In Between
I’m assuming many people in this room have flown somewhere at least once before. Is there anyone who has still been able to avoid flying? That means many of you know this all too well, but there is that moment right before the trip is over when the pilot comes on and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are preparing for our final descent.” And immediately, the demeanor of the entire cabin changes!
People who were sleeping perk up and sit up, adjust their hair, try to look presentable again. Tray tables are cleaned up and put up. People hurry to get their laptop or iPad stowed or fast-forward the movie they are watching to try to see the ending before the wheels touch down.
If you have ever been on one of those incredibly long flights—12, 14, 16 hours—that announcement from the pilot contains the joy of finally being able to get off that plane and out of your seat! If you are a little fearful of flying or of turbulence, that announcement means you made it…everything is going to be okay! For many people, that final descent is the beginning of a long-expected trip. Or for many it signals the simple joy of being back home and sleeping in your own bed again.
You don’t really know how much you love that announcement until you miss it, or it goes wrong. One time I was so tired on an international flight that I missed that announcement because I was sleeping and woke up as the plane hit the runway in Dublin and almost had a panic attack! It was raining, and there was a strong wind, so the landing was not “gentle”. I had a hundred thoughts going through my mind for a couple of seconds there until I realized we were okay and on the ground.
On another flight back to Boise, I once had the pilot come on and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are beginning our final descent into Boise, Ohio.” He then continued with the rest of his speech, and then there was a hushed silence in the plane. About one minute later, he came back on and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, as your pilot, I DO know where we are flying, and we will thankfully be landing in Boise, Idaho this evening.”
My goal this morning in this sermon is to announce that we are beginning our descent on our “In Between” series. As fall nears, we will be finishing up our “In Between” passages at the end of August. And like a real plane flight, I know many people are hitting the ground running in September. Jobs are in full swing again after summer vacations. Kids are going back to school later this month. In some ways, many of our lives this fall will be like when everyone stands up at the end of the flight, trying to get their bags out of the overhead bin to hurry, hurry... and then stand there and wait for the doors to open. We’re not necessarily going anywhere, but it seems like there is a lot to do!
And, perhaps for you, this last year has been hectic in general. Perhaps your year has been the equivalent of wrangling three kids on a flight across the country—you are just glad you survived it! Perhaps YOU are the one who dozed off a bit this last year and may have even forgotten we were in a series called “In Between”. Either way, I want to help us appreciate the journey we have been on this year, and to appreciate the (hopefully) smooth landing we are shooting for in September.
So that you don’t wake up as I did in Dublin, our landing is meant to be simple. Where we are trying to head to land over this next month is simply with:
Love
In Between: Review
As we started this series last September, we looked at these two passages from Genesis and Revelation:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 1:1, ESV
And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”
Revelation 21:5–6, ESV
Scripture starts with God’s perfect creation. We see God’s desire to share HIS joy by creating all that we know and see and specifically by creating us! People! Image bearers of God almighty! People that he breathed His Spirit into. And then, at the end, we see God making all things new again. A new creation. A new heaven and a new earth. People once again brought back to God without sin and able to walk with him, face-to-face on the new earth.
In between those two points—a beautiful beginning and a sure ending—we live now in this in-between moment. A moment between the first perfect creation and the second perfect recreation. Today we see God’s plan unfolding all around us. A plan to get us from that first perfect creation that humanity broke and back to his second perfect creation where we will walk with him again. Much of his plan has already happened, but much is still happening today even through you and me.
2 John: Walk In Between
One of the places we looked at in this In Between series was in 2 John. Jack helped us to see how God is encouraging us to walk—how we are to live our life—in this in-between time. Amazingly, John’s second letter is outlined much like our motto at Main Street Church. God is calling us to Love God, Love Others, and to Make Disciples of Jesus. How fortunate is that…it’s like there is a purpose to that motto! And, as John reminds us, we need to be careful not to deceive ourselves that our purpose is anything other than this. The easy life calls to us and wants to sway us to abandon the good yet hard path of God’s call on our life. But John encourages us to walk the walk God has given us in this in-between moment. Jack did a great job of navigating us through 2 John earlier this year.
