Comfort When Anitichrists Tear the Church Apart

Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church.

Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern Minnesota.

We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg.

This is our epistle reading.

It comes from 1 John 1

-2.

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, the life has made

manifest and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal

life, which was by the Father and was made manifest to us.

That which we have seen and heard and proclaim also to you, so that you

too may have fellowship with us.

And indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with the Son, Jesus Christ.

And we are all writing these things so that our joys may be complete.

This is the message that we have heard from Him to proclaim to you that God is light

and in Him there is no darkness at all.

If we say that we have fellowship with Him while we walk in the 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.

Blood of Jesus, His Son cleanses us from all sins.

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

If we confess our sins, He is faith and just to forgive us our sins

and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

And if we say we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us.

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.

But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ

is righteous.

He is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours

only, but also for the sins of the whole world.

This is the word of the Lord.

In the name of Jesus.

Brothers and sisters, I am going to use the occasion that the lectionary for the next few weeks has us working our way through

the epistle of 1 John to actually work our way through that text.

We'll be doing this for several weeks.

Have any of you read this epistle, 1 John, and thought, I don't quite get it.

It's a little bit tough to get because it doesn't follow a standard format that

we in our Western thinking are used to.

You'll notice that there's no thesis statement, so to speak.

It doesn't really follow a really easy -to -follow outline.

I've been working my way through this text, and I think I've found a way to crack it open in a way that we can all

really enjoy what's in it and take comfort in the message that is there for us.

In order to do that, we're going to have to do a little bit of background work.

You don't have to follow me there, but in Colossians 2, the Apostle Paul writes these words in

verses 8, 9, and 10.

He says, Those

words are

going to help us out here a little bit.

As we read through this epistle, we're going to start halfway through chapter 2

because chapter 2 gives us the context.

Let me explain.

What we know from reading this text is that the churches that John

was discipling, this was probably while he was in the city of Ephesus,

that those churches were torn apart by a heretic whose name is Serinthus.

We know this from church history, and it's important that we understand who Serinthus was and

the errors that he was engaging in and how then we can, as Christians, take note

of this and be on guard against people who are like Serinthus today.

These are people who have mixed Christian doctrine with worldly philosophy.

Let me explain.

Back in the ancient world, the assumed philosophy that people were instructed in

and catechized in and were taught as children and raised up in is a philosophy known as

Platonism.

It comes from the philosopher Plato.

He had a view of the world that went something like this.

This is a little bit of a simplistic way of approaching it.

But matter, the things you can touch, the things that you can see and smell and stuff,

those things are, well, not so good.

In fact, kind of bad.

In fact, everything that you can see and touch is really kind of cheap, tawdry, and not the

real thing.

The real thing is some perfect spiritual concept up in the ethers somewhere.

And so the way my professor, Dr. Rod Rosenblatt, explained it to me when I was in his

class, taking a philosophy class, he said it's like this.

He says, you see that chair that you're sitting in, you students here at Christ College?

Well, you see, that chair isn't the real chair.

It's not even a good chair.

In fact, it's just a bad knockoff of real chairness.

Now, I don't know what chairness is, but the real chair exists somewhere in the

spiritual realm, and it is perfect.

This, not so much.

This, bad.

The spiritual, good.

And so Serentis, although he had been instructed in Christian doctrine and had heard

the testimony of the apostle John that Jesus Christ is God in human

flesh, he rejected it.

And the reason why he rejected it is because to believe that God is in

human flesh is unthinkable, because the perfect coming and being

imperfect like that is not a tenable position.

And so many in the ancient world would have bristled at the thought that the perfect

God took on human flesh and that we, our hope,

is that he's going to remake the world and we are going to exist forever

in matter.

That's bad in their way of thinking.

And so in order to make Christianity more palatable to people in the ancient

world who believed this philosophy,.

Serentis reworked it.

And we know this from one of the church fathers.

His name was Irenaeus.

And writing in the 2nd century, he tells us about Serentis in his book Against Heresies.

Let me quote it.

It's a little bit ponderous, but I'll explain it.

Here's what Irenaeus wrote.

