WHEN WE READ A VERSE WITHOUT IT'S STORY

We challenge the common “confess then get forgiven” reading of 1 John 1:9 and show how context changes the meaning from a transaction to an agreement with what Christ already finished. We walk through a simple framework for reading Scripture honestly so we can live in the freedom of forgiveness rather than the fear of losing it.

• worship as participation rather than performance 
• stepping out in faith when the next step is unclear 
• why isolating verses creates a transactional mindset 
• comparing 1 John 1:9 with Paul’s “already forgiven” language 
• using immediate historical biblical and literary context to interpret Scripture 
• how 1 John addresses denial and spiritual elitism rather than anxious believers 
• confession as agreement with God rather than earning grace 
• light and darkness as truth and ignorance shaping fellowship and division 
• living from the finished work of Christ instead of constant spiritual restarting 
• coming home like the prodigal son and rejecting shame-based distance 

Take these verses. Learn, learn this. Read, you know, take take a few verses that you’re familiar with. Take a verse that you struggle with. And actually take that one simple verse and use this and look at the context of it.

Transcript

Worship As Participation

SPEAKER_00 0:01

One of the things that uh doing praise and worship this morning, that was just an awesome time. And as we said last week, you know, this is praise and worship is not a time for uh them to entertain us. It's a time for us just to step in to, you know, and praise God and and and give uh you know, ask, you know, talk to him about things that we got going on in our own life. You know, it's uh one of the things I kept hearing as I was praying during praise and worship is, and I don't think this is just for me or for this ministry, but I kept hearing step out in faith. Step out in faith. And, you know, we've all got areas in our life that that we want to see change in. We want to see uh, you know, things transition a little bit. And I believe sometimes we we uh it's easy to move forward when we see the answer out there in front of us, when we know, when we know what to do. But it's those times where we don't always see the answer, we don't always see what the next step's gonna be. And that's when he says step out in faith. And I'm telling you, that's that's something as a ministry that we're gonna continue to do. Uh I prophesied at the beginning of this year and said that uh the things that he's called for this ministry to do, uh I believe it. And I believe that we're gonna be out of this building by the end of this year. I'm gonna continue to stand on that. I don't always see how it's gonna happen. I don't see how the provision is gonna always come. But that's where the stepping out in faith comes at. Uh because I believe, I believe in what God says. I believe that He is uh, you know, He's not gonna go back on His word, and He knows that there's a plan, there's a purpose for us in this community. So uh stand in alignment with me on that. I know we got stuff in our personal life as well, continue to stand on that. But as a congregation, stand in agreement with us on what God is doing for this ministry and where we're headed to with it. So I'm excited about this this morning's word. Um last week we talked a little bit about forgiveness, and it really I didn't go as as far into it as I really wanted to for time's sake last week. And uh we come in Wednesday night, and uh Wednesday nights we come in and we just talk about whatever really. Usually it winds up going back to something we talked about on Sunday morning. So we sat there and we talked, had some questions, and we talked about what we uh brought up when uh Sunday morning, talking about forgiveness and what the Bible says about forgiveness and things like that. And some really good questions come up. I had something else I was gonna preach on. I told them Wednesday night I was what I was where I felt like I was going with the sermon, and uh God changed it. So uh, if you don't like this sermon this morning, uh you're gonna have to blame it on uh we're gonna put Miss Kim's phone number up here and you can text her about it because she asked a question Wednesday night that really stuck with me, and that's really where we're going this morning, and it ties into something we've talked about so many times in this in this church of what it means to truly look at things in the context of what the scripture actually says. And you can see the title here when we read a verse without its story. So many times we take verses and we pour and we isolate a verse out and we get out of it. A lot of times, let's just be honest, whatever we want to get out of it. We try to make that verse fit our situation and our circumstance. But what we got to do is we gotta go back and we gotta read these verses in context. And Wednesday night when we was talking about forgiveness, one of the main verses that uh is probably one of the most used verses in the Bible when you start talking about uh forgiveness is 1 John chapter 1, verse 9. And we started talking about that verse a little bit, and this is what it says, and then we're gonna go into it. But it says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Now, if you just read that verse, if you isolate that verse and pull it out and read it, it sounds pretty self-explanatory. It sounds pretty simple on what it's saying. But I want to challenge you this morning. We're gonna go into it. I want to challenge you this morning to open up your mind a little bit when we start looking at context and saying, you know, maybe this verse is not really meaning what we think it means. Because I can tell you, the first thing I've got a mind that just asks questions. And when I read that verse for what it actually says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins. Again, sounds pretty simple. And he will cleanse us from all unrighteousness. But the way my mind works, I read that verse and I say, okay, if we confess our sins, he'll forgive our sins and he'll make us righteous. So pretty much what you're saying is if we don't confess our sins, he will not forgive us of our sins and he will not make us righteous. I always look at the backside of it too, because I believe that's what we do when we go in and we start studying Scripture. We don't just take it for what we think it's always meant, but we dive in there, we pick it apart, we study it. Again, this may be one of the most quoted verses in the Bible, but it may be one of the most understood, misunderstood verses in the Bible. So the question I want to challenge you with this morning is what if the meaning of this verse changes when we read it within the context? Because again, pretty simple. Confess your sins, he'll forgive you of your sins. Confess your sins, and he'll make you righteous. Okay? Sounds pretty simple, but we're gonna dive into it. We're gonna make it, we're gonna pick it apart a little bit. We're gonna look at the context of it, because I'm I'm telling you this morning, when you look at the context of this verse, you will not have the same understanding of this verse that you probably have right now. So we usually run into problems when we isolate verses out. Again, many many look at this and say, confess my sins, God forgives me. Which creates what it really creates right there, and I use this word a lot, it creates a transactional formula. I do this, and God will do this. That's a transaction. Okay. You pay for something, you get delivery of something. That's a transaction. You pay money, you get a product. That's a transaction. That's what this verse comes down to if we look at it like that. If I do this, then God will do this. Confession, when we we we talk about it a lot, I want to look at it in the context of confession and forgiveness. How do we link those two things together? Because if you look at this verse again, it's pretty simple. If we confess, he'll forgive. Pretty simple. Here's a question I want you to also think about. Is forgiveness something God wants to give us until we say the right words? Is he holding back on that forgiveness? Is he just sitting there waiting on you to say the right thing, for you to come to the right church, for you to have the right experience and get to the right altar? Is he waiting on all that to align? And then when you do it, he says, Yes, now I can forgive them. I don't see it that way. So that's what we're gonna talk about a little bit. There's two verses right here that I want to start out with that I want you to see. Colossians uh chapter 2, verse 13. Look at what this verse says. And you being dead in your trespasses and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, he has made alive together with him. Look at here, this is this is what I want you to see. Having forgiven you all your trespasses. Some translations say has forgiven you of your sin.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Okay? That's important. Ephesians 1, verse 7. In him we have redemption through his blood.

