The Eternal Life - [1 John 1:1-4]

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Do any of you read stories aloud to your kids at night, or your grandkids? Right, plenty of us do.
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How do most of those stories, the children's stories, end? They most end with, and they all lived happily ever after, the end.
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We all want a happy ending. In fact, I've very often had to comfort my children when we're reading a story, or watching a film, and the narrative comes to this climactic point where things look really bad for our heroes, and they're fraught with danger.
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And I've interrupted it, and I've had to say to them, don't worry, it's going to be all right.
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It's just a story. You know that the heroes always win in the end. And they do.
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And even the great tragedies of literature or theater, they're intended to teach us lessons, or to inspire us to some kind of action.
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And so even they, ultimately, are designed to produce a happy ending. But real life is not a children's story, and it's not a fairy tale.
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So does real life have a happy ending? Should we be looking for one, even?
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The artists, the advertisers, the humanists, the politicians, they all seem to want one.
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We've even baked it into our very founding documents. The American founding fathers enshrined it into the
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Declaration of Independence, that it's our inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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But what is the biblical mindset about happy endings? Well, the Apostle John and his fellow apostles, they did not pursue happiness.
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They sought something better. They pursued joy. Their own, and ours as well.
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And so open with me to our text tonight in 1 John, chapter 1, the very beginning of the epistle we're going to be in tonight, 1
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John, chapter 1, verses 1 through 4. And we're going to get to joy eventually tonight, but we need to go through the progression, the same progression that John himself goes through here in these four verses, the biblical progression first.
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So let's read together. That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life.
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The life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testified to it, and proclaimed to you the eternal life, which was with the
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Father and was made manifest to us. That which we have seen and heard, we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us, and indeed our fellowship is with the
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Father, and with his Son, Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things, so that our joy may be complete.
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Now, if that passage sounded a little bit like a mouthful to you as we read it, there's a very good reason, and that is that in the
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Greek, it is a single giant sentence, all four verses, just one sentence.
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And that very fact made it very difficult for the English translators, when they were trying to translate this verse, made it very difficult for them to parse it, and untangle it, and pull it apart, and be able to write it into something that makes sense, and follows the rules of English grammar.
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So, I hope then it's not going to be a surprise to you that our outline tonight, it's not going to follow the verse divisions exactly, but we are going, and so in those four verses, we're going to have three points.
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And those three points are this, that as we talk about the eternal life, we're going to talk about the person of the eternal life, and then the proclamation of eternal life, and then finally, the purpose,
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John's purpose. Let's see together then how the objective truth, that is, that the
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God -man, Christ Jesus, came in the flesh, that that compels us to preach the gospel.
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And the goal, the object of that preaching, is to bring us together, and to fill us with joy.
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So first, the person. The person who is the word of life, the eternal life.
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Verse one again, that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life.
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John begins at the beginning. And that should immediately give you a clue about the object of this one giant
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Greek sentence, that the object of this sentence is Christ Jesus, is the eternal logos.
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Just like in his gospel, where it starts with, in the beginning was the word, right? Here we have that which was from the beginning.
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Not that it came into being at the beginning, not that it was the first of the beginning, already was at the beginning.
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Already was. Eternal, preexistent, the uncaused first cause.
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But strangely though, comparing this to the gospel of John, this epistle starts with the word that.
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That which was from the beginning. And the word that is a bit broader than if John had, for example, used the
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Greek word that we would have translated who. It doesn't say who was from the beginning. It says that was which was from the beginning.
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And the reason is that, is that we should think more broadly, that that is a more broad term than who.
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And that John is not talking about just the person of Jesus Christ, but also the gospel of Jesus Christ and his very message, his teaching.
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Because as he's going to go on here, we're going to hear him talk again and again about the message in which he's been given and that he has been commissioned to preach.
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Since Christ is the living incarnate word and the written word, right? This, the written word is in some about him.
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It shouldn't surprise us that John conflates them together in this sentence. Because while we can very clearly see that later on, that John is proclaiming this message and the message itself is the person that is our message.
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Our message is the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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That most importantly, that Lord Jesus Christ is God, the son and that God, the son has come in the flesh.