Serentis was a man who was educated in the wisdom of the Egyptians.

He taught that the world was not made by the primary God.

Instead, it was made by a certain power which was far separated from the primary

God and at a distance from the principality who is supreme over the universe and

ignorant of him who is above all.

He, Serentis, represented Jesus as having not been born of a virgin,

but as being the son of Joseph and Mary according to the ordinary course of human generation.

While he was nevertheless more righteous, prudent, and wise than other men,

it was only after his baptism that the Christ descended on

Jesus in the form of a dove.

And so you note in Serentis' theology, to believe that Jesus is the

Christ is not tenable because he's believing in the philosophy of Plato and of the Egyptians.

Instead, he believed the Christ, whatever that is, descended on Jesus in his

baptism.

And worse, when Jesus went to the cross, the Christ left him

because the Christ can't suffer and die and things like that.

And so you get the idea.

This guy had a really strange religion.

It was Christian -ish.

It hijacked Christian ideas and reworked them.

But brothers and sisters, I want to say this.

We have the same problem going on today.

You may not recognize it or be able to name it, but there is a predominant

philosophy that has taken over our culture today, and that philosophy has a name.

That philosophy is postmodernism.

Now, think of it this way.

Have you ever wondered what has gotten into people's heads that a person

who was born with the physical plumbing of a man is confused as to

which bathroom he should use?

You sit there going, what has gone wrong with our world?

Or how is it that, you know, these crazy things that are happening are happening?

Answer, it's because people have been taught a philosophy.

It's called postmodernism.

They might not be able to quote Foucault or Derrida, but they are the

disciples of those men.

And this is why things are going bad in our country the way they are going bad.

And what's happened in our time is that there are church denominations and individual

congregations who have literally tried to take postmodern philosophy and marry

it to Christianity.

And they have done the same thing that Sorenthes has done.

This is why we have churches today and entire church bodies that bless same

-sex marriage, who refuse to use male pronouns

to describe God, despite the fact that His Word, the Bible, does.

These are people who are now trying to get rid of this idea that we are created in the image of God, male and

female, and they deny that there are only two genders, and instead they say that there's multiple genders,

maybe 70 or 80, who knows?

And you better learn a whole bunch of new pronouns.

You see, those churches have actually departed from the faith.

They have made the same error that Sorenthes made.

Now, we also learn from Irenaeus that there was an occasion where

the apostle John, when he was in Ephesus, actually came into the same building

as Sorenthes.

And it's a quite hilarious account, and here's what Irenaeus writes about it.

He says, there's also those who heard from Polycarp that John, the disciple of the Lord,

going to bathe at Ephesus, perceived that Sorenthes was within the building, and

he rushed out of the bathhouse without even bathing, exclaiming, let us fly,

lest even the bathhouse should fall down, because Sorenthes, the enemy of the truth, is within.

Wow.

So, in order to understand 1 John, we have to

understand that this is the history.

This is the details and the facts that were brewing behind the scenes, and we know this

because in 1 John 2, we actually get the reason for the writing of this text.

So here's what happens when you put all the pieces together.

Sorenthes was able to get enough people within the church listening to his

philosophical Christian theology mix, and they ended up leaving

the church.

There was a church split that occurred as a result of this man's heresies,

and that's exactly what continues happening to this day.

There are church splits when people depart from the faith, and here's the thing.

John is not going to budge a single inch, and this letter was written

in order to comfort Christians who have been buffeted by, and he's going to describe them as

antichrists, those who have mixed the philosophy of the world with Christian

doctrine and created some weird, you know, satanic hybrid.

The two cannot go together.

And so let's pick up in 1 John 2 starting at verse 15, and you'll see how this then

plays out, and then we'll circle back to chapter 1.

John writes, 1 John 2 .15, Do not

love the world or the things that are in the world.

If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, the

pride of life, it's not from the Father.

It is from the world, and the world is passing away along with its

desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

And by the way, what is the will of God?

Well, this same author in his gospel says it's the will of God that you believe the

one whom the Father has sent, and that is Jesus Christ.

It is His will that you believe Him and that you are forgiven.

