriated by man. We must confess our sins. We must repent. We must receive the Son of God. John says, “If anyone says he has no sin, he deceives himself and the truth is not in him. But if we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” As Christians, we are those who’ve accepted Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. We’ve accepted His sacrifice for us—His execution, His atonement. We’ve accepted Him as Savior and He has taken our penalty upon Himself and we’ve been given eternal life. But John is saying, even for us as Christians, we can begin to live in sin. Though we have spiritual life, we live as though we were dead. We begin to lose that fellowship with a father. We begin to be separated and we too need constantly to confess our sin before the Lord to appropriate the advocacy of Jesus Christ.
In 1858, there was the great awakening here in the United States, a revival, one of the greatest revivals in the history of the world. It began in Kalamazoo, Michigan. A minister was preaching. He was preaching on the relationships between husbands and wives. He had a letter and he read this letter from a wife who was describing years of abuse from her husband. She was describing all the ways that her husband had mistreated her through the years. When the minister was done reading the letter, a man stood up in the congregation. He said, “I am that husband and I want to confess. I want to repent.” Then another man stood up and he said, “No, I think I’m that husband. I want to confess.” Seven men stood up and they confessed their sin as husbands. Before that worship service was over 600 people received Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and a great movement of the Spirit began to flow across the land.
At the end of the month of January in that year, the religious press began to write about the revival that was taking place. In the month of February, the secular press began to write about it. In March in the city of New York, 6,000 businessmen met every lunch for Bible study. That same month in March, 50,000 people accepted Christ in New York City. By the middle of the year, 50,000 people were accepting Christ every week in this country. We must remember that that was more than 120 years ago when there were far fewer people living in America than there are today. A great revival, and it began with confession. It began with repentance.
God wants us to know that revival takes place in our life through confession. That’s how we find life. That’s how we find joy. That’s how we find abundance. When we confess our sins day by day.
In 1789, Fletcher Christian led a group of mutineers on a British ship called the Bounty. The captain of the Bounty was one William Bligh, a harsh, cruel seaman, who later was to become the governor of New South Wales. Fletcher Christian and his mutineers put William Bligh and 18 of the crew overboard into a little boat. There’s no way that Fletcher Christian could ever have thought that William Bligh would have survived, but he did. Through great hardship, he drifted in that little boat for 3,600 miles. He came to civilization with half of the 18 also still alive. They made their way back to England and William Bligh brought charges against Fletcher Christian. Fletcher Christian was condemned by the British government as a mutineer, but they could not find Fletcher Christian. He was on a little island with nine other mutineers, a little island called Pitcairn Island. They couldn’t find him for 20 years. The descendants of Fletcher Christians still live on Pitcairn Island today, 90 people.
But a strange thing happened this last month. The British government forgave the descendant of Fletcher Christian. His great-great-great grandson Tom Christian was just given, on January 3rd, British citizenship, restored fellowship, forgiveness. It only took 193 years. God wants us to know that He’s willing to forgive us the moment we confess, the moment we repent of our sins. He longs to help us be restored to fellowship.
You may have heard of a man named Henry Fawcett. He served on the British Parliament. He was Gladstone’s appointment as Postmaster General, and he made many brilliant renovations and reforms within the British Postal Services. But the most amazing thing about Henry Fawcett was that he was blind. When he was 20 years old, he was on a hunting trip with his father, and it was a tragic accident where his father fired his gun and blinded his own son. Through the years, the father of Henry Fawcett could never forgive himself. Many times Henry Fawcett would sit in the house and he would hear his father crying in the other room. One day, Henry Fawcett resolved that he was going to do whatever was necessary in order to help his father forgive himself. Henry Fawcett said the only way he could possibly do it would be to make something of his life, to show his father that his blindness was not a terminal problem. So Henry Fawcett began his climb to the British Parliament, and towards the close of his life Henry Fawcett said, “I would have done anything to help my father forgive himself. I loved him so much.”
You see, that’s the way Jesus Christ feels about us. He’d do anything to help us find forgiveness. And He did. He came into this world and He died for you and for me. Now He lives and He wants to be your advocate. He wants to be your defense. He wants to be able to say, “I died for her. I died for him. I paid her price. I paid his price.” Whenever we sin, even as Christians, He wants to be able to stand and say, “I died for that too.” The one thing he asks is that we repent and we confess.
So we had this message from John. First of all, sin is serious. It has great consequence. It causes separation with a living God, separation with man, separation with our own bodies. It causes separation from Eden, from paradise. It causes spiritual death and physical death. But God has a solution, and that solution is His Son, Jesus Christ, who came to earth, that He might be our atonement for sin, that He might pay our price, that He may take our penalty upon Himself, and He is now our advocate with the Father, the advocate of all who believe in His name. In the final message from John, we must confess, we must repent in order for the work of Christ to be appropriated in our life and for us to have the fellowship, the joy, and the abundant walk that He wants for us. Shall we look to the Lord in prayer?