Four Layers Of Bible Context

SPEAKER_00 8:57

The forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace. Now, both of those verses right there, Colossians 2, 13, and Ephesians 1 and 7, totally contradict my understanding of what it just said in 1 John. If I read 1 John as in, ask for forgiveness and then he forgives. Because these two verses are saying forgiveness already occurred. Forgiveness has already happened. I'm bringing these up, and there's many more verses. I just brought these two because they're common verses. The reason I'm saying that is because anytime we read scripture and we read and we get an understanding of like we do in 1 John, and then we read Colossians and Ephesians, and it seems to contradict each other. We need to ask the question, what's going on here? The word is not contradicting itself. The word is not coming back and say, well, this must not have been the truth because this is something totally different. What it should do is it should push us to say, where am I missing this at? Because I know and I believe the word does not contradict itself. So if one or two verses in the Bible is saying we've already received forgiveness, he's already forgiven us through the blood of Christ, but then another verse says you'll only be forgiven when you ask for it, that seems like a contradiction. Maybe it's me, maybe it's the way my brain works. But to me, that sounds like a contradiction. Paul speaks of forgiveness as something that's already accomplished in Christ. All through the world. Anytime you read Paul's words, he always talks about forgiveness as being something that's already been accomplished. It was accomplished on the cross. Paul speaks of forgiveness as a finished work, already complete, already done. 1 John seems to make forgiveness conditional. What's it conditional on? It's conditional on what you say. It's conditional on your words. You'll only get forgiveness if you ask for it. When you speak it, when you confess it, then you'll get forgiveness for it. That's conditional. That difference should force us to look a little deeper. It should force us to say something's not lining up, something's not, don't seem to make sense here. I want to get in there and find out what I am missing in these verses. So before we go deeper into 1 John 1 and 9, and that's going to be the one we really dig into this morning, we need to understand something important about how we read the Bible. We've talked about this many times, but this is going to be an example this morning of not just hearing a sermon preached, but now taking the information, taking a verse and saying, how do we make it practical? How do we take and read a verse in context and be sure that we're not just isolating it out and putting our own meaning onto it like we do so often. The Bible was not written as a collection of isolated verses. It was written as letters, it was written as stories, it was written as teachings to real people during a real time that was going through real situations. So when we take a single verse without understanding its context, we can easily misunderstand what the writer was actually trying to say in it. And I can tell you from experience, there's a lot of verses that I read, and a certain meaning, a certain understanding was passed down to me, and I've just always thought, well, that's gotta be right because that's what everybody always says. But then when I got in there and started reading the verse within context, it changed everything. I'm not gonna ask if you remember this because I might get my feelings hurt. But a while back, I preached on what context in the Bible actually is, and I come up with this little silly phrase. The Bible tells us that we're to be the light of the world, right? So I come up with this little thing. I'm his biblical light. And if you can remember that phrase, I'm his biblical light. What happens here is we now begin to start looking at the way we look at context.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

Immediate. Literary.

