Complete

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

Complete, as in nothing left out, nothing lacking, nothing still missing. And John is convinced that what he's testifying to and proclaiming can actually do that in our lives. Because what he's inviting us into is the life that was from the beginning. And he says that that life can do what nothing else can in our lives.

The background of this letter

But first, as we begin this series, I think it's important that we don't rush past some of the background realities of this letter, because everything that follows in the rest of this letter is grounded in what we understand here at the outset in this prologue, and even about the background of this letter.

And one of the first and most obvious things that stands out is this letter doesn't introduce itself in the way that we might expect it to. There's no formal greeting here. There's no named recipients. It simply starts. Technically speaking, this is an anonymous letter.

And yet the early church spoke with remarkable clarity and unity that this is a letter from the apostle John, the son of Zebedee, the one who in his own gospel, the gospel of John, refers to himself not by name, but as the disciple whom Jesus loved. And you can hear that that's the case as soon as you begin reading this letter. It's simple, it's pastoral, it's centered on these ideas of light and love and truth, themes that are so similar to the gospel of John and to John's other letters, 2nd and 3rd John and even the book of Revelation.

Yet at the time that John wrote this letter, he wasn't leaning on Jesus at the Last Supper anymore. But now he was decades removed from those events, writing with a pastoral urgency as an aged apostle to a church that he found that was in danger. Tradition tells us that John likely spent the later years of his life in Ephesus, a city that we have a letter written to in our New Testament. And it's most likely from there that he wrote this letter. sometime between 85 AD and 85 100.

And that actually places, along with John's other letters, among the oldest writings that we have in the New Testament, or latest writings, excuse me, some of the latest writings in the New Testament. Which means that we're interacting here with theology that's been lived, tested, preached, and even defended over decades that have passed since Christ's ascension.

And one reason that John writes is because false teaching had begun spreading in the early church. Particularly teachings from a group called the Gnostics, who denied important teachings about who Jesus really was. Some denied his full deity, while some denied his true humanity. And John understands that when you distort who Christ is, you begin to unravel the very gospel itself. As if Jesus is not truly God, then he can't truly save. But if he's not truly man, then he cannot stand in our place. Everything is at stake in these questions.

John wrote to confront these errors, to expose them and to guard the church against them. But that's not John's only purpose here. In fact, you can make the argument that that's not even his primary emphasis. More than anything else, this is a letter to encourage believers, to encourage the church, to steady them, to anchor them, and to give them assurance, a key word in this letter, assurance in the midst of confusion. You can hear that purpose woven throughout the whole letter, and maybe most clearly in the purpose statement of the book, which comes from the end of the last chapter, 1 John 5, 13, which says this. John gives his purpose.

He says,

I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.

Know. John wants believers to live with settled and confident assurance that they possess eternal life in Christ. Because there are many genuine Christians who spend enormous portions of their lives spiritually unstable. John writes, because God does not intend his children to live in perpetual uncertainty about whether or not they belong to him. but instead that they might rest in a confident assurance rooted in Christ.

And in that sense, this letter parallels John's gospel in many ways. Where the governing purpose statement of John's gospel in chapter 20, 31, he writes,

these things are written to you so that you may believe in Jesus, that he is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

John's gospel is written so that you might believe. 1 John is written so that you might know.

The structure of 1 John does not unfold in a straight line. It doesn't build like a carefully ordered argument like Paul often writes in many of his letters. Instead, it circles and revisits and deepens. It's a common literary technique here at work in the time that this letter was written called amplification.

John will introduce a theme, light, love, truth, obedience, and then he comes back to them again and again and again. And at the center of all of it is God himself. John will say in chapter one that God is light. And later on in the letter, he'll say that God is love. And these two important truths about God's character roughly divide the letter in half. The first half emphasizing God as light, and the second half as God as love.

Another observation that we've already noted, 1 John doesn't really read like many other traditional Greek letters or epistles. There's actually debate as to what genre of literature we should consider this. Some have noted that this actually reads more like a sermon. It feels spoken, direct, urgent, and even pastoral in nature. Large portions of it further emphasizing that it might be a sermon of sorts directly mirror or quote the words of Jesus from John's gospel, particularly quotations that you'll notice all throughout 1 John from John 13 to 17, which were some of Jesus's last words spoken to his disciples. So what we're reading is in a very real sense, apostolic preaching in written form.