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Now, the reason John emphasizes this so heavily right from the beginning in verse one is because of the purpose, the thing that motivated him to write this epistle in the first place.
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And for that, I just want to give you a little bit of historical context. John wrote this very late in his life, probably at the very end of the first century, 90s
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AD. And at that time, one of the, after the
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Judaizing heresy that Paul had to fight against, the next great heresy to confront the church was starting to rise up.
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And you could sort of call it, it was the proto phases of that heresy that really peaked in the second century.
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And that heresy is known as Gnosticism. Gnosticism.
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And maybe you've heard of it. And we're not going to get too much into all of the things about the Gnostic beliefs.
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But suffice it to say, their great error, the one in which they focus the most heavily on, in fact, is that all matter and material is evil.
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And so thus, Jesus could not have come in the flesh, that he could not have been a real person, that he must have been just a spirit, or an illusion, or perhaps the
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Christ spirit came upon someone who was really a man, but then left him again before the crucifixion. But regardless, they were just so hung up on this idea that matter was evil.
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And John, on the other hand, knows how important it is for us to understand that God, the
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Son, came as truly God and truly man. That it is that perfect union of those natures that is how
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Jesus can save us. And so that's why John here, right away in verse one, he's emphasizing the senses, right?
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We see which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, and he even repeats himself, which we looked upon.
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And even for emphasis, he brings up his eyes, which we have seen with our eyes, right? And touched with our hands, emphasizing again and again how they were true witnesses with their physical senses of the
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Lord Jesus Christ, of the man Christ Jesus. And he's gonna actually hammer this point home even more later on in his epistle.
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If you'd flip over, we'll read it real quick in chapter four. In chapter four, verse two, the importance of Christ as being understood as truly man.
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By this, you know the spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses that Christ Jesus has, what has come in the flesh is from God.
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And every spirit that does not confess Jesus has come in the flesh.
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Cannot confess Jesus is not from God. Jesus has come and he has come in the flesh, though God, he is also fully human.
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And the reason that Christ came as fully human, as truly man and truly God, is that we needed a truly human savior.
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And why? Quite frankly, it's because we needed him to die. We needed him to die.
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Because we deserve to die for our sins. So we needed him to die in our place.
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Had he not been truly man, he could not have truly died. Had he not been truly man, he could not have lived the righteous life that he lived that I and you could not live for ourselves.
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We needed him to be everything we could not be. We needed him to be perfect.
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And so the life, the eternal life, came in the flesh. And now if we go back to the prologue here in verse one, and we'll go on to verse two, we see that that's exactly what
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John immediately expands upon further. The life was made manifest and we have seen it.
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Seen it. The Greek word here for seen is horeo. Compared with other
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Greek words for the sense of sight, horeo especially confers the idea of seeing with understanding.
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To really, to see and grasp it. For the light bulb to go off over your head.
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Do you know where else John used this word? He used it in his gospel. Let's turn to John chapter 20, please.
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The gospel of John chapter 20. At the very beginning of this chapter, it's resurrection
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Sunday morning, very early before dawn. Now on the first day of the week,
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Mary Magdalene came to the tomb while it was still dark and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb.
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So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom
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Jesus loved, namely John, and said to them, they have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him.
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So Peter went out with the other disciple and they were going toward the tomb. Both of them were running together, but the other disciple outran
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Peter and reached the tomb first and stooping to look in. He saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in.
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Then Simon Peter came following him and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus's head, not lying with the linen cloths, but folded up in a place by itself.
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Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and here's the word, and he saw and believed.
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Horeo. And he saw and believed. For as yet they did not understand the scripture that he must rise from the dead.
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In other words, they didn't understand yet that the Old Testament prophecies all had said that he was going to rise from the dead.
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But this is the moment at which John believes that Christ has risen from the dead, that it is a fact, that the resurrection is true, that eternal life can be had.
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And if we go on further in chapter 20, down farther, the part that was read for us tonight by Jerry and through verse 19, and I'm just going to highlight them out.
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We hear over and over again, again, John emphasizing the senses, right?