SPEAKER_00 13:57

So when you start looking at it from a verse, any verse, from an immediate context, historical context, biblical context, and a literary context, it starts to make more sense to me. I've got to ask those questions. What does it mean? What does immediate context mean? When you look at a verse, you've got to ask yourself, what comes before that verse? For instance, we're going to look at 1 John chapter 1, verse 9. What comes before that verse and what comes after that verse? I can't just pour that one verse out. I've got to look at before and I've got to look at after. So what comes before and after the verse? Because when we understand that a verse is part of a whole paragraph in the Bible, and a paragraph is part of a larger thought that the writer was trying to put out there. If we remove a sentence from the paragraph, we might completely miss what the writer is trying to tell us in it. We've got to understand the whole context of it. So, what does historical context mean?

SPEAKER_01 15:11

Think about the history.

Reading 1 John Around Verse 9

SPEAKER_00 15:13

What was happening in that area, in that region? What was happening in that church that he was writing a letter to? If he was writing a letter to the Colossian church, what was happening in the Colossian church at that time? What was happening in whatever area that he was writing these letters to? Something might have been going on that we need to be aware of. Every book of the Bible was written to real people dealing with real situations and real circumstances. If we don't understand what those issues were, we might assume the author was saying something that really he never said. And we turn that thing around and now we start taking something out of it, like all of us has done, we start taking something out of it that was truly not there in the Bible. I can't tell you how many times I've heard verses. And now because I've dove into context and I understand what context means, and when somebody says something, I almost cringe sometimes. And I don't mean that in a mean way because I used to teach the same stuff. But now that I've dove a little deeper into it, I understand the context of the verse. And it's almost, you know, you're sitting there and you're hearing somebody teach it a different way, and you're like, you know, what are the people thinking? What are they getting out of this? There's so much more into it that we can go. So you got immediate, you got historical, you got biblical context. How does this verse, biblical, how does this verse line up with everything else that's in the Bible? What do I mean by that? Think about it. We always make the uh comment that scripture should always interpret scripture. Okay? My tradition doesn't interpret scripture. My opinion does not interpret scripture. Scripture will always interpret itself. So if there he's writing something here in 1 John, or let's just say you hear read something in Matthew. And we know that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, there's a lot of the same stories in there, but they sound a little different because they're written by different people in different time periods. But it's the same stories that they're talking about. So if I read something in Matthew that's very specific, and then I go over to John and I'm reading it, it may have some different language in it, but the point of what's being said should be the same. It can't change. Why? Because Scripture is interpreting Scripture. So we got to look at the biblical context of it, how this verse fits with the rest of Scripture. The Bible is one story told through many books. So when we interpret a verse, we should ask how it fits. If Scripture says something here, can I go to another book in the Bible and get the same thing out of it? That means it's interpreting itself. And then the last one, real quick. I'm going through this really quick and then we're gonna break a verse down a minute. Literary. What type of writing is it? The one where people really get messed up and they take the literary, they just totally forget about the literary context, is Revelation. Revelation is not a scary book. Revelation was actually written to be the revelation of Jesus Christ. But when most people read the book of Revelation, they say it's a scary book, it's a hard book. You know why it's hard? Because it's the way it's written with a lot of allegory in it, a lot of symbolism in it. And we're trying to read it from a standpoint of saying, boom, this is what it really says. We're trying to read it from that standpoint, and we start looking at dragons and all that kind of stuff in there, and we're like, what in the world is this talking about? You cannot read, you've got to realize that there is symbolism in there. And that dragon is not talking about some animal flying around with wings blowing fire out of his mouth. He is representing, he is a representative of something else. When we understand that context, Revelation is not a hard book. Really simple book, actually, if you understand the context of it. So when we look at the literary, we have to ask ourselves, how was this, how was it written? Was what I'm reading written as a story? Was it written as a letter of correction? How was it written? Was it written as poetry? We got to understand that. Each style communicates in different ways. And when we understand the style that each book is written in, then it starts to bring context into it. So if we look at, again, 1 John chapter 1, verse 9. Let me read this verse to you one more time because I want you to see it. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Now you could take that verse, isolate it out, don't give any other verses with it, and ask any Christian what that verse means, and they're going to tell you that if I confess my sins, then he will forgive me of my sins. Which in my mind ultimately means if you fail to confess, you're not forgiven. I mean, that's just the way my mind works. That's pretty much what it's saying. If you do it, you'll get this. But if you don't do it, you won't get this because it's a transaction. That's the way we read it, is a transactional verse. So let's look at it from an immediate context. And it's really good to go back and read the whole chapter before and after this, but we don't have time for that. So I'm just going to go into one, I'm going to go into chapter 8, I mean verse 8, and then we're going to go to verse 10. The one before it and the one after it. So look at 1 John 1 and 8. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. And the truth is not in us. Now let's go to verse 10. A minute. Look at what it said. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar. And his word is not in us. Some pretty tough verses if you isolate that out by itself. I want to stop right here though. I want you to. I just caught this. I want you to see it.

SPEAKER_01 22:25

If we say that we have not sinned, normally if you look at me and I say, I ain't got no sin in my life, you might look at me and say, You a liar.