Jonah
We also looked at Jonah with Demer. In this in-between time, most of us are very aware that we are failing. At least I am very aware that I’m failing often. Maybe you are too? Realizing and seeing our sin can be very discouraging, and I think we often imagine God as disappointed with us and discouraged that we aren’t moving faster and further down the trail.
But that isn’t true. In the book of Jonah, we saw that our God is a god of grace! Grace: undeserved merit and favor, given to God’s people through faith. Grace is meant to be the TONE or TENOR of our life and relationship with God here in this in-between moment. We are meant to see that our God is showering us with GRACE! God is sharing with us his HEART towards us throughout his word, and it is a heart of grace. In the book of Jonah, we saw God’s grace to all people and even a wayward prophet, as God desires to show his hesed (his steadfast love) to all his people.
Genesis
The backbone of much of this in-between series has been Genesis. Right away, at the very beginning, we saw that it was humanity and our sin that messed up and marred this wonderful creation of God. We—as represented in Adam and Eve—choose sin over God. We choose our own knowledge over his guidance. We listened to the serpent instead of the Creator. Part of what we should see in Genesis is that the same sinful choices you and I make today are rooted in and are the same type of problem that Adam and Eve had in the garden of Eden. We wouldn’t have done it any differently if it was us!
But God! But God is one of the amazing statements that Paul latches onto in Ephesians 2 because that is God’s character. But God! God does the unexpected! He is not a God who is distant and who watches us from afar. He is a God who intimately walks with us, comes and sees our sin, acknowledges rightly where we have walked away from his ways, and still meets us with grace and care.
But God! God had a plan! Adam and Eve did not boggle God nor did they thwart God. God knew from the beginning of time what it would cost to make this world, to make this people, and then to save us and redeem the world. It would cost him his very life!
God always had a plan for us—for you and me, for Adam and Eve—to be his image bearers and to be a part of his mission of covering this earth with his glory and to share with others the beauty of our God as we walk with him and live like him. We are meant to be mobile temples to God who worship him and image him everywhere we go! And even though sin is now prevalent in all aspects of this world, God has not given up on that plan.
That is much of what we are seeing in the beginning of Genesis. God did not give up on his plan with Adam and Eve. Rather, he promised a solution through the seed of the woman who would come and crush the head of the serpent. God did not give up on his plan when Cain killed Abel but rather continued to bless all of humanity through every generation, moving the plan forward.
Even when things get so bad that all of humanity grieves God in their sin, God continues his plan through Noah. A new creation again, humanity placed on a mountain uncovered by the waters again. A reminder of the covenant and our place as God’s people again.
God has a grand plan, and he is making sure it will happen! One of the pieces of feedback we have heard this last year is how helpful it has been to see this larger picture of God and his plan here in the beginning of Genesis. I think many of us know that God has done good things through his plan and specifically good things for us in Jesus Christ, but I don’t know if we all have the story stitched together very well in our heads. Sometimes we feel like what we have read in Scripture is just a jumble of stories. That makes it hard to share God’s plan and his story with others. That makes it hard to stay encouraged and have hope together in the middle of this plan.
That is one thing we are going to work on together this fall: we are going to take a step back even further and look at the larger picture of Scripture, and piece together the entire story of God as we look at and follow his covenants through Scripture. If you have ever wished your pastor would walk one of your friends through the entire story of Scripture, this fall is your moment! Think about someone you can invite—a friend, a neighbor, a co-worker, a family member—who you think would like to hear the whole story of Scripture unpacked from September to Christmas. That is what we are going to be doing. And I think it will be good for more of us than just our friends!
But Why? Love!
But why this series? We should all ask questions like that more often. Why did we stop and make a big deal about going through this series called “In Between”? Well, it can’t be because it is super unique. As I said earlier this summer, this really isn’t a series that we will ever stop, so it can’t just be something we learn once and move on from. We are all living our lives “In Between,” which means that is the great story of our life. And if statistics hold, we will likely live out the rest of our lives in this in-between moment. Literally every person who came before us, except Adam and Eve, has died only experiencing this in-between moment.
