Taste and See That The Lord is Good

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1 John 1:1-2:2

Good morning. What we're reading this morning is from the Book of 1 John, from the start of the book through to chapter 2, verse 2.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched, this we proclaim concerning the word of life. The life appeared. We have seen it and testify to it. And we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.

We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.

This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you. God is light. In him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and we do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we are fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.

My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.

This is the word of the Lord.

Crossing the Garden to Taste and See

Well like Rachel said at the start of the service, we have been having some incredible weather this week and it looks like next week as well. So I'm making the most of it. I head out into the garden most mornings with my coffee and it's not that I'm an awesome gardener but I have these bursts and then I really like to see if something has changed or grown or kind of transformed overnight. Hopefully it hasn't been eaten by caterpillars overnight or snails but at the moment I've got a dahlia that we transplanted from the ground into a pot and it's flowered for the first time in like eight years. So I'm very excited and I kind of go out there and I check everything.

Yesterday I looked over at our white raspberry bush and I realised that I'd forgotten that we had this kind of second flush of raspberries growing. It must be this weird weather.

A couple of weeks ago I had eaten a few of them and I was like, oh this is amazing, my garden is so productive and I must kind of keep harvesting them and then I'd entirely forgotten about it. So I was relieved yesterday, I hadn't missed the harvest, the possums hadn't got them.

And then weirdly I found myself just kind of standing there observing the raspberries a few metres away and I thought, oh well I better get going on the day. It seems just a bit too far to kind of go over there and eat those raspberries now.

Maybe I'll get them tomorrow and I kind of caught myself in that thought, as classic me actually, like oh why do today what you could put off for tomorrow, until the adrenaline's really pumping.

But I knew the raspberries were there, I knew they were ready to eat and that there was a risk that you know if I didn't that they would drop off or whatever. I was pleased that I'd remembered, but to actually cross the garden to pick them and to eat them somehow felt like this kind of separate task that I had to consciously agree with myself to do.

And in that moment I thought this is exactly like what happens with our faith in Jesus. We know about him, we are glad he exists. We admire the doctrine, the word, maybe the culture that kind of comes from Christian nations. We appreciate the music, we feel warm during a particularly good sermon or service, prayers, when Glenn does the Bible reading. And then we go about our daily business and we forget.

And we turn up to church again on another Sunday and we go, oh phew, yes, yes, they're ripe, they're ready, this is great, I'm so glad, look how delicious it all is. And then, even then, we find ourselves tempted to treat the whole thing as something for another day. When I'm not wrangling the kids, when I'm not dealing with career, when I'm not thinking about the price of petrol, when I'm not stressed, when I'm not sad, when I'm not busy, it will be a time when I'll walk over and actually pick and eat.

Psalm 34 tells us to taste and see that the Lord is good. Not know and appreciate, although those are good things. Not just rejoice that he exists, but leave it for another day to taste and see. Our theme for this year is that Jesus is good and good for you. And I think he's calling us in this series in One John to walk across the garden and experience that for ourselves.

So you'll be pleased to know yesterday I went over, picked the white raspberries, even found a strawberry to add to the mix, and I was like, oh, I'm living the earth mother life with my coffee in the garden. There's a kind of knowing that only happens in the eating. And that's what John wants to write to his readers, to us today, what God wants to say as we come to his letter.

The Real Jesus: More Than a Spiritual Concept

Because for John, he was known as the beloved disciple. And so faith in Jesus is about knowing that you're loved and being able to love others out of the love that you first received from God. Being in fellowship that is enabled by something real, something full, something free. So he writes as he opens the letter, that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at, and our hands have touched, this we proclaim concerning the word of life.

We've got a pile of verbs. I love to see puppy piles. I don't know if you get any content on your algorithm that shows you puppy piles, but I'm training mine to give me more piles of puppies.

And we might even get another puppy at my house one day soon. And then every time we have a stressful transition in life, we'll get another puppy, we'll have a whole pile of puppies.

John is giving us a pile of verbs so that we might see the kind of excitement and energy that is in his encounter with Jesus. Heard, seen, looked at, touched.

His gospel starts with the more measured kind of philosophical, in the beginning was the word, and the word was God. But here, this is puppy pile personal witness. I was there, John says, my hands touched him. I heard his voice with my own ears. Before the cross and after, I am reporting what I encountered.

And the rest of the book is a little bit puppy pile-esque, because it, unlike the gospel, doesn't do this kind of structured, here we go from one theme to the next, and something's kind of flowing through. But this is like kind of networks of ideas that keep coming back, or a spiral. So if you do have the time, or you make the time to read it in the booklet that we've produced, or in your own Bible, you'll see that he's kind of, he says the same thing, and then he moves slightly, and then he comes back. He's piling it all together so that we can really see the power of what it means to encounter Jesus.