Remember the tail end of our gospel text today.

You heard John write these words.

These things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the

Son of God, and that by believing that you might have life in His name.

It is the will of God that you believe and trust in Jesus.

So, verse 18, Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that

Antichrist is coming, think of the man of lawlessness, the one mentioned in the book of Revelation, so

now many Antichrists have come.

I find it fascinating that many people obsess with this little game called pin the tail on the Antichrist,

and they fail to recognize the smaller Antichrists that have already been in

the church for these last 2 ,000 years.

All these little Antichrists are pointing to the big one, and everybody always focuses on the big one and misses the whole

throng of them right in our midst.

So we must not do that.

I remember when I was working in Seattle the year that Barb and I got married.

I was working in a bank, and there was a Vietnam vet who would come in and cash his check

every month, and he literally looked at me and says, Do you think Nancy Reagan is the

Antichrist?

No.

I'm 100 % positive she wasn't.

You kind of get the idea.

But who are these little Antichrists?

These are the people who are like Sorinthus, that take false philosophical

ideas, man -made ideologies, and try to force them into Christianity and morph

Christianity to fit their philosophy.

And so he says this, Children, it's the last hour.

If you heard Antichrist is coming, so now many Antichrists have already come, like Sorinthus.

Therefore, we know that it is the last hour.

They went out from us.

So notice, in describing these people,.

They have totally left,.

Broken fellowship with the true church to follow after Sorinthus.

There's a church split that occurred here, and I can tell you, having witnessed a church split in my

lifetime, these are extremely painful and confusing things to go through.

And so John is writing to comfort them and to help them understand, where do we go from here?

They went out from us, but they were not of us.

If they had been of us, they would have continued with us.

But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.

Now writing to the Christians,.

But you,.

You have been anointed by the Holy One, and you have all knowledge.

And the anointing he's talking about there, by the way, is your baptism.

Peter writes, or Luke writes, about Peter's wonderful sermon on the day of Pentecost.

He says, repent and be baptized, every one of you, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will

receive the promise of the Holy Spirit.

And so the idea is, is that in your baptism, you were united with Christ in his death and his resurrection.

Your sins were washed away, and you have received the Holy Spirit.

Every single one of you has the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit now dwells within you,

your body being the temple of the Holy Spirit.

So he's reminding them of the basics,.

If you would,.

Taking them back to their baptisms.

You have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge.

And I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, I write to you, but because you know it.

And because, and here's the important words, no lie is of

the truth.

It is a lie.

To say that Jesus is not the Christ, to say that the Christ

descended on Jesus.

That's a lie.

And remember, the devil is the father of lies, and when he is lying, he is speaking his

native language.

So John here is holding the line and saying, stop listening to these lies.

No lie is of the truth.

Who is the liar,.

But he who denies that Jesus is the Christ?

Strong words.

He doesn't name Serenthis by name, because to only name him would be to miss the whole point.

He names every one of his disciples who no longer believe that Jesus is the Christ, and he says,

they are all liars.

In the same way, in our day, any Christian pastor who would say, God

blesses same -sex marriage, and there is more than two genders,.

Is a liar.

And they are not of the truth.

In fact,.

Using John's terminology here, any Christian leader,.

Pastor, preacher,.

Teacher, who would say these things is a little antichrist.

That's what the text is saying.

So,.

No one who denies the Son has the Father.

Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.

So let what you heard from the beginning then abide in you.

Notice the words.

Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you.

Go back to your catechism.

Go back to the Word.

Remember, Christian doctrine does not develop.

It's not like a Polaroid,.

You know,.

Where the apostles took the snapshot and then we over the centuries kind of waved it in the air and now it's getting clearer and

clearer.

No.

It is the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

Christian theology doesn't morph or change.

You cannot make it palatable to the predominant philosophy of this age.

No.

Go back to your catechism.

Go back to what you heard from the beginning.

If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and the

Father.

And this is the promise that He made to us.

Are you ready?

Eternal life.

That's what He's promised us.

God has not promised to make you rich in this life.

He has not promised you health,.

Wealth,.