In that sense, learning more about this in-between moment is THE project of our lives. That is why the series! We need to see more clearly God’s plan. We need to see more clearly what he is calling us to do. And we need to walk rightly in those moments NOW! When we look at God’s plan, we find that this life is not something that we throw away when the plan of the new heavens and the new earth come to fruition. Rather, this is all preparing us for how to live rightly with God IN that future moment. As Paul says:
For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison…
2 Corinthians 4:17 ESV
This momentary difficulty of living in a sin-filled world with sin-marred people waiting for our sinless Savior to come back is meant to prepare us. The lessons we learn here are the same lessons we need to walk with him THERE, in sinless perfection, forever more.
If preparing for the future is one of the main projects of our lives, then there is much to learn from God and his word! For those of us who like data, who like to plan, who like the process, we then lean into the Bible to learn everything we can. To understand what God has said. To understand what God did and will do. We can even go so far as to make rules and processes we now try to live under and to live in. And, maybe even, hold others to our rules as well.
But that would miss the point. The goal of Scripture is not rote memorization. The goal is not to live under a law. That is something that confuses many other religions and many people. The Bible is not a handbook of rules to follow. It isn’t JUST explaining God’s plan to us. It is explaining God’s plan in a very specific way. It is explaining his plan to us through people and through time. There are people in this plan. Some lives are lived, and there is context to each move and purpose God has in this plan. There is affection in this plan.
Some of you may have noticed that I didn’t bring up 1 John in our review a minute ago. You would have been observant enough to notice earlier this year that we picked two of John’s letters to go through during this in-between series. And if you have read John, you might have thought to yourself, “That is strange. John’s letters are quite similar. Why do both back-to-back?” There was a reason for that!
As we study God’s plan and the unfolding of the beauty of this purposeful world that God has stitched together for us, we are meant to be moved. Moved deeply in our hearts and our souls. As we come to Scripture and see all that God is doing, we are meant to have our affections tweaked, challenged, and raised. The point of looking at God’s plan and knowing who he is, what he has done, and where he is taking us is meant to make us LOVE.
Love—an affection where we are warmed towards, oriented towards, desirous to look at and follow someone else or something else. This plan, this reminder of our life in-between is meant to push you and me towards love! Specifically, love of God and love of one another. That is what we saw in 2 John, and that is what we see as well in 1 John: Love. John is very good at pulling out our mission of love, and we wanted to be sure to infuse this series and our life with that love.
We may think we know much about God’s plan, and we know much about God, but without love, it is not truly knowing.
1 John 3:10: Love God
Look again at our passage this morning:
By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.
1 John 3:10 ESV
This is where we left off in our last 1 John sermon. Think for a moment what John is asking: Who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil? If you and I were to answer this question after reading all of Scripture, after thinking deeply about God, who he is, and what he does, would you have said THIS?
Perhaps you would. Interestingly, we see this question come in other places throughout God’s story. Many of us remember the lawyer and Jesus talking about this same thing:
And one of them, a lawyer [teacher of the law], asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Matthew 22:35–40 ESV
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Love your neighbor as yourself.
At first, it doesn’t seem like John is saying the same things here. John doesn’t say directly that we should love God. Instead, he says:
whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God
That is a little closer to what Jesus says earlier in Matthew:
But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Matthew 6:33 ESV
But what does John mean here? There is a reason teachers try to teach you to write positive sentences, not negative sentences: negative sentences are much harder to follow. Here, John has said we can know who is of God and who is of the devil. Because he ended with the devil, he makes the statements relate to those who follow the devil. So those statements are all negatives.
There is an interesting side point here. Because God has always been, always will be, and defines all goodness, joy, and love, the only thing that Satan could ever be is “not God.” We believe Satan really is a being who chose to rebel from God, but there was nothing he could ever really offer that is from himself—something he created. All he could offer is “not God.”
That is what I see here. As John is sharing in this letter, those who follow the devil are those who do not practice righteousness. Or said in a positive way:
God’s people practice righteousness.
If you are like me, you see that phrase “practice righteousness,” and you probably hear rules, law, things to do. Be perfect. Earn God’s love. That may even be what you heard earlier in the quote from Matthew 6 where Jesus says to pursue God’s righteousness. But that is not at all what John is wanting you to hear. Early, John has said of Jesus:
My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.
1 John 2:1 ESV
Jesus, THE righteous. Righteous is Jesus’s definition. He is righteous, and he alone. He defines righteousness as the one who is fully God. The Psalmist tells us the same thing about God:
For the LORD is righteous; he loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold his face.
