Christians Do Not Love the Worlds Lies

If you have not already, turn in your Bible to 1 John 2, the book of 1 John, the epistle of John. Epistle is one of those good old words that we only use in Bible contexts. People who use the word epistle probably say blessed with two syllables because they're super Christian. An epistle is just a letter. That's all it is. Well, you're in 1 John 2 where you should be. Now, in this section of 1 John, John's going to talk about antichrist. And that's— it can be a loaded concept because there's eschatology associated with the idea of antichrist. And some people love eschatology, they want to know all the nuts and bolts of end times doctrine. Other people might be a little hesitant, like myself. I actually am careful how I speak of eschatological things because I know that it's a divisive issue. I have convictions. I'm pretty well established premillennial, and even maybe I might even believe in the dispensational view of that last things happening. But I hold to those things somewhat loosely because I know that we can be preoccupied with things. Like, you can get so caught up in that that you're not thinking about sharing the gospel. You can get so caught up in that that you're not thinking about raising your family right in the Lord. So I want to make sure and keep main things the main thing, not that prophecy is not a main thing. Three-quarters of our Bible is prophetic, so it's very important. But because the word Antichrist is used here, there is a potential here, I think, for people who might get preoccupied with eschatological thought. So eschatology, that word is actually in our text here today. Eschatology is just the doctrine of last things or end times.

This is a funny note. I'm sorry if— forgive me if this is not funny. If this isn't funny and it's offensive, then just be super charitable to me, okay? Be nice to me. But I laughed when I was in seminary once because we were doing Greek work and we covered this word eskatos and maybe the accusative form of— I think it's accusative— of eskaton. And my professor told me of a convalescent care facility that the name of that facility was Eskaton. Yeah. Now, Sam is laughing because the idea is essentially like this is your last stop, right? This is the end. Like the name of the place was essentially saying you don't go any further. What a crazy name for a place. This is the last place you're going. Now, maybe that's not what they mean. Maybe they're talking about that in the future, in the end times, these people here who are believers will have a hopeful future. I hope that's what they mean, but it is a strange name. But eschatology is the doctrine of end times. It's the study of end times, theology related to last things. And even though the text will actually say last hour and Antichrist, that is not the point of this text. Verse 26 is the point of this text. I'll handle it when we get there, but I do want you to see that John is not writing so that you and I become eschatology experts. That's not what he's writing for. He's writing to make sure we're careful to not be deceived by people who are anti-Christ. That's the point of the text.

So what good does it do for you if I give you the exact spelling in Greek of anti-Christ? Because the word, believe it or not, in Greek is antichristos. It literally comes directly across into the New Testament. What if we spend an hour on that? Now the word anti here means against versus the other times anti in the Rhipuom, and then because of that one it means before, in this case it means against. And we spend all of our time studying what the word Antichrist means, but then we're easily deceived by antichrists. So I want to make sure that you're— if you have an itch that wants to be scratched by eschatological things, come next week in the afternoon because Walter will be preaching from Revelation. I'm not going to scratch that itch today. I will talk about it briefly. I will talk about it briefly because there is some grammatical-related things here. But the main thing to me is to get the main point of the text. And it's the main point of the entire book. I've said it over and over again. This book is about whether or not you're a Christian or not, or whether you believe in true Christianity or not. And this text is going to talk about people who don't and what it looks like when they don't.

So what good does it do if you study, for example, the word, I don't know, love or hunger, and you say, I know all of the forms of the word love and hunger in the New Testament, but I never fed anybody and I've never loved anybody. Oh, I've read 42 books on evangelism. Okay, you must be sharing the gospel all the time then, right? No, I haven't really ever. So don't get caught up in end times theology if you don't care about being obedient in the end times and doing what we're supposed to be doing is making disciples and sharing the gospel. So I hope that warning is clear. This text is so very pointed. John means it in this text. I know he means everything he says. The words are inspired. But I do want you to catch that there's warnings here of deception. And I want to say here too, I want to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. If you're young and you don't know what that means, we have had it happen over the years where people did not know what that phrase meant, and they thought, who would ever throw a baby out with bathwater? No, we don't mean it can actually happen. It's saying don't, don't, don't miss the main thing for the minor things. I want to be careful because I do want you to be thinking about deception at all levels. The text is about being deceived to the point of abandoning Christ. That's what the text is about. The text is about full-blown false teaching and being misled by false teaching so that you now become anti-Christ. But I do want to say to some degree, 'cause I wanna shepherd well, this also pertains to doctrines that may be just questionable doctrines too. Meaning, if you have a tendency to be pulled away by lots of doctrinal things and being impressed by your favorite teachers and maybe looking for things that you want to be true out there in the world, you might not be full-blown desiring to be antichrist, but if you are flippant or light about the authority of the word of Christ— I want this to apply to us too, because we may not get fully deceived, but we can go down a path that is not fully truth-oriented and giving full weight and authority to Scripture. So I want to be careful because that could turn into lukewarmness, that could turn into little isolated pockets of people believing their own things and factions and things like that. So there's more to this text than merely following the Antichrist as an individual or being an antichrist.