Now, John was writing into a world that is not entirely, entirely unlike our own when it came to spirituality. There were fashions, you know. We've had various, in my nearly 50 years, fashions in spirituality.

And in John's time, the emerging fashion was inner spiritual knowledge that kind of put you in the elite. Gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge, and eventually that fashion would be called Gnosticism. You might have heard of the Gnostic Gospels.

They're written after the Bible was finished quite some time after, and they give a much more kind of esoteric or elite and otherworldly picture of Jesus. And the idea in this spiritual fashion was that the truly enlightened person rises above the messy physical world and attains a higher understanding, a kind of pure abstract spiritual knowing.

And the problem for these Gnostics, or for those that were starting to get into that fashion, was that the Jesus of the Apostles like John was too earthy, too bodily, too inconveniently historical, kind of too puppy pile, we touched, we heard, we saw real. For those who wanted this elite spiritual knowledge, they were thinking, well, maybe the real risen Christ is more of a spiritual principle.

Not a man who exists who got tired and hungry and wept at a tomb and had fish on the beach when he was risen. But John the Apostle will have none of it. Our hands touched him. The word of life became flesh, lived a human life, died a real death, rose in a real, if transformed, body. The point of Jesus is not a spiritual concept but to actually impact human life in a way that human life is only and always impacted. Real relationships, real encounter, real world.

Fellowship and the Call to Walk in the Light

So he says, we proclaim to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

This reality ought to lead to relationship. And that's the word fellowship in Greek, koinonia. I'm just showing off my Greek while I've got the chance. No, it's somebody else's work. Don't worry.

It's doing far more than our kind of English translations or use of the word fellowship means. So we often talk about, you know, we're going to have fellowship, which means having coffee in the hall.

But this could describe a business partnership or a marriage, a community, the kind of bond where two lives or more become genuinely shared with a purpose together. And John is saying that's what is being offered through the real Jesus Christ, living, died, risen again, alive today.

That's what's being offered, not a set of ideas, not something to admire from a distance, but participation in his own life. Real world, real relationship right now.

And the result of this fellowship, joy that is complete, complete, whole, full. It's part of the reason why I wanted to call this series Wholehearted, because this is the wholeness that God offers.

Not a perfectly successful life, not a guaranteed comfort life, not certainty necessarily about our futures, but a wholeness of real joy. A wholeness of heart, a wholeness of life that comes from being loved and being able to love without fear.

It's like the wholeness or the posture of a kid, and I long for my own to have this posture, who is so confident that whatever happens, family is there for them. They belong. They're never facing it alone.

This wholeness, this wholeheartedness is not automatic now that Jesus has come in the flesh and risen again. There is something that gets in the way of this fellowship, something that keeps people standing at the edge of the garden, admiring the raspberries but never eating them. So he writes, God is light. In him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth.

What is walking in darkness?

Earlier this week, Pope Leo was asked a question about the Church's moral priorities. And he said, we tend to think that when the Church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual.

And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women. I'm encouraged by the work that he is doing and the words that he is saying, particularly in opposition to violence and war and the abuse of power.

And I think it's right that, because when we often think about walking in darkness, we think about kind of hidden, grubby things. And we have a tendency to miss the vast landscape of what walking in darkness might actually look like for a world as well as for ourselves.

Absolutely, sexuality is one area in which God calls us to walk in the light. But walking in darkness can and does look like so much more than that.

And so vast is the landscape for myself. And I was thinking, OK, let's share something practical. I think it also looks like the injustice I participate in, without noticing or worse, noticing but being too comfortable to do anything about it.

Because I want to buy this or receive this, the systems I benefit from while others are crushed. It also looks like the pride that I sometimes have that I want to be the smartest person in the room.

It also looks like my greed, dressed up as financial prudence. My envy, dressed up as holy ambition. My exclusion of the vulnerable, dressed up as responsibility for my family.

It looks like bitterness held onto because letting go would feel like losing. Or it looks like patterns of gossip, pretending to be real critique because it's soothing to have people on your side.

It looks like the thousands of ways that I diminish other people. In my speech, in my assumptions, in my scrolling indifference to the suffering of the world.

And above all, it looks like my love of self over my love of God, again and again. Sometimes truly forgetting he's worth so much more than the way I've shaped my life to allow.

Now, there's much that I haven't included in that list. Much that I can't even admit to myself. Or much that I don't even know. Because not only do we sin, we deceive ourselves about it, right?

Verses 8 and 10. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. This is our risk. This is very possible.

You see, as we grow, we learn the skill of reframing our behavior until we appear innocent to ourselves. It's one of the most universal, most destructive features of human psychology. It's a moral problem, but it's a wholeness problem as well.