That brings us to our text today, the prologue, which declares a powerful message for us. The message is this, the life that was from the beginning has come. Enter into it that our joy may be complete. The life that was from the beginning has come. Enter into it that our joy may be complete.

Testify, the life is seen

There are four key words that are gonna serve as the four points of the sermon today that help guide us through the passage. Those words are directly from the text, testify, proclaim, fellowship, and joy. Testify, proclaim, fellowship, and joy. Let's look at our first point this morning. Testify, the life is seen. Verse 1 of 1 John should feel very familiar to us.

Back before creation, before time,

that which was from the beginning

, verse 1 says. This is the language of pre-existence, of eternity. Before the first word was spoken over the void, before the first star was set into place, before anything else began to exist that does exist, the life already was.

It echoes the very beginning of the Bible from Genesis 1.1, where it says,

in the beginning.

And the end of 1 John 1 tells us what that which was from the beginning is. The end of verse 1 says,

concerning the word of life.

Again, this is a clear reference to the Gospel of John 1.

In the beginning was the word.

And this word, word, this Greek word logos, it means to speak of reason and order behind reality itself. And John takes this culturally understood, very loaded word and says something staggering about it. He says that the word is a person, Jesus Christ himself.

John adds in verse two that this life was made manifest. all of verse two in this prologue functions as a parenthetical of sorts, giving further definition to who and what the word of life is. And he says that this word of life is manifest, meaning it's been revealed, it's been made visible, it's been brought out into the open. The life that existed eternally with the Father has now been seen. And John tells us in verse 2, he says,

and we testify to it.

That word testify is critical here because he's not referring to some sort of philosophical speculation. He's talking about eyewitness testimony.

And who is this we? Well, John's including himself as a part of this group. And he must be referring to him and the other apostles, those who walked with Jesus, who lived alongside him, who heard his teachings and saw his miracles themselves, the same men who watched him die and who encountered him risen. And indeed, John, speaking on behalf of all of the apostles who did actually see Jesus, they testified to the word of life.

Verse one is a part of that testimony. Read with me. He says,

we have heard, we have seen with our eyes, we have looked upon, our hands have touched.

John's using sensory language here because they have seen Jesus. They have seen the preexistent word of life who is God.

And that is, that's staggering. Because in the Old Testament, the consistent testimony is that no one can see God and live. Moses was told that he could not see God's face. And in our text that was read from Isaiah 6 earlier, Isaiah, when he sees a vision of the Lord, he expects death to come upon him. He says, woe is me. And yet here, John is saying that these men They're saying we saw him, we heard him, we touched him.

The eternal God became a man. Fully God and fully man. Not at all diminished in his deity, but not lacking at all in his humanity. And that has profound implications. it's either one of the most important things that's ever been said or one of the most dangerous lies that's ever been told. John knows that there's no middle ground here and he's asking you, he's asking us to reckon with that. It means that the God who is invisible made himself visible. The God who is untouchable made himself touchable. Christians Don't lose the wonder of this. Don't lose the wonder of how amazing this is.

The Son of God didn't save his people from a distance. The Son of God entered into human weakness, suffering, grief, and temptation, which means that there's no human weakness apart from sin itself that Christ stands distant from. That means that when we suffer as believers, we're not crying out to a God who is unfamiliar with our affliction. He became like us, entering weakness into limitation, yet without sin. This is not a myth. It's not a nice story.

John is saying that this is history. And he's testifying to it by his own firsthand experience. A real man, in real time and space, seen and touched by real people. And John is testifying to us today to say it is verified. This happened. So if you're here this morning and feel like you're holding faith more at arm's length, maybe you would consider yourself more a skeptic. Well, first of all, welcome. We're glad that you're here. John is not asking you to turn your mind off this morning. He's asking you to be a good juror. He's asking you to weigh this testimony, to consider what these men like John stood for and what they could lose by telling the world this message.

They certainly weren't chasing power or comfort. Almost all of them were imprisoned at some point, beaten, and most of the apostles killed for their faith. And not one of them ever recanted this testimony. What do you do with that? How do you wrestle with the witness that John is giving? For the doubting Christian in the room, for the one whose faith feels thin right now, more like obligation than oxygen, hear this.