Influence, affluence, or even that you'll be relevant or liked by your neighbors.

Chances are, you may have a cross laid upon you and you will suffer.

You may even be persecuted for your confession of Christ and if you are,.

You are to rejoice.

Because our hope is not in this life.

Our hope is in the one to come, the promise of eternal life.

So John then says, I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you.

But the anointing that you receive, the Holy Spirit, abides in you and you have no need that anyone should

teach you.

But as His anointing teaches you about everything and is true and is no lie, just as

it has been taught to you, abide in Him.

Now, you're going to note, we hear these words, abide, and immediately we want to take action.

I want to be somebody who abides in Christ.

I want to continue to abide.

This same author, in his Gospel, the Gospel of John, chapter 6, verse

56, quotes Jesus this way, Whoever eats my flesh

and drinks my blood abides in me and I in

him.

So you're going to note, abiding according to Jesus is to have the Lord's

Supper.

Because we believe, as Jesus has revealed, that when we partake of the Lord's Supper, we are

eating His flesh, drinking His blood, given and shed for us for the

forgiveness of our sins.

And through the Lord's Supper, we abide in Him and He abides in us.

And so note, John here is taking them back to their catechism, taking them back to their baptism,

taking them back to the Lord's Supper.

These are the means by which we resist those

who seek to deceive us.

It's back to the basics.

It's kind of like that Vince Lombardi quote,.

Where he basically holds up a football.

And says, gentlemen,.

This is a football.

It's always the basics.

We never move beyond them.

You never graduate from your catechism.

And even when we confirm people in this congregation, that is not a graduation from

Christianity.

That is their first graduation into it.

You understand?

So I write these things about those who would deceive you.

Verse 28,.

And now, little children, abide in Him, so that when He appears, we may have confidence

and not shrink from Him in shame at His coming.

Little bit of a note here.

Shrink in shame from Him at His coming.

Think back to the Garden of Eden.

Adam and Eve listened to the serpent.

Eve listened to the serpent,.

Ate of the tree.

Adam listened to his wife,.

Ate of the tree.

Then they heard the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

What did they do?

They went and hid.

They put fig leaves on themselves to cover their nakedness and they went and hid.

That's a really silly thing to do from an omnipotent, all -present God.

But see, they feared Him because of their sin.

But the truth,.

Your baptism, the Lord's Supper, and the faith once delivered to the saints do not give us

that doubt where we have to somehow feel like we need to hide from God or shrink from Him should He appear.

Instead, the Gospel gives us confidence that we are forgiven, that we have fellowship with God, that

we are united with Christ and that we have a right standing with God.

And therefore, when He appears, we will not hide in the weeds or ask for the rocks to hide

us from God in His presence.

Instead, we will be like little children greeting their father after he's been gone on a journey and come home.

Daddy, Daddy, I'm so glad you're back.

The Gospel gives us that kind of confidence.

So, little children, abide in Him.

So when He appears, you may have confidence and not shrink from Him and shame at His coming.

If you know that He is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of

God.

You see, because they've been born of God, they practice righteousness.

They don't practice it in order to be born of God.

Just like little children don't breathe in order to be born, they breathe because they're born.

You see, that's the idea.

Now, with that in mind, let us now briefly take a look at the opening chapter of 1 John.

And we may not make it all the way through this first chapter.

And that's okay, because next week's reading is a little bit shorter.

But the idea here is that take a look now with this context of this prelude, now

understanding the introduction to what's going on when John wrote this text.

Hear these words.

That which was from the beginning, verse 1, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we

have looked on and have touched with our hands concerning the word of life.

That opening sentence is right in the face of the Corinthianites.

Because they are saying, we handled and touched the Christ.

He says, the life was made manifest.

We have seen it and we testify to it and we proclaim to you the eternal

life which was with the Father and has been made manifest now to us.

You see, our gospel text, where there's Thomas being invited by

Jesus to touch him and put his hands and fingers in the wounds of Christ.

All of that is being recalled as John is saying these words because he's writing them against the Corinthianites

and writing them to comfort those who continue to believe.