Confession Means Agreeing With God

SPEAKER_00 22:38

That ain't what this verse says. It says, if you say you have not sinned, you don't make yourself a liar. We make him God a liar. I ain't got time to go into that today. That's another sermon. But I'm telling you, that's important right there. You are not making yourself a liar by saying that. You are making God a liar by saying that. That's scripture. There's a lot of deep meaning in that, that one little word right there. Okay? But we'll jump into that later. So looking at verse 8 and looking at verse 10. Who is John correcting right here? He's correcting people. He's saying something to them and saying, okay, y'all are off base right here, and I've got to bring some correction to you. He's not correcting sinners who have not confessed enough. He's correcting people claiming they have no sin in their life. Okay? Now many scholars believe he was addressing, and if you go back and study this out, he was addressing Gnostic teaching at that time. Go back and study out that word Gnostic, and you'll be amazed at how much understanding it'll bring to this group of verses right here. The Gnostic teaching at that time was pretty much that they believed that they were spiritually perfect. It was a group of people who believed that because of the understanding and the wisdom and the knowledge that they had, that they were far superior than anybody else, than the rest of the Christians. They were on a different level. They believed that salvation came through special spiritual knowledge. Didn't come through Christ. It came through special spiritual knowledge. Only certain people had a deeper spiritual enlightenment. Every Christian didn't have this. Only this group of people had it. They also did not believe that Jesus actually came down in bodily form. There's a lot of things in there when you go and you study out what the Gnostics believed that would blow your mind. This created a spiritual class, an elite class that thought they were better than everybody else. And they were going around to the churches and they were teaching the Christians in the churches that this is a level that you'll never get to. Only we have this level of knowledge. You can't have it. You're just a little old Christian. We're the elite. And John heard about this. Word got to him that this was going on in the church. So he comes back and he begins to teach. And it's amazing. Even if you start off in uh 1 John verse 1, the very first verse in the chapter. Now that you know what I just told you about what was going on, look at verse 1 and look at what it says. That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled concerning the word of life. Now, why is that important? He was starting out the very first verse, telling them Christianity is not about some secret knowledge. It is about the real historical person of Jesus. The one we've seen, the one we've heard, the one we've touched. He's pretty much in one verse shooting down everything that they're talking about. Because they're saying salvation and all this comes through the knowledge that they have. It got nothing to do with Jesus. It's the knowledge that they have. So he's shooting it down straight from the first verse. If you don't understand the context of that, it don't make no sense. But when you understand what these people were saying, who they were, what they were teaching to the people, and then John comes on the scene and says, uh-uh. He breaks it down to them. That's why those verses that we just read a while ago, uh back in 8 and 10, makes more sense when you understand who he was talking to. The meaning of confess, we talk about this all the time. This is where it really matters at. This is where understanding what confession, the true definition of confession, it does not mean getting on my knees and telling God every bad thing I've ever done. Now, if you feel the need to do that, great. There's nothing wrong with it. But that's not what confession is. Confession is not going to a Catholic church, sitting in a booth and telling the Father that I just committed a sin. That is not what confession is. That's admittance. I'm admitting to something, but confession by its definition is homo legal in the Greek, in the way it was written. And when you break that word down, homo legal, homo means same. Boom. Legao means language. So when I'm confessing something, I am speaking the same language. I am in agreement with what God is saying. I'm saying the same thing that he said. I'm not in disagreement with him. Okay? These folks right here that I just talked about, the Gnostics, they were in total disagreement with what Christ had already said. They were not in agreement with him. So that's why John's coming back now saying, confess, agree with what Christ said, not what these crazy fools are teaching you. We want to agree with what Christ said. So that's the very first word. Confess your sins. Agree to, agree with, come into agreement with. That's why that word is so important. And there's so many verses where that word confess is in there, and when we take that word out of its meaning and out of its context, the verse doesn't make any sense to us. So when a verse don't make sense to me, what do I usually do? I apply my own understanding and knowledge to it. And usually it's what somebody's taught me down the line. And then one day I'll come back in the Bible and look at it and say, you know, that don't make any sense to me. That's because I put tradition ahead of context. Context matters, it has to come first. So Christ dealt with sin decisively at the cross. There was no question about it. Humanity has been reconciled in Him. But we experience that reality as we live in the light of truth. He reconciled. I told you this many times. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Okay? So the reconciliation has already occurred. The bringing back into relationship, that's what reconcile means, to bring back into relationship, into unity. That's already occurred on the cross. But just because it occurred on the cross don't mean we're walking in it. You know, you can know what truth is, but still walk in a lie every day. So our goal is to walk in light, to walk in knowledge, to walk in truth. So being dead to sin does not mean we pretend that sin no longer exists. We know sin exists, and when we're talking about sin, we are not talking about behavioral things. I'm talking about a distorted image of myself. Any thought that I have that is opposite of what God has already said about me, that's sin. He says one thing about me, and then I come over here and I look in the mirror and I say something totally opposite. That's sin. It's a distorted image in the way I see myself. And if I wake up every day, look in the mirror and see myself as nothing, see myself as nobody, see myself as a failure, then what behavior is going to come out of that? Bad behaviors. The problem is we call the behavior sin. It ain't the behavior, it's the thought process and the image that I have. And then out of that comes behaviors that line up with it. That's why he says to repent, to change your thinking. Because when I repent and I change the way I think, and I see myself as a child of God, I see myself as forgiven. I see myself as redeemed. I see myself as he sees me. Now I don't have to work on changing behavior. I change the thought process, and the behaviors begin to line up.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

You're gonna act out what you think. Okay?