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Their experience, their witness of the risen Christ. Look in verse 20, when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side with their sight, right?
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Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. And in verse 22, and when he had said this, they heard, he breathed on them.
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They could actually feel his breath. He had breath. And then later on, when
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Thomas says that he will not believe until he touches the nail holes in Christ's hands and sees the wound at his side, right?
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And he says, and then Jesus comes back and presents himself to Thomas, and he says, put your finger here.
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See my hands. Put out your hand, place it in my side, like you said, and asked, do not disbelieve, but believe.
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Thomas answers, my Lord and my God. And Jesus said to him, have you believed because you have not seen me?
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Verse 29. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.
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Luke also in his gospel goes to great lengths to tell us about all that the apostles experienced with him, that they saw him, talked with him, touched him.
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They ate with him. Jesus rose bodily from the dead so that we know that he is the first fruits.
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That means that someday we also will rise bodily from the dead. That is our great promise that death is conquered, that Jesus has the victory that we know when he has risen, that we too will rise one day.
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He is the promise. And then the promise is sealed for us by the giving of the spirit.
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So when we go back to first John again, and we read here in verses one and two, all these things about the senses that which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, that we have seen it.
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We are reading John reflecting upon an objective truth, the person of Jesus Christ, who is the
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God, the son, and that he's risen from the dead. And now he and we transition from the person to the proclamation of that person.
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As he goes on in verse two, the life was made manifest and we have seen it.
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And then he goes on and says, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the father and was made manifest to us.
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That which we have seen and heard. We proclaim also to you. We'll stop there.
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And so, again, two keywords. I'm sorry, again, emphasizing the union of Christ divinity and humanity, humanity, that he was made manifest to us.
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And then he goes on and he uses two very key words. One even repeated, right? That he uses testify, that we testify to it and that we proclaim it to you.
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And then again, in verse three, that which we've seen and heard, we proclaim also to you now testify and proclaim.
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Those are words about authority. They're about authority. Testify is a
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Greek word. That's a legal term. And so when you read testify here, you should think just the same way that you'd probably already thought with English.
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The word testify, you should connect it to a courtroom setting, and you can think about a witness in a court of law and realize that when
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John wrote this at the end of the first century in 90 something, a D very likely at this moment, he was the very last possible living witness to Christ's resurrection.
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It's possible that at that point he was, and John knew that he was called to bear witness to what he had experienced firsthand as we've just looked at, right?
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All these things that he has seen with his senses. And so he's testifying to those things.
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That's his, in terms of authority, that's his authority of experience. He has experienced the resurrection.
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And so he is sharing it and testifying to it. The other word proclaim that word.
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On the other hand, that word is about the authority of commission. Christ commanded him and all the other apostles to tell the others, the good news.
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And he told them to take that good news all the way to the ends of the earth.
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That was their command. Now, you and I both know that the apostles did not make it all the way to the ends of the earth.
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They made it very far. You might even say they made it to the farthest reaches of their known world at the time.
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At least that's what tradition tells us. But now is the day.
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Now is the time in which we are reaching the very ends of the earth with the proclamation of the gospel.
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And that is where we come in. And we should think of it as a relay race as a track team relay.
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Think about, think about with a relay, what the rules are to a relay race, right? So first there are, there are four people in a usual relay race and everyone's got to run.
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You can't cheat. You can't have one person run three quarters of the way, one person run the last quarter and the other two guys just sort of stand on the side and cheer them on.
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Rah, rah, rah, all four have to run and they all run an equal length and they have that baton, right?
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That baton that they have to pass between each other. They have to pass off in order to advance and move.
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And in fact, there is even a set distance length on the track that the baton has to be passed off within that section of the track or their whole team is disqualified.
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And the rules really about relay races are kind of brutal because if you drop the baton or if you pass it off outside of that area, boom, that's it.
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You're disqualified. It does not matter how far ahead your team was. It doesn't matter if the other three teams that all fallen flat on their face, you are completely disqualified.
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You are not going to win. They don't even count it as you finishing fourth. They just counted as did not finish done.