Studies show us that the experience of guilt and shame produce depression, anxiety, a kind of fracturing of the self. And if we don't have a way to face them and deal with them, well, our only option as human beings is to kind of construct these elaborate inner architectures to avoid feeling them, right?

So, reframing, rationalizing, blaming, repressing, punishing. But actually, these architectures that we build prevent us from feeling and experiencing the things that we really long for. We know we're not seen for who we are. We can't be truly known and loved by others because we've had to build these things and do these things so that we don't feel these things that are weighing us down.

So when God calls us into the light, he's doing it for our good. To live with real honesty will bring freedom. Owning our sin, our behavior, seeking to repair and restore with others, that actually gets us a long way down the path of life.

But to repair and restore with our creator and ourselves, well, how do we do that? Again, research shows that self-forgiveness is almost impossible to hold onto reliably. I don't know if you've ever been through that, I must, I gotta release this, I gotta forgive myself for this thing, and boy, it comes back.

We're asking ourselves to kind of simultaneously be the offender, the judge, and the partner. And this triangle is not something we can really hold. It keeps collapsing. We can't absolve ourselves and then let alone know exactly whether we're absolved by a God that we can't see.

The Advocate and the Ocean of Atonement

And so this is the good news that John wants us to encounter. Walking in darkness is not just moral wrong, it is a failure to be the creatures that we were made to be. It produces the very incompleteness, the very brokenness that continues to bring our world to the brink of collapse.

Jesus calls us to move into the wholeness of life, the light for which we were made. But he's not just an idea, he enables that to happen. Humans are called to holiness.

John says, my dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous one. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for the sins of the whole world.

We are called to grow in holiness. My list that I shared needs to shrink. That's part of what the Holy Spirit does, even without always me partnering with him, praise God.

But John is not pretending that perfection will come in this life. When we fail, and we will fail, we are not left stranded in a place of sin.

Now guilt and shame, I can say that list, knowing I am not cut off or left alone to deal with my darkness. I have an advocate.

Now this is the same language, advocate, that Jesus used in the farewell discourse that we looked at a couple of months ago. If you're new or visiting, you can jump back on our website, look at our Lenten series in John 14 to 17.

Jesus says, I'm an advocate, and I'm going to send another advocate. The word means the one called alongside. The Holy Spirit is the advocate sent from the Father and the Son.

And here, Jesus is called the advocate, because an advocate helps to achieve the best future for their client. They come alongside with the resources that are needed, particularly in a courtroom setting where a person is standing at a crossroads.

Will a person's life deteriorate into judgment and death? Or will the person's life move into freedom, forgiveness, and flourishing?

Jesus Christ is the one who God calls alongside us to bring all of God's own resources, righteousness, grace, power, forgiveness, to bring us into the light, a future of the light, and keep us there.

Now, he's also described as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Atonement, this word particularly is only used a couple of times in the New Testament, but it got its roots in the Old Testament, the day of atonement.

And on the day of atonement, there were two goats. One goat was sacrificed, killed. Its blood was carried into the most holy place and presented before God. If you were here to see the mobile tent palace, presented before God to symbolize the penalty for sin, death.

The other was called the scapegoat. You might know that word. We use it in English when you've kind of put something on someone else. Well, the scapegoat, the priest would put his hands on its head and sort of confess the sins of the whole nation, and then they would send it away, send it out into the wilderness.

And I mean, I hope it joined a lovely community of scapegoats that had been sent out every year. But who could say? Um, bring it back in. Two goats, one the sacrifice, one that removed the sins. And there are two words that we use to describe these things, propitiation and expiation.

Expiation, we don't actually use them very much in English anymore, but they are words that are kind of important in theology. Expiation is about a problem. You deal with it. So expiation is the scapegoat taking the sin, purifying the nation, taking them away, the sins away into the wilderness.

Propitiation is something that happens between two people. It's a relationship word. It's the restoration or reparation that you would make, or a penalty that you would pay for something, for wrongdoing. It's a justice word.

And so when we talk about atonement on the cross, the cross is doing all kinds of things, showing us the love of God, being victory over the powers of darkness, so much. But when we talk about the cross's atonement, these two things, the two goats are part of that. It's expiation and propitiation.

The sin is carried away and gone. Mine is gone, purified. John uses that word a lot. But it is also paid. The penalty for sin is also paid so that justice is truly done. In a single act, on a single afternoon, both things happen.

Now, this one over here is particularly easy to misunderstand. It's hard for us in such a clean and civilized world to think about penalty, punishment, and blood, and death.

It's important for us not to think of it as a transaction that happens between a wrathful, demanding father and a scared, obliging son so that God is divided within himself, and part of God must save us from another part of God.