SPEAKER_00 32:19

You're always gonna act out what you think. So it's not always about changing what I'm doing, I've got to change the way I think about myself. So if you go to the historical context of that verse, and you start saying, What was the historical context of what was going on? And I've done told you, I've done really told you about what was going on, but ask yourself the question: what was going on in this region, in the church, in this area during this time? John wrote this letter near the end of the first century. The church was facing a lot of problems during this time. And as I said earlier, teachers were claiming they had a special knowledge that put them in a higher class than everybody else. They had, they felt like they had moved beyond sin. They were just this elite, you couldn't touch them. And that's what they were trying to teach people. John's letter repeatedly combats this idea. He he comes against them all the time. And notice the repeated phrase. If you read through that, he keeps saying, if we say, if we say we have not sinned, if we say we have not done this, if we say, that's the phrase he's using. He's quoting their claims.

SPEAKER_01 33:45

Think about that just a minute. So John's not giving a formula on how to be forgiven.

Gnostics Light Darkness And Fellowship

SPEAKER_00 33:54

What he's doing is he's confronting spiritual denial. This group of people, and you might say, well, he was talking to the church there. No, he wasn't. He was talking to a group of elite people who thought they were better than everybody else and were on a different level than the church was. That's context. If I think he's talking to a church, then my understanding of that verse is we just need to confess and then he'll forgive me. He wasn't talking to a church. He was talking to a group of elite people who thought they knew everything, who thought they were beyond the church, and he was telling them, you need to confess. You need to come into agreement with what God has already said. So the historical context makes a huge difference. And then the last one right here, literary. And I showed you this while ago, but I want you to see this again. This is pretty crazy. And it's in the it's in the letter that John wrote here. We use this verse as as a how to verse. How to be forgiven. But look at what verse in this verse in 1 John chapter 2, verse 12 says. So that really, that one verse right there in verse 12 totally changes the way we read verse 8. I mean, verse 9. Verse 9 says, do this and you'll get this. Well, in verse 12, he says, You already got it. So either John's a little bit schizophrenic here and don't can't make up his mind, or that we're misreading scripture. So we need to be honest. It's okay to be wrong. It's okay to say, you know, for the last 20 years, this is what I thought this verse said. But you know, the more I dug into it, the more I read, and the more I got context, I'm okay with admitting I've been misreading that verse. I've been misunderstanding that verse. It's okay. Because now that I've admitted that, I can move forward with the truth now. Or I can keep teaching that and keep putting more people in bondage that I've been in for the last 20 years. And the key is to bring people into the knowledge of Jesus Christ, not bondage. And that's bond, that can be bondage. Because if I don't recognize what this verse 12 is telling me that I'm already forgiven, then I live my life thinking I gotta keep doing something to be forgiven. But he's saying right here to the church folks, he said, You've already, you've already got it. You're already there. I write to you because your sins have been forgiven. Not will be, but have been. So John clearly believes forgiveness has already been accomplished. That means verse 1 and 9, verse 9 cannot be a transactional verse. That totally destroys verse 9 being a transactional verse. If we already have something, and I already possess it, then there's nothing I have to do to get it. So, and then you gotta say, well, what does confess mean then? Well, we just said what confession means. Agree with. So I'm not confessing, telling all my dirty deeds so that he'll forgive me of it. I'm confessing, I'm agreeing with what's already been done. The literary context of 1 and 9 is crucial because it helps us see why the verse is structured the way it is, and why so many people misread it as transactional instead of relational. He's trying to get back into relationship with us. He's not trying to tell us we need to do something to get closer to him. He's saying, I'm already with you, but sometimes your thinking moves you away. I'm trying to bring you back into this relationship and let you know that I've always loved you. Let you know that I've always been there for you. You're not trying to get to me, you're not trying to win my love. I've always loved you. I've loved you so much that I sent my son to the cross. So it's not something you're trying to earn. It's something you already have, but you gotta open your eyes up to it. You gotta be able to see it. So when you look at the literary, it's all it's it's actually throughout the whole chapter here. John is quoting and using classic Greek rhetorical style Greek language all through this scripture.