Let's pray, we'll dig in together. Father, this text is so strong in its warning, and I wonder sometimes, Father, if we even recognize how susceptible we could be to clever words or to eloquent teachers or to our favorite things, maybe our own confirmation bias. Maybe we want we want you to be saying things, and so we might try to find people who tell us what we want to hear. Your word makes that really clear that we are able to heap up teachers. So Father, oh, would you please help us as we hear your word here from John to watch out, to take his warnings to heart, to not be easily deceived, to not be misled. Not only would you protect us with truth, but then also that we would love truth enough to really immerse ourselves in it, that we would love the truth enough to study it, that we would study and dig into it so that we can avoid deception. Would you help us, Father, be strong in the word? John's going to tell us what that looks like in our text, so would you help us take that lesson with us? In Jesus' name, amen.

Amen. We have a lot to cover, so forgive me for— like I said, I already got permission to preach 3 hours today. I'll just go right into the afternoon service. I'm just kidding. If it makes you all feel better, you might think, well, if he preaches long, at least he has to do yard work tomorrow to suffer. I can't do yard work because the lawn is too wet, but I do have to rebuild my lawnmower. So you at least have that satisfaction that there's some justice done, you know.

So verse 18, this is where we're at in 1 John 2:18, "Little children, it is the last hour. And as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour." So there's a couple of bookends there that say last hour. The first thing I want you to see— oh, well, first thing I want you to see is he says, "Little children." Do you remember me last time when he was writing to the various audiences in 1 John, when I said that he speaks to children and to fathers and then to children again? And those are different words for children. You have the children who are the idea of being taught, and then you have the children in this case, it's more like endearing, the idea of a father loving his children, right? So when he's saying little children here, he's not talking about kids. Although you kids in the room should be listening when the Bible tells you to listen. When you hear "little children," that means kids can understand it. So listen when he speaks to little children. But then he says, "Little children," those are his children, his spiritual children, "it is the last hour."

Now that word again is eskatos. It's where we get eschatology. It's the last time. The simple understanding of last hour in this context, in fact many contexts, is it's in the time between Jesus' first coming and his second coming. Now obviously that's been a couple thousand years. So we don't want to get too caught up in any sort of date setting or anything like that. We don't want to be caught up in the prophecy of exactly when the second coming is or whatever. But what the one thing we know for sure is that we in 2026 are closer to the second coming than John was. Okay, we are closer in whatever, whatever he's, whenever he's writing, uh, in the, what, '80, '90 something-ish, '80 to '90. So we're definitely closer to Jesus coming than he is. But the one thing He says about this last hour in His time, He's talking about His time being the time when people who are anti-Christ, or the Antichrist, as we'll see comes in the future, people who are against Christ are rising up. That's how you know it's the last hour, that people are pitting themselves against Christ.

Incidentally, I'm not— I just told you eschatology is not a favorite subject of mine. But one for sure eschatology I cannot hold to or abide by is postmillennialism, because it says that eventually the world will be so evangelized and Christianized that it ushers in— the world will be so good that Jesus has to come back and rule it. And I have trouble with that because of texts like this. It's the Antichrist and the more Antichrist. It gets worse. So you can take that for what it's worth. That's just a side note.