Psalm 11:7 ESV
The LORD is righteous in all his ways and kind in all his works. The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.
Psalm 145:17–18 ESV
Righteousness here is a way of talking about WHO God is, not what we have to do. But that is the interesting thing—those two ideas weave together a bit. If God is righteousness, if all he does is categorized as righteous because that is who he is, then we should want to be like him. As our affections are raised in seeing this story, as we love God more in seeing God’s plan, in seeing all he has done to love us, God invites us to walk again in the righteous ways he walks in and the righteous ways he made us for.
That is the trick in this plan! One of our tendencies when seeing God plans to think the answer is for us to earn our way back into God’s good graces. To think that if we could just muster up the tenacity and willpower to do good, we would be fine. But so much of the plan and story is there to remind us that we will all fail. We can’t live perfectly—not yet. But praise God that isn’t his goal for us under sin:
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:21 ESV
For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith…
Philippians 3:8–9 ESV
The righteousness that we are after is not the righteousness that comes through the law (as Paul says). It is not a righteousness that comes through our own willpower and attempts to do good. The righteousness we all need is a righteousness that is GIVEN to us through faith in Jesus. It is a righteousness that is part of who we are made to be again in Jesus and what we are becoming as we are adopted in Jesus and brought back into the family of God to live as his sons and daughters.
And note what John says here:
practice righteousness
Practice—to make righteousness a habit, to be righteous regularly, to engage in righteousness for our own growth. Not being perfect. Not following a list of rules. Rather, being who God made us to be because he is working in us. Practice these things. Make righteousness a regular part of our identity, and—Lord willing—increasingly more regular than our sin.
This idea that God’s people are those who practice righteousness should not make us think of legalism or our own actions. It should make us think about God, who he is, the amazing plan he has ensured will happen across millennia, and everything he did for us at the cross. We should not be thinking about a rule to follow, but rather a God to know and who did it all for us! We should find our affections raised towards God!
The only way you and I can begin to participate in the plan of God again is because of his awesome work of Jesus Christ at the cross on our behalf. That was God’s righteousness. Something God GAVE us through faith in Jesus.
Application
When you and I read our Bible, when we pray to God, when we ponder the beauty of God’s plan for this world and for us, we need to constantly be praying. Praying to God through every verse: “God, please help me to see YOU!” “God, please let me fall in love with you!” We want to see our Bible and everything it tells us about God as a love letter. A love letter that walks us through the long relationship that God has had with all of humanity, leading up to me and you. And then see beyond our wildest dreams that God has loved us in incredible and almost unbelievable ways.
Seeing God’s plan should inspire us to love. Love for our God and all he is and all he does. Unlike Satan, who offers us “not God,” our God offers himself, literally, on the cross. He offers himself that we might have all that he is—even his righteousness—not as something we made and did, but as something we receive from him, so that we might walk rightly as his children.
John is bringing us back to God and our love of him in this in-between moment. Knowing who God is and who we are, knowing the plan, knowing the role we have in this moment are all meant to raise our affections and lead us to love.
If you find yourself reading Scripture, praying, or thinking about God and not feeling love, you are likely missing something important. You may have seen the rules, patterns, and plan, but you are likely missing the person. A real God, a real person who loves you so much. A person who wants you to step into your role in this plan, not to prove you are good enough, but because you have already been purchased; you have already been placed; you already are his people through faith in Jesus. He loves you and is drawing you close to himself.
We love God as we are made righteous and as he is righteous. That kind of righteousness—one that comes from faith—leads to love and peace.
And the effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever.
Application
That is love! And don’t fret. As John said just before our passage:
Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous.
1 John 3:7 ESV
Friends, whatever little righteousness you may think you have now and practice regularly now is because Jesus is righteous and working through you now in faith. To see and know that righteousness, treasure that righteousness, trust in that righteousness is truly Love. Love God. Love him deeply for all he has done for you and all he is doing in you! He is righteousness, so he is making you righteous. He is making you LIKE him, which can only be righteous.
1 John 3:10: Love Others
And yet, our love of God isn’t meant to stay with us. Much like our God who seeks an object to pour out his abundant love onto (me and you and all of humanity), so too we are meant to pour out our love of God onto and into others. That is what John says in the second part of this passage:
nor is the one who does not love his brother.