SPEAKER_01 39:55

He's quoting the claim that the Gnostics were making, and then he's debunking it with truth. He's saying, This is what you're saying. But here's the truth. Kind of what Jesus done all through the word. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

Many people read verse one and nine as a magical formula. Confess, get forgiveness. Confess, get forgiveness. That's the way we read it. But the literary context shows John is debunking a false claim that these people are making about themselves. He's showing a pattern of darkness versus light. And if you read this whole chapter, you'll see where what I'm talking about there. Because there's many times he talks about darkness and light in there. Remember, darkness, if you go back and look at those words darkness and light in the Greek, and this was written in Greek, so we have to understand a little bit about the Greek language. Darkness means ignorance. Ignorance means I don't know. Don't mean stupid, don't mean dumb. It just means I don't know. There's some things, if you tell me to do, I'm gonna tell you I'm very ignorant in that area because I don't know how to do it. I don't know. So darkness represents ignorance. Light represents knowledge and truth. So when you read those verses in there, and he's talking about darkness and light, he's not talking about a light bulb. He's talking about understanding versus lack of understanding. These people, these Gnostics, had a lack of understanding. They were walking in darkness. And they were trying, excuse me, they were trying to get the people to walk in darkness because they were telling them that it wasn't because of Christ that you're saved. You're only saved when you get to this level of understanding that we're at. And y'all ain't there. That's what they was pretty much saying to them. Only we are there.

SPEAKER_01 42:02

So when you look at it, they were preaching ignorance and lack of understanding.

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So when John came along, he said, No, we're not gonna keep teaching that foolishness. We've got to confess, we've got to agree with what God has already said. That's where we're going back to. And then he started repeating after them, but he started quoting their claim to them. If we say we have not sinned, and then he comes back and he debunks it. Okay.

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So John had a purpose in what he was doing and how he was doing it. Look back at what it says earlier in the chapter, 1 John verses 1, or chapter 1, verse 7. Look what it says in verse 7 just a minute. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.

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And the blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanses us from all sin. Now, based on what I just told you right there about the understanding and the definition of light and darkness, read this verse from that understanding. Light equals knowledge, light equals truth. But if we walk in the truth, if we walk in the knowledge, as he is the truth, he tells us in other places, I am the way, the life, and the truth. No one comes to the Father but through me. He is the truth. So he's going back, and what is John doing here? He's just confessing again what's already been said before. He is agreeing with. He's saying Jesus is the lie. He is the truth. He is the knowledge. So if we walk in that knowledge as He is that knowledge, then we have fellowship with one another. But if you allow these crazy fools to come in here and teach that stuff they're teaching, then what's it going to do?

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It's going to start dividing people.

Finished Work Grace And The Gospel

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But if you walk in the truth, you walk in fellowship with one another. He was bringing the church back together. And these other folks was trying to come in and divide and separate and say, you're not good enough and you're not on our level and you're not like us. And then they started denying Christ himself. They denied, they actually denied the incarnation of Christ. They did not believe that Jesus actually came in the flesh. That goes against everything Jesus taught. So that's why he had to come in and speak these things. So confession is about honesty. Confession is not about earning grace or earning anything, it's about being honest with what God has already said and repeating it and agreeing to it and coming into agreement with it. So what is the real meaning of this verse? You could summarize it like this. John is not saying God forgives us when we confess. He is saying that when we live honestly before God, we experience the cleansing that Christ has already accomplished.

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This is still going back to the finished work. What's already been done.

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Confession is not the cause of forgiveness, it is the experience of living in the light of it, living in the knowledge, living in the truth of it. This is why context matters. We say that all the time, and I know some people just say, man, I'm tired of him saying that. But context matters. That's why, and I don't mind saying this, that's why the way we teach some verses, there's other people that will call me a heretic. There's other people that would say, what I'm saying is from the pits of hell. What I'm saying is a lie. Just because I'm going about reading it in context and it contradicts their understanding of it. Now that don't mean that I can't still be wrong on my understanding of it. I'm learning every day. I'm going deeper every day on it. I may come back next week and say, hey, let me show you what God showed me on this verse. And it goes a little bit deeper. I don't think we can exhaust God. I don't think we can exhaust his knowledge. We're not going to get like these Gnostics thought they were, where we're just at this point where you have reached the ultimate place of knowledge.

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I don't think we'll ever get there. And I think when you think you're there, somebody like John needs to come in and put you back in your place. Because that's what he did.

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But we get looked at like we're crazy for doing this. I mean, look at this. Most Christians would totally deny the way I just interpreted that verse. Alright, they would deny the way I just interpreted that verse. But if you take it and you break it down with context, you can't deny what's being said here. Why? Because it makes more sense that you know why John was speaking to him, who John was speaking to, why he was saying it. When you start looking at all that and bringing that into context, now you understand why he was using the language he was using.

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Look at what happens when we read a verse without context.

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Again, confession, God forgives. With context, Christ forgave. Confession is agreeing with the truth. So I'm not going to look at somebody and say, oh, you're wrong. No, it ain't about right or wrong. It's just about context. Am I truly understanding what I'm reading in there? Now there's nothing wrong. If you want to say, I'm just going to agree with God as saying that if you confess, that He'll forgive.

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Nothing wrong with that. Only thing is, people's going to keep living with a mindset that they're not forgiven yet. That's it.