And so, that gospel text is so important because you can see that John, even his gospel, was

written in order to counteract these errors of people who would somehow say that matter is

evil and that the Spirit is good.

And therefore, Jesus couldn't possibly be the Christ.

He's saying, no.

We saw Him.

We touched Him.

We ate with Him.

We could even smell His bad breath in the morning before He brushed His teeth.

Maybe He didn't have bad breath, but you get the idea.

So he then continues,.

Verse 3,.

That which we have seen and we have heard, we proclaim also to you so that you

may have, and listen to these words, fellowship with us.

And indeed, our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ, and we are writing these things so

that our joy may be complete.

You ever recited the creed where it talks about, and we believe in the communion of the saints?

And your mind just puts a big old question mark on it.

I believe in it, but I have no idea what that is.

Yeah, I believe in that communion of the saints.

You betcha.

No idea.

What's it mean?

I have no idea.

This forms the basis of that.

The communion of the saints.

Is this,.

That by abiding in Christ and abiding in this proclamation of Him given,

born of the Virgin Mary, suffering under Pontius Pilate, crucified, dead, and buried for your sins, that

in this then, we have fellowship, listen to this, not only with each

other here, we have fellowship with Jesus, we have fellowship with the

Father, and we also have fellowship with all of those saints who have

died in this same faith.

We have communion together with angels and archangels and with all the

company of heaven who laud and magnify the glorious name of Jesus.

That, at its core, is the communion of the saints.

So now you can chalk it up and say, well,.

I have a better idea.

Of what that means.

So he says this.

So we are writing then that these things, so that our joy may be complete.

And this is the message that you've heard from us and heard from Him.

And we proclaim to you,.

God is light.

In Him there is no darkness at all.

If we say we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, and the Cyrenthianites were walking in

darkness in the lies of the devil.

He says, we lie.

And we do not, listen to these words, practice the truth.

Truth is not something merely assented to.

It is that.

It is something that is believed.

That leads to action.

That leads to confession.

Leads to all types of things that you do in thought, word, deed.

Things you do and don't do.

You see, the truth is something that is practiced.

But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with, listen, one another.

And the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.

If we say we have no sin,.

We deceive ourselves.

Important to note here.

These Cyrenthianites, by denying that what God created in this world is good,

they believe that, well, the material world doesn't matter.

Think about the implications that would then have on their practice.

They would literally, we learn this from church history, engage in all kinds of sexual immorality

and debauchery.

And sin has no category in their theology.

Because what you do with this body, which isn't any good anyway, doesn't matter.

Sin, who needs to be forgiven of sin?

And so John says, if we say we have no sin,.

Boy, do we have it,.

Well, you deceive yourself and the truth is not in you.

But if you confess your sins, listen to these words, God is faithful and just to forgive our

sins and to cleanse us from all

unrighteousness,.

Not some.

And if we say we have not sinned, will we make God out to be a liar?

And if we do that, His word is not in us.

So, my little children, I'm writing these things to you so that you may not sin.

However, if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous.

And see, Ecclesiastes 7, verse 20 says this, there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and

never sins.

So that's why we confess our sins week after week after week.

I once told somebody here that I'll stop forgiving your sins every Sunday when you stop sinning.

Every day.

Until then, we will confess our sins and receive forgiveness from Christ.

And then he says, He is the propitiation for our sins, and not only for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.

And you'll note that Jesus' death was for everybody, not just for some.

And so as we then consider these words in our opening sermon then on 1 John,

let us then consider these comforting words to a church that had been ripped apart

by wolves, by false teachers.

And they were being tempted.

To figure out,.

Which way do I go?

Return back to your baptism.

Abide in Christ in the Lord's Supper.

Hear again the words of the Catechism which instruct us in God's Word regarding His law,

regarding the Creed, which reveals the Gospel, how we are to pray, and do our

good works.

All of this is from God, and you don't move beyond the basics.

So be comforted in these things, brothers and sisters.

Be comforted in them because Christ has done these things for you so

that you can be reconciled to the Father and have fellowship with Jesus, the Father,

each other, and all the saints in heaven.

He is risen.

He is risen indeed.

Alleluia.

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