The New Testament is absolutely clear. God so loved the world that he gave his only son. There was no part of God that hated you, that God needed to somehow stop himself from that feeling. God loves you.

But the work of Jesus, part of the Trinity, God's work in his son, is to enable us to enter that love without any injustice, without any penalty hanging over our head. God loved the world. He didn't need the work of Jesus to love you.

But the work of Jesus enables us to confidently enter and stay in that love. God can be both the one who is just and the one who justifies.

When God said to Adam in Genesis, here are all these wonderful provisions for you. I love you. Here is the garden. Eat, enjoy, be fruitful, and multiply. But don't eat from this tree. In the day you eat of it, you shall die. He was expressing something real about the way the universe is ordered.

Sin has penalty and consequence. The deep grain of reality is that creatures who turn away from the source of life will move inexorably towards death. So our sin sets us on a trajectory toward death. It's both a natural end of the journey, but it's also the justice end of the journey.

To declare us forgiven while leaving that undone doesn't help us. And it doesn't help those who experience wrongdoing and injustice in our world. A God who could simply overlook sin and say, it's OK. You're forgiven without doing any of this wouldn't be more loving. He'd actually be less trustworthy.

He offers nothing to the oppressed and the broken, those that long for evil to actually be dealt with. In this, the full weight of evil is seen. The full weight of sin is taken upon a sinless one. And so the forgiveness that comes from the cross is real and trustworthy, but it is not cheap.

It did not cost nothing. It didn't just go out into the wilderness to enjoy friends. It cost everything, and precisely so that we would see exactly the depths of God's love and holiness for always and ever, and actually be drawn to him.

How can you stand at the edge of the garden and go, ha, not today, when you know what has been given, the depths of what it took, and how greatly you have been freed?

And then John adds this. Not only for our sins, but also for the sins of the whole world. It's almost like he can't believe the scale of it.

I could do my ledger, and I've come to Jesus. OK, he's going to do that. He's going to do that. But what about the ones in the future? What about the ones I've forgotten? What if my Johari window, you can look that up, isn't big enough? There is enough.

Jesus' cross wasn't just big enough for the sins that I know, the sins that I've admitted. It wasn't just big enough for those who would actually believe. It was open to all. The atonement is not just limited to those who would put up their hand. The atonement is an ocean.

Whatever you have done, whatever you carry, whatever you've never shown to anyone, there is enough for you, for anyone who would come to him and receive. You need buckets of forgiveness. It never runs dry.

You know a whole neighborhood who you long to have his forgiveness and freedom. There is enough. Bring your bucket. Bring it again and again and again to the ocean of his atonement for the sins of the whole world, every background, every language.

But you do need to bring your bucket. You do need to step into the light. You do need to walk across and say, this is real, and I need you to bring me to the life that I long for.

Stepping Into the Light

Some of us have been carrying some guilt or shame for a long time, an old failure, and it's real, and it sits in the chest, and it won't move. And if you start to dismantle some of the scaffolding around it, it is just too ugly to look at. So you put it back. The advocate wants you to know that there is an ocean of forgiveness for you. You do not need to be paralyzed anymore. He can come alongside you, speak freedom and forgiveness, and you can walk alongside him into new ways of being in the world.

Some of us have been admirers of Jesus for years, maybe since you were born. You know about him. You are glad he exists. But maybe the question this morning is whether you've actually ever tasted him.

Whether that knowledge and admiration has become encounter, and whether the doctrine of forgiveness has become the experience of being forgiven, the doctrine of God's love has become the experience of being the beloved. And what would that look like?

It might look like walking into your garden or shutting the door of your room and actually pouring out your heart in prayer as imperfect as that will be. It might be saying, I'm not sure I've trusted that you're alive and that you have a plan for my life and things to say to me. Would you please help me to trust you? I trust you.

Maybe you have never actually said, I need you, and I need you to make me your child. Open the Bible and see. He might start to talk to you. He might put people in your path. He might show you how deeply you are loved in the Lord Jesus.

And of course, some of us here have had plenty of experience of the goodness of Jesus, but we keep forgetting that the harvest is there, that the fruit is ripe, that we're supposed to go over and eat, and we're putting it off for another day. The trajectory of wholeness that we were on might have slowed a bit, or our priorities have changed so that we've stopped giving our time and energy to delighting in the reality of Jesus, real world, real relationship.

And so maybe this morning, we're just being asked to acknowledge that, to confess our sins, to receive his forgiveness and re-establishment on this path, and to delight in the nourishment of God's word. Go home and read it. Listen to it. Lie in the sun and listen to it. That's what I did yesterday.

Expect that God will be moving. Expect him again to be in your home, in your workplace, in your life. Expect him again to be in our church. Expect that he has good things for you, good words for you, good works for you, and good gifts for you to share.

Taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. Amen.