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And to me, that's hurting them. I would rather live in a place of knowing that what he did on the cross was totally 100% sufficient for me. And that I received it. I'm not waiting on it one day when I walk through the pearly gates and all of a sudden it's going to fall upon me.

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I want it now. There's knowledge that I don't need in heaven. There's knowledge I need now.

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There's things I need to understand now. I need to walk in now. Not one day in the buy and buy. So I want to understand when he's talking about things that we already have possession of. I want to take possession of it. Again, nothing wrong with somebody else wants to be a futuristic person and say, one day I'll get it. But why not live with it now? That's why we say heaven here, heaven now. We can have heaven on earth. We can have heaven in our life now.

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And you can have hell in your life now if you choose to. You ain't got to wait until you die. You can experience hell in your life right now or heaven. It's up to us. But a lot of it is determined on how we understand these scriptures. What we're going to receive.

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See, because when you say confession, God will forgive, or Christ forgave, confession is already there, and I agree with it. That's two different gospels. If you tell me that confession, if you confess your sins and God will forgive you is the gospel, I'm going to have to argue that with you. Because that ain't the gospel. That ain't good news. Gospel means good news. The good news is Christ forgave you on the cross. The good news is that if you confess, if you agree with it, you can walk in this truth right now. That is good news to me. That is good news to somebody who's been living their life of hell. Somebody who's been struggling. Somebody who's been beat down and their life has just been a wreck. To tell them that, well, you can get it one day or you can have it now.

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Which one's good news? Now.

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So when we talk about the gospel, that's my only concern with teaching this in a different way. Teach it the way you want to teach it, but don't call it the gospel. Because the gospel is good news.

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So here's the big picture.

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God's not waiting for the perfect confession before he shows grace. The cross already revealed the heart of God.

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Our role is not to convince God to forgive me.

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And I can tell you, that's the attitude that I had used to have toward coming to an altar. Nothing wrong with the altar experience. Nothing. But the mindset that I had toward it was if I get up there and I cry enough and I feel bad enough about myself and I tell him everything I've done, then he will forgive. He'll feel so bad for me, he'll forgive me.

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That's the mindset that I had. And that's what I've done for years.

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I would do something stupid on Saturday night and then run to the altar Sunday morning. Because I had to tell him I was sorry for what I'd done.

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Nothing wrong with that, that. But we can't call that gospel.

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That's an apology. I've done something stupid, I've done something crazy, I've done something out of character, I've done something I regret, and I'm gonna come to the altar and I'm gonna just tell God I'm sorry. That's an apology. Nothing wrong with that. But it's not a confession. Confession is agreeing with what he's already said. So confession doesn't twist God's arm and try to make him forgive me. Confession simply opens our eyes to the forgiveness that's already there, that he's already given us. Let me leave you with one question as we close. And I hope this will provoke you to think. That's always my goal. Since I started being a pastor, that's always been my goal, is to provoke people to think a little bit differently. What if the Christian life is not about convincing God to forgive you again and again and again and again and again, and we can keep going because we all mess up, we all do crazy stuff, we all think crazy thoughts. But what if it's not about convincing him to forgive us, but learning to live in the forgiveness that he's already accomplished?

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Learning to live in the forgiveness that he's already given us. It's already there.

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What if confession is not a transaction that restarts your relationship with God every time you fall and stumble? But simply stepping back into the light and agreeing with the truth. That's why I don't downplay making mistakes. But it's just my belief system puts me in this place of saying, guess what? When I make a mistake, when I fall, when I stumble, guess what? I'm gonna get back up. I'm gonna dust myself off and I'm gonna step back into who I know I am. I don't have to, I don't have to quit coming to church for three months because I'm scared that God's gonna strike me down when I walk in. I tell you how many people ain't in church this morning because they're scared to walk through the doors.

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Because they know they've been doing something they don't feel good about, and they are scared to come into the building because they got so much conviction on them. That's not what God wants for us.

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I mean, how many times did you push your child away when they wanted to come up and give you a hug after they'd done something wrong? You might have whipped them, but then you hugged them.

Prodigal Son Coming Home Again

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You might have whipped them, but you never stopped loving them. He just wants us to come back to him.

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Realize, hey, that's not who I am, like Paul said. Sometimes I, you know, Paul would make mistakes and he said, but then I'd stand up and recognize that's not me. Prodigal son doesn't that. He said, that's not me. He came to himself and said, Dad, this is not me. I don't belong in a pig pen. I don't belong over here in this place wasting all my inheritance. I belong in daddy's house. And he got up and he went back. Now he still didn't have a good understanding of who he was because he still tried to convince Daddy to just let him back in as a servant. But before he could even finish his sentence, Daddy says, Shut up, son, you my son. He threw the coat on him and he gave him the ring and he threw him a party. And everything that that son represented, Dad gave right back to him. Because even though in his mind he wasn't worthy, Daddy said, You never stop being a son. Even in the midst of everything he was doing, you was still a dirty son, but you were still my son. And he let him back in. And that's a whole nother sermon, but why did the older brother get mad? You know, the other brother got mad and said, You didn't do this for me. And what did he tell him? He said, because you've never, you've always had it. Everything I have has always been yours. So why do I have to give it to you? Why do I have to give something to you that belongs to you to begin with?