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Now there's something fascinating to me that happens during the handoff.
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That's applicable here. And that is that the first guy, as he runs up and as he approaches the second one, he doesn't just stand there waiting for them to hand, waiting for the first guy to hand him the baton.
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He starts running. He gets a running start. The idea is that he wants to be all the way up to speed to full speed so that by the time he gets the baton, he's going as the same speed as the person who's coming in behind him.
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And then he takes off with the baton. And that is like us as students of the word as disciples of those who've come before us.
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The idea is for us to get up to speed so that when we are handed the baton, we are ready to run forward with the proclamation of the gospel.
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And then the second rule that's important to this illustration is, like I said earlier, that you can't drop the baton.
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We are being handed a treasure, a spiritual treasure from those who teach us the word.
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It's a spiritual treasure that is the knowledge of God. And that requires two people, by the way, those who invest in you or disciple you and whether I'm talking about elders or Sunday school teachers or parents or friends, they can put it right there in your hand, but you need to reach back and grasp it.
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That clean handoff in the track race takes two. Somebody gave you the baton and you're responsible to run your leg and hand that baton to somebody else.
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It all started with Jesus who gave the baton to the apostles. So to speak, these things that Jesus began to do and teach, he passed on to the apostles and they wrote it into the scriptures and the treasure that is the scriptures, the gift that every single believer is given in the indwelling
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Holy spirit who illuminates the scriptures for us and allows us to understand them. That means that we get to grab the baton, not just from those who came before, but even directly from the apostles themselves through what they've recorded for us.
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I imagine most of us in this room have a Bible app right in our pocket right now.
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And I imagine that most of us have more than one printed copy at home and probably in more than one version.
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And to that, I say and remind you to whom much is given, much is required.
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Read it, study it, meditate on it.
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Don't drop that baton. John and the apostles have passed to us a proclamation, one that is rooted in the person of our
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Lord Jesus Christ. God, God come in the flesh, the person and the proclamation.
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And so lastly, then the third point is the purpose of this proclamation and it follows immediately in the rest of verse three and into verse four so that you too may have fellowship with us.
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And indeed, our fellowship is with the father and with his son, Jesus Christ.
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And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. So that those words there, they always indicate a purpose statement, a goal, the desire.
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John desired that his right readers might have fellowship with himself and with the other apostles who had seen and conversed and had fellowship with Jesus through him with the father.
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How could the others have fellowship with the apostle John? I mean,
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I'm sorry. How could we have fellowship with the apostle John? I mean, we've certainly never seen him or met him personally.
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Even the people that he was writing to in this epistle perhaps had never actually met him personally. So clearly what
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John is describing here to talk about fellowship is only possible supernaturally.
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And the super, the supernatural enabler of this fellowship is the very message that John spoke of in the previous verse.
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It is the gospel. Why does John talk about the goal here in turn as the gospel in terms of fellowship rather than salvation?
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It's because if we think about it from one sense, death and sin are all about separation.
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And the gospel is all about fellowship in the bringing together. Sin separates, it destroys, it tears asunder.
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Adam and Eve separated from the close communion that they had with God in the garden.
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It separates people from each other and leaves anger and hate and sorrow in its wake.
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It separates body from soul and spirit in death. In hell, it separates all unbelievers from grace, from joy, from comfort, from peace, from any relief at all for all of eternity.
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And to pay its penalty, God, the son was abandoned and deserted by the father.
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Do you remember his words on the cross? Eli, Eli, Lima, Sabat and I, my
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God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Spurgeon wrote of this.
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He said, if the comfortable light of his presence is shadowed, even for an hour, there is a torment within the breast, which
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I can only liken to the prelude of hell. This is the greatest of all weights that can press upon the heart to our
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Lord. The father's love was the foundation of everything. When that was gone, all was gone.
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Nothing remained within, without, above when his own God, the
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God of his entire confidence turned from him. Yes, God, in very deed, forsook our savior.
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And it was just a short while after that, that death separated even the God man from his body.
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When Christ gave up the spirit, his own spirit, but the good news is that the gospel, he was not separated from that body for long.