To say it positively again:
Those who are righteous like God love others.
As we are going to see a little later in this letter:
We love because he first loved us.
1 John 4:19 ESV
Main Street, love of God and love of others are inseparably linked. As we love our God who IS righteousness, and as we allow him to work in us through faith to make us more righteous as he is righteous, we will find ourselves loving others like he has loved others. We will find that our joy, like God’s joy, is made complete in our love of others. That is an amazing calling.
John is the only disciple who recorded Jesus saying this:
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
John 13:34–35 ESV
I think this statement from Jesus impacted John greatly…enough to fill three additional letters! The defining characteristic of a disciple—the main characteristic of one who follows Jesus—is that we will love like him. To enjoy and love God’s righteousness means to become righteous ourselves, which means to love others like God.
As we said a minute ago, as we are reading through Scripture, we are meant to see our God as a person who loves us and whom we love. We are to read about his plan starting in Genesis and think, “My God has loved me, set in motion history for me, for thousands of years!” We are meant to treasure that God sent Jesus, the eternal Son of God, to die on the cross for you! For me! We are to see God’s covenants, God’s enduring promises, and say to ourselves, “God promised that so I could be here through faith in Jesus!”
And similarly, we are meant to see fellow believers—everyone in this room—and marvel at how God is using them in his plan. The temptation can be to see others as a way to please ourselves. Instead, we should see how GOD is using them to make much of himself!
When we see one another—fellow believers—we are meant to see others who shine forth God’s righteousness and love to us. I love that I get to see that every day in my work. I love seeing Laura at work and knowing that she images God’s passionate pursuit of perfect order AND of knowing others through her job. I love seeing that Beth can have a passion for payroll and Peonies—just like our God! I love that Roslyn has a passionate pursuit of everything with the vigor of the colors she wears and the colors she is painting her house! I love that Jack passionately pursues God’s steadfast sureness, patience, and happiness. I love that Nathan passionately worships both here on this stage and with a banjo at bars with a passion fitting a cherubim! I love that Wyatt passionately works quietly on Sunday mornings like our God who quietly works through his Spirit in our lives in ways we may never see nor know. I love those same glimpses of God that I see in each of you!
What about you? Do you see how God is using those all around you? How we are fellow saints and co-citizens with one another and with our God in his kingdom? Love of others knows this, treasures this, proclaims it, and asks God for more!
And love of others doesn’t stop there! The overflowing spring of love and affection for God flows through us and to other saints, but also to others who don’t know him yet. We see that we are sojourners in this plan with one another, including with people who don’t even realize God's plan yet. Love of others reaches out even to those who may seem as though they are enemies of God. But so were you at one point!
For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
Romans 5:10–11 ESV
We want them to find the same reconciliation to our righteous God that we have found!
Conclusion
Friends, seeing God’s plan is meant to lead us to love. Love of God and his righteous ways. Love for one another and our joint need for God. Practicing righteousness means walking in this affection for God and finding it overflows to all those around us as well.
This message is a descent of sorts. You should feel the change in altitude as we turn from Genesis 1–11 and end here with 1 John. We will come back to Genesis later and finish it. We will keep looking at God’s large story and plan throughout this fall. But we want to land our In Between series here in 1 John to look at love. We want to go from a 30,000-foot view of God’s plan and bring it back home on the ground. We want to make the plan personal in our lives today.
God didn’t just save nameless people and a mass of followers that he doesn’t know to come and praise him in the new heavens and new earth. God saved his people. He saved me, he saved you, he saved thousands like us. And he has more people here, in Boise, Meridian, Nampa, even some in Caldwell that he wants to save! That is the landing we are after this fall. A landing that comes home and sees how God’s plan, God’s word, and all his instructions and care for us over time are meant to land here, today, in our lives. This plan of God is meant to have practical implications for our life in our homes, with our friends, in our work. It is meant to permeate our Gospel Communities, our time just hanging out with one another, and everything we do.
We are meant to find that the righteousness of God practiced in our lives comes from our faith in Jesus’s righteousness given to us. And it flows out as God’s imaged righteousness to others. To those around us walking with us in this plan who already know God, and those who desperately need to know his plan for them. That is why we look at this In Between moment. That is why we love—because he first loved us.