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He didn't understand that.

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John tells us something again, and we quoted a while ago, verse 7. If we walk in the light, the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin. Notice he doesn't say it will cleanse us one day. If you stay in the light long enough. It's present, it's ongoing, it's already flowing from the finished work of Christ. So maybe the invitation of the Christian life is not to live in constant fear that we've fallen out of God's grace.

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There's a lot of Christians that live like that. We've done something bad enough that we've fallen. We even created a word for we call it backsliding. Backslid. And then we try to figure out how do we get back in his good graces. Real simple, just come home. Just come home. He was always a son.

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So maybe the invitation is not to live in that constant fear, but to live in the freedom of knowing we are already embraced by it. It's already ours. Maybe confession is simply the moment when we stop pretending, stop hiding, stop denying, and step back into the light, into the truth of what's already true about us. And the question we should all wrestle with is this what would change in my life? This is personal to each one of us. What would change in my life if I truly believed that the cross of Christ was enough?

How To Study Any Verse

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If I truly believe that, how does it change my thinking? Now I said catch that, I said it was truly not just about enough, not temporarily enough. It was enough. Completely finished. Because if the cross really is finished, then the Christian life is no longer about earning forgiveness, it's about walking in it, it's about awakening to it, knowing it's already been done, and learning to live every day in the light of a grace that was already given. How would that change us? How would that change the way we see scripture?

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This was just one verse. One simple verse that I pulled out because it came up Wednesday night. And Kim asked the question Wednesday night. She brought that verse. We were having a good conversation about this, and Kim brought this verse up. Because when you just read it by itself, you're like, ooh, that sounds like it contradicts everything we've just said. And it does. It sounds like it. And exactly what I told her Wednesday night. We didn't go deep into it, but I said, until you see it in context, until you understand who he was speaking to, what was going on, and all this kind of stuff, until you understand that, it's easy to just believe that's a transactional verse. But when you understand everything that was going on and you start looking and saying, immediate, historical, biblical, literary, and I it's hard to remember all that. That's why I said, I'm his biblical light. I H B L, I'm his biblical light. If you can understand that, that's the way I have to do it because I can't, my mind don't always remember this stuff. But when I create little things for it, now I can read a verse and I'll say, okay, my first thought when I read that verse is what is the immediate context in this verse? What is happening before and what is happening after? And then I go down and I, what is the historical? What was going on? Who's he talking to first? And what was going on in that area, in that region that caused him to write a letter?

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What was the biblical context of it?

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How does this verse align with other verses in other places in the Bible? In the literary, what style was it written in?

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If this is a book where it's written in you know something different like Revelation, I have to understand that.

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You know why? Because you're trying to take a book with a bunch of symbolism and you're trying to read it literally. Of course, it's going to be confusing. Because your mind's trying to figure out are dragons real? I mean, were they really dragons flying around? No, dragons represented the church. He was talking about the churches in that time. And the dragon was representative of that. It wasn't animals flying around in the sky. But if my mind goes to dragons, I'm like, forget this. This don't even make sense. And I don't even want to read it no more. But when you understand the literary writing of how it was written, you start realizing that revelation was about Jesus. It's not about the end times, it's not about the Antichrist.

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Yes, those words are in there, but it's the revelation of Jesus Christ. I'll probably say this, I don't know how many more times.

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Context matters. Context actually matters. If you read it out of context, there's no telling what understanding and interpretation that you're going to get out of it. And that's fine. There's plenty of verses we read wrong all the time. But if I can come to the knowledge and an understanding of what the truth is of that scripture, what was God really intending? What was He really trying to say? That's what I want. Why? Because now I'm walking in truth. Now I'm walking in light and knowledge. So why not have that? Why keep reading something the same way, even though I know it's not accurate just because I don't want to let go of tradition.

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Can I just be that that is dumb to me? That you are so held on to tradition that tradition will supersede truth. That's dangerous. And it's hurting people. So that's why I say we are. What we're teaching, it's not we're not heretics.

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What I would challenge most people that call us that to go and do is actually look it up for themselves. And they would see that really what we're teaching aligns with what the first century church taught. So it's not new. I've heard people look at what I said and said, oh, you're teaching a new age stuff. They say new age, this is original. This is going back to what the people in the first, second, and third century church actually taught. And there's things that we're teaching our church today that you will not find in the first century teaching. It's not there. And I struggle with that. I'm like, okay, why didn't they teach it? Why are we teaching something that they never taught? We're missing something. And it's simply because we read it all out of context. And we threw all this stuff in there.

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And it's when you go back to the original context of the Bible, it's not there. Take these verses.

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Learn, learn this. Read, you know, take take a few verses. Take a few verses that you're familiar.

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With.

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Take a verse that you struggle with. And actually take that one simple verse and use this and look at the context of it.