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His tomb is empty. He rose on the third day. The grave could not hold him.
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Death lost its sting. So while sin and death separate, the gospel restores, it brings together, it creates fellowship and fellowship.
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The word is not the word that we use it for too casually in our day and age.
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And we just say that we're going to have some fellowship tonight. And we mean, we're going to get together and eat and play some board games.
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Andrew in the back. No, the fellowship, the biblical fellowship is that which is in common.
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It means to have a partnership. It actually really is a business term to say that, like a business partnership that you share in everything.
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You have the equal responsibilities, equal stake in the game. And there is fellowship on the vertical dimension, right?
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In that we have fellowship with God. Now, through Jesus, because Jesus has reconciled us to God.
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And Christ himself even spoke of becoming one with him, even as he is one with the father. And there is also the horizontal dimension to one of the two most vivid metaphors used in the new testament for the church.
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I'd say one is the fact that it calls the church, the bride, right?
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The bride of Christ. And another is that it calls us the body of Christ.
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And both of those are entirely about union. They're about unity. They're about fellowship.
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The bride again is vertical. It's the union with Christ. And the body is both vertical because Christ is the head, but also horizontal.
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And that we are all members of that one body. And we all have spiritual gifts in which we have been equipped in order to nourish and encourage that body and grow that body and advance his kingdom.
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Because we're in it together. That's fellowship. So understand then that the purpose of the apostles proclamation of the gospel, indeed of the gospel itself, is that we might have forever fellowship with God and with each other.
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And there is yet another aspect of that purpose as we see in verse four. And it is the purpose of the gospel end of this very letter.
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And we are writing these things. John says, so that our joy may be complete.
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I told you we'd get to joy. Usually when we're talking about authorial intent,
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I'm supposed to talk about this much earlier in the sermon, but John got to it in verse four.
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So we're going to get to it now at the end too, but this is the authorial intent. John's making it very easy for me.
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He says it right out. I'm writing these things so that our joy may be complete.
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He's very good at this. John does the same thing in his gospel. It was the last verse that we read or that Jerry read tonight in verse 30.
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Chapter 20, verse 30. He said, now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in the book, but these are written.
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So that there's the purpose statement again, so that you may believe that Jesus is the
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Christ, the son of God, and that by believing you have life in his name, the gospels intent, its purpose,
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John's gospel. I mean that his gospel, its intent was evangelistic. That you may believe the epistle on the other hand is about fellowship.
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It is about joy. It is about building up that we write these things so that our joy may be complete, finished, made perfect.
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Now it's very interesting that here, John uses we, as opposed to I, there are plenty other times in the epistle where he says,
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I am writing these things like in chapter two, verse one. So it's not a
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Royal. We, but rather if we think back to what we've been going through and reading versus one through three, we can see that really what we're talking about all the time that we have heard and we have seen and we testify and we proclaim he's talking about the whole apostolic band, right?
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Not, he means it, not just as himself, but all the apostles, whether he's the last survivor at this point or not, it's still the truth that it was all the apostles together who proclaimed it is all the apostles together who have this intent.
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That this object, this goal, desire, purpose, that our joy may be complete.
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So this really, if you think about it goes beyond the authorial intent, even of this one epistle, it speaks to the authorial intent of all of the writings of all the apostles, which really namely means the new
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Testament, the new Testament. And John says, our joy, our joy.
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What is joy? Joy. I've heard it said is a deep seated gladness, a depth.
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Every time I say it, I feel like I want to push down a depth of assurance and confidence.
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This week I read a news article about the world happiness report being released.
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There is such a thing, the world happiness report. Maybe you saw the headlines. So the world happiness report, these,
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I don't know, political scientists, scholar folks, they get together and they make it, they rank the countries of the world.
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Who's the happiest? Okay, so here we go. Here's the top ones in case you're interested in moving.
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Number one, Finland, Finland, number two, Norway, number three,
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Denmark, number four, Iceland, number five, Switzerland.
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Now, from this list at this point, you might be thinking that living in a cold place is what makes you happy, right?
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But I know that's not true because we New Englanders have perfected being miserable in cold. And so that is clearly not it.