Your assurance was never supposed to rest on the steadiness of your feelings. It rests on the steadiness of what has actually happened. Christ entered history. He rose, he has been seen, he was touched. Your feelings are going to fluctuate, but the tomb stays empty. Praise God for that. John is not writing this letter to shame struggling Christians, he's writing to anchor us. which is good news because if assurance depended on any of our emotional consistency, half of us are gonna lose our salvation three times by Tuesday. That means that when your feelings fluctuate, The foundation has not moved.

Proclaim, the life is announced

Christ remains. The eternal word of life remains and this testimony remains. The gospel remains. That is what John is testifying to. But he doesn't stop there. He goes on to proclamation, which is point two. Proclaim, the life is announced. In verse two, he continues and says,

and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us.

So here we get the shift from testifying to proclaiming. We can think of testifying as stating what has been seen and experienced. Proclaiming would be announcing and declaring, even think of like someone heralding a message to others.

What does he say is proclaimed? He says, the eternal life. And he tells us, again, that this eternal Christ was with the Father. That speaks, again, of his pre-existence, his eternal relationship within the Trinity, meaning Christ didn't begin at Bethlehem. He has always been.

And that doctrine's incredibly significant for us. It's come under attack many times in the history of the church, and actually still to this day as well. And the church needed to respond to these attacks. The early church, one way that they would respond is by putting into words what scripture clearly teaches about the identity of the Son. Creeds like the Nicene Creed, where they confess this about the identity of who Jesus was.

They said that Christ is

begotten from the Father before all ages. God from God, light from light, true God from true God.

So their declaration in line with what scripture teaches is that Christ was not made, he was not created, he wasn't elevated to his position from a lower one, he was eternally begotten. The eternal life was with the Father before anything else existed. Second, calling Christ the eternal life tells us that he, Jesus, is also the source, the embodiment of eternal life.

So Christ isn't one path among many. He is the eternal life. There is no eternal life apart from Christ. No amount of sincerity, morality, or spirituality can save you. Eternal life is found not through generic belief in whatever you call God. It's found only in God's Son. Jesus himself said the same thing again and again, most famously in John 14, 6, where he said that,

I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

So Jesus is the life exclusively. And this eternal life, as verse two ends,

was made manifest to us.

Again, this emphasis that it has appeared, it has come. Eternal life has entered into history in the person of Jesus Christ.

And in that, he has done what we could not, living perfectly. He received what we deserve, dying on the cross under the wrath of a just God. He has conquered what defeated us, sin and death, by rising from the grave victoriously. And he offers what we do not deserve, mercy. And he gives what we could never earn, grace upon grace upon grace upon grace. And yes, eternal life to all who would turn to him and believe. The life has come, it has been proclaimed, the only question left is what do we do with that proclamation? Here's a practical question worth sitting with this week.

Who in your life needs to hear that proclamation from you? Not from a pastor or a professional Christian, from you. because those who have encountered the life are responsible for announcing it. You have been entrusted with the most important news in the history of the world. John saw and testified to what he saw, and he has proclaimed what he has encountered.

Fellowship with the Father and the Son

And now he tells us why. These two words carry the whole weight of his purpose. Point three is fellowship. Life draws. So after the parenthetical of verse two, verse three continues the sentence which began in verse one by reiterating what verse one has already said. Verse three says,

that which we have seen and heard, we proclaim to you.

And now John's gonna give us the reason why he proclaims. He says, so that. John is testifying and proclaiming so that his proclamation would accomplish a particular result. This proclamation, he's saying, is going to do something. And John tells us that he proclaims

so that you, too, may have fellowship with us. And indeed, our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

So first, John is proclaiming Christ so that you, the readers of this letter, may have fellowship. The verb fellowship, it denotes an intimate participation with and sharing. So he says,

so that you may have fellowship with us.

And that us is the same group as the we that we saw in verse one.

It's the apostles who walked with Jesus themselves. And so John's desire here is that the proclamation of the light through this letter would yield in its readers an intimate fellowship, first with John and with the other apostles. And he continues,

so that you may have fellowship with us, and indeed, our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

So the Apostles have fellowship with God not just because they walked with Jesus, but most fundamentally because their lives have been transformed by Christ. And John's desire is that those who hear would share in that same intimate fellowship. He's in a sense proclaiming, I proclaim Christ to you so that you might have what we have, and what we have is intimacy with Christ.