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Pastor Mike likes to joke all the time about moving here to New England. I was here, left for Pittsburgh and came back.
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So I knew exactly what I was in for. The factors that they included in this judgment about the world happiness report included things like income, life expectancy, social support, freedom, trust.
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I don't know trust and what exactly, but they said trust and generosity. Right? These are all the things that they said make people happy, according to them.
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And so because all these countries ranked high rated highly in these factors, they ranked them up at the top.
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But this is the world's idea of happiness. The world's idea of happiness is income.
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The world's idea of happiness is a long life. Here on this sin, cursed
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Earth. The world's idea of happiness is freedom to do whatever
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I want, right? That is not the biblical definition of joy.
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Martin Lloyd Jones said that in any definition, we may give of New Testament joy. We can't go to the world.
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We can't go to a dictionary. We go to the New Testament instead. This is something quite peculiar, which cannot be explained.
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It is a quality which belongs to the Christian life in its essence, so that in our definition of joy, we must be very careful that it conforms to what we see in the
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Lord. The world has never seen anyone who knew joy as our Lord knew it.
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And yet he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. So our definition of joy must somehow correspond to that.
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Joy is something very deep and profound. It's something that affects the whole and entire personality.
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In other words, it comes to this. There is only one thing that can give true joy, and that is the contemplation of the
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Lord Jesus Christ. He satisfies my mind. He satisfies my emotions.
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He satisfies my every desire. He and his great salvation include the whole personality and nothing less.
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And in him, I am complete. Joy, in other words, is the response and the reaction of the soul to a knowledge of the
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Lord, Jesus Christ. John has written this letter, this gospel and his gospel, and the apostles have written the whole
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New Testament. So that we may have joy, satisfaction, and that we may have it to the maximum.
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When I am dissatisfied, whenever I am disheartened or disappointed,
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I'm not thinking about Jesus. Do you want true joy?
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The prescription is so simple. It's almost embarrassing for me to say it to you, but it's simply this look up, fix your eyes upon Jesus.
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The order of this prologue of John's epistle is important. It started with the person of Christ, the wonder of the incarnation and imputation.
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It compels us to proclaim him. And God has chosen that proclamation of the gospel as the means by which men are, women are saved and brought into fellowship with him and fellowship with each other.
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And that fellowship leads to joy. The life of faith is the life of joy, and it's experienced only by those who respond to the proclamation of the word.
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These things I have spoken to you, Christ said in the upper room with his disciples, these things
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I have spoken to you so that my joy may be in you. That they can have fellowship and that your joy may be full.
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True joy is directly connected with our fellowship with Jesus and his father.
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And what could possibly satisfy us more than God, the infinite, all powerful, all knowing, always present
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God. Adopting you and me, welcoming us into his arms.
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That we can boldly come before the king of the universe. And we can refer to him tenderly as our
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Abba father. And we will live joyfully ever after.
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Amen. Let's pray. Heavenly father.
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We cannot begin to thank you for the wondrous gift that is your son.
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That you humbled yourself. And came to live on this earth.
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And lived a life truly man, but lived it righteously and perfectly.
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And obeyed all the commandments of the law that we could not live. And then you died on our behalf.
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So that. God the father might. Put our sins upon Christ on the cross.
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And put his righteousness upon us. And in that great exchange, we gain eternal life.
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And fellowship with you. Father, we thank you for the faithful witness and proclamation of the apostles.
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And for the new testament that they left behind for us. That we may through your inspired word.
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Know the truth. And the whole truth. Of your person. That we may know how to be saved.
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That we may know. The ending. That we may know what is in store for us as we live forever.
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In heaven with you. In glory. Worshiping and praising you with all the saints and with all the angels.
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May this truth. Lord, be the root. Of our fellowship with you and with each other.
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May we not take it so lightly and so for granted when we can come together as a church family.
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And a church body. May our conversations not just be about things of this world.
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But that we might share with each other the wondrous glory of your son and the truths that we know of you.
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And that in all of that. That we may have joy inexpressible. A joy that is only a glimpse of what we will have someday in heaven with you.