That's the goal. Not mere knowledge or moral reform, but fellowship with the Father and with the Son. It should give us pause, though. How can this be? How can sinful people be near to a holy God? The Bible gives us a helpful word to answer this question.

The word is reconciliation. Reconciliation means the putting together of two divorced parties. It's a word that we hear and use a lot in church. And it can be applied between the relationships between two people, like Keith has been preaching on reconciliation between two individuals from Matthew 18. But reconciliation is also relevant, perhaps most of all relevant, to man's relationship with God. And it's that meaning that it's at the heart of what John is saying here.

Because since Genesis 3, sin has separated humanity from God. We can rightly be called God's enemies apart from Christ. But by his great mercy, Those who are in Christ through faith are reconciled to God. Being reconciled into fellowship with God is both positional and experiential. It's positional because every single follower of Jesus is positionally reconciled to God. Meaning that if you're in Christ, you are no longer God's enemy.

You are his child. That is positional. Paul captures the security of this positional reality in Colossians 3, 3 where he says,

your life is hidden with Christ in God.

Hidden, secured, not by your grip on him but by his grip on you. And that's true as a fixed positional reality for your life as a Christian, no matter what you feel on a given day, no matter how many times you continue to fail, no matter what. That's true not because of your works, but because of the God who has worked in you to reconcile you to himself. He is the one who holds you fast. So it is positional. But fellowship with God is also experiential.

Though our position as reconciled is secure, our experience of fellowship is not. Ongoing sin in a believer's life, it tempers their enjoyment of God. A believer living in unconfessed sin will not enjoy closeness with God in the same way as a believer who is walking in repentance. The Christian neglecting prayer, neglecting the word and life with the church should not expect deep experiential fellowship with the God while persisting in these patterns.

Fellowship with God rarely collapses overnight. Just slowly gets quieter and quieter and one day you realize you can't remember the last time it was loud. And if that description lands somewhere tender for you this morning, if you recognize that your own experience with God, your own fellowship with God has grown thin and distant, it's not a reason to despair.

That's why this letter is written. It's an invitation. 1 John is primarily written to Christians, so I actually think it's this kind of experiential fellowship that John is primarily referring to here. He's saying that as a result of his proclamation of the words of the eternal life in Christ, that these positionally reconciled Christians might have the experience, that they might experience the same fellowship with God that John and the apostles enjoy. John isn't describing mystical emotionalism that makes us feel close to God. He's saying that the proclamation to come in the rest of this letter is the means, that it is the means by which deeper fellowship with God is going to result in the lives of us who hear.

The Word of God is the means. Fellowship with God is cultivated through truth, through hearing rightly about Christ, believing rightly about Christ, and walking in the light as he is in the light. contrast, false views about God distort fellowship with God. You cannot enjoy intimacy with a God that you fundamentally misunderstand.

This is one of the great burdens of 1 John. John isn't just trying to make us as readers more informed. He is trying to deepen our communion and assurance of that communion with God himself. And he understands that right theology fuels right worship. The great end of salvation is God himself.

Fellowship with him, communion with him and nearness to him, which raises important and maybe difficult questions for us. Do we actually want that kind of fellowship with God? Are we cultivating nearness to him? Or has Christianity become mostly external for us? Attendance, familiarity, the right vocabulary, routine.

It's possible to consume endless Christian content while remaining spiritually distant from God himself. And with that, I think it's important to say that we live in a really, really strange time where any of us who are here could realistically listen to six sermons a week, four theology podcasts, and maybe even for some of us argue for an hour online a day about different Greek verbs. We could do all of that and still not pray. We could do all of that and never once pray. You can have a full podcast queue and still have an empty soul. The two are not mutually exclusive.

So do the actual patterns of your life demonstrate that fellowship with God is precious to you? John is convinced that the proclamation of the word is going to produce that deeper fellowship with God. So read the word. Read it individually. Read it with your spouse and with your children. Read it with others in the church. Hear the Word. Hear the Word on Sundays as we hear it preached and as we sing the Word together. Pray the Word in your life. And speak the Word. Speak the Word to your brothers and sisters in Christ and allow them to speak it over you.

Life completes joy

All toward the end of nearness with your God to His glory. And as we'll see in this final point, the heart must be engaged in this. It must. Final point is joy. Life completes joy. John gives us his second purpose statement in verse four. says,

and we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.

So our joy that he's speaking of includes both the Apostles and the believers who are receiving this letter. Some manuscripts of this text actually do say your joy here, and you might have a note of that in your Bible. And while there is some debate over which wording is the original, the theological reality remains unchanged for us either way.

The joy here is shared. The proclamation of the gospel and the fellowship with God that it produces results in joy, both in the hearer and in the teller. There is real joy in proclaiming Christ. And there is real joy in fellowship with God together. John's so that here tells us something very important about Christianity. It tells us that joy here isn't an accidental byproduct of the Christian life.

Joy is one of its intended goals and outcomes. John writes with joy and view as one of the goals of this letter, and it raises a question that many of us maybe feel too nervous at times to even ask openly. Is it wrong to pursue joy? Is joy somehow a lesser motivation than duty?

If we're talking about worldly joy, then certainly the answer is probably yes, that would be wrong. the contents of 1 John are about the God who is love and light, and pursuing joy in him isn't just an afterthought, it's a central part of the Christian life itself. We've somehow become convinced that the holiest posture before God is reluctant endurance, but Jesus disagrees.

Listen to his words in John 15 that were read for us earlier where he says things like,

abide in me, keep my commandments.

And then he says why. He says,

these things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full.

Don't miss the connection that Jesus himself makes here and that John then picks up on. Jesus is saying that abiding in him, walking in obedience, and remaining near to him are not obstacles to joy, they're actually the very pathway into it.

The modern world consistently preaches the opposite of this. It teaches us subtly or directly that obedience to God and the pursuit of holiness, they're obstacles to joy, that they restrict our joy. The world sells freedom and it delivers emptiness. God demands our obedience and delivers joy. The track record isn't even close here.

Friends, holiness and nearness to Jesus are not the enemies of joy, they protect joy. Jesus isn't reluctantly permitting joy as a side effect of obedience. He is saying that joy in you is his intention. The God that you serve is not indifferent to your joy, he is pursuing it. Which means that the glory of God and the joy of his people are not competing realities. God is glorified through our joy in who he is and what he's done. that's what worship actually is.

And don't miss how John qualifies the joy here. He says

that our joy may be complete.

Again, so similar to what Jesus says in John 15. Full joy. And there is, of course, a future fullness of joy that awaits God's people in eternity. But there's also present joy right now.

Christian life isn't grim endurance until heaven. There's real fellowship and joy available with Christ right now. And this isn't a constant emotional hype. It's not superficial feelings that we're talking about that are dependent on your circumstances. What's being described here is a deep-rooted joy that's grounded on the message of this letter. Reconciliation with God. The joy of a cleansed conscience. the joy of prayer and worship, the joy of growing in holiness and suffering with hope.

And notice where John places this joy, right alongside the other intended outcome of fellowship with God and one another. In other words, John places joy in the church. 1 John is written for a community of believers. One of the greatest tragedies of the West is how individualistic Christianity can become. Many people want personal spirituality detached from life committed to God's people. But John ties these realities together. He has testified and proclaimed the good news of the gospel for the purpose of fellowship and joy. These are not separate ideas here, they're one movement.

And John's about to spend the whole rest of this letter showing us what it actually looks like to live inside that one movement. That's where 1 John begins. Before he's gonna confront false teachers and warn of the antichrists, he begins with the eternal life who has made himself known to us. He begins with the invitation into joyful fellowship with God, and with the promise that in that fellowship our joy will be made complete. John's about to spend the rest of this letter showing us what that life looks like.

So brothers and sisters, the life that was from the beginning has come. enter into it that our joy may be complete. Would you pray with me? Great Father in heaven, it is unspeakable joy, unspeakable joy that you have purchased us in Christ. that in you we have been brought near who were your enemies, that the light of the world, the life has appeared that we might have life in you. God, would you produce deeper fellowship with you in our lives and would you cultivate joy in our lives, joy in you for your glory. We pray these things in Christ's name, amen.