Now looking for the second half of verse, or second part of verse 18, "And as you have heard, the Antichrist is coming." Man, I could get stuck here. I could do the thing right here and pretend I'm a scholar and go crazy. There is a manuscript variant here. When I say variant, that means some of the original Greek manuscripts that the New Testament is based on differ in this verse, in this sentence. The critical text, the Westcott and Hort text, the United Bible Society text, the Alexandrian text, that's all the same thing. The text that the ESV, the New American Standard, and the NIV is based on does not have the word the. It's just the word ha. It's the letter O with the rough breathing mark, omicron, with a left breathing mark over it. Ha. That's how you say the. That's one of the 24 the's in Greek. So here in that group of manuscripts, the Westcott and Hort manuscripts, the critical text, it does not have the word the. But in the Textus Receptus, the Majority Text, the Byzantine Text, New King James and King James Manuscript, it does have the word the. But I do need to tell you something. The doctrine of this being an individual does not depend on that the. Because the word here in verse 18, the first part is singular and masculine. So whether the word "the" is there or not, it is an individual. Okay? So the reason I say that to you is because some people will argue eschatologically over that word. I don't want to argue over it. I can tell you that it's almost untenable grammatically, syntactically to mean this is something other than one single individual. So whatever John means here, he is saying an individual Antichrist is coming. Do you see it? In the future. Now, obviously, with my eschatology, that fits fine. It fits fine that we believe in an Antichrist that sets himself up during the tribulation time. We believe in that. So I don't have the wrestling that other people do. But what— and I don't even want you to wrestle, by the way, if you disagree with that. This isn't to cause wrestling. But the main point here is if you hear the interpretation that this is just and antichrist among many, it really begs the text. It stretches the text. Because the text could just say there are a lot of antichrists out there. But it doesn't. It delineates this one individual one from the others that are working at the time of John's day. So he does say, as you have heard, the antichrist is coming. As you understand, the antichrist is coming. An antichrist or the antichrist, but I actually think it's the because it doesn't have the article. So there's a rule there that if a noun doesn't have the word "the" in front of it, it can only mean one of two things. That's for another time. I'll give you the Greek lesson on another day. But for now, singular, and then the ones that come later in the verse, even now many antichrists have come. You could maybe try to draw the conclusion that the singular one is just an equal or a peer of the many. I don't think so. I think we'll see later John is going to talk about the spirit of antichrist, that there is an individual antichrist that is significant and labeled somehow. And then there are some who come in that same spirit that the individual comes as against Christ. And that is literally the meaning of the word, by the way. Antichrist is literally the word. That's what it means. The people who— you can call them the against Christs. That's what you could call them. Those are the against Christs. That's what those people are. That's how you describe them.

So it's the last hour. You've heard that Antichrist, the one individual masculine Noun is coming in the future. The Antichrist is coming. And then he says, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it's the last hour. So something tells us it's the last hour. What tells us that we are closer to the second coming of Christ, the judgment of God on the world, the end of all things? What tells us that? That there are people who are against Christ out there active, that people are trying to shut down the work of Christ. They're trying to undermine the ministry of Christ and his people. These are the against Christs that are attacking churches. They're trying to mislead people, and that's what John is going to tell us. Don't listen to them, right? So it's indicative of the last time that there are deceivers and antichrists. That tells you that you know you're in the last times, not the beginning times or the final consummation of all things. So John is saying, little children, it's the last hour. Antichrist is coming. Even now there are people that are like antichrist, that are against Christ, plural, at work in the world right now. And we know because they're at work in the world, it's— his coming is soon. Judgment is coming. And you need to be on guard until he gets here. That's the idea.

And then this verse that we know really well, but I wonder if we know it really well. Look at verse 19, please. They— that's interesting. That's a pronoun. What's it referring to? Antichrist. They who were antichrist went out from us, but they were not of us. For if they had been of us, they would have remained, or continued, with us. But they went out that they might be made manifest, that none of them were of us.

It is indicative that you are anti-Christ if you do not want to be in the body of Christ. Now, Pastor Jonny, are you about to tell me that I should wonder if someone is a Christian or not? If they're not part of a church? And Pastor Jonny tells you, "Yes." In fact, my Reformed brothers, my professors, have even told me that in some of their denominations, if you are not a member of a church, they don't even consider you a Christian. That you can't call yourself a Christian and not be a member of a church. Now, you're all stunned in silence right now because American Christianity is we're all individuals. I'm the church, you and me at coffee, right? Two or more are gathered. This is indicative of Antichrist, that they went out from us to go do their own thing, to not be a part of John and the little children, because that's who the us is. They went out from us. Who's us? It's John and the little children, the gathered church, the identifiable church, the Christian community.

Now, I'm not talking about the kind of membership. Do you sign a sheet? Do you get voted on? I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about joining a church, being identified with a congregation. You would know that Timothy was a member of the church at Ephesus. You would know that Titus was a member of the church at Crete. You knew that because they were identified with that local congregation. And here he's saying the Antichrist left us. So let me just say it this way: no genuine believer, no true believer who loves the Word of God, who loves what God says is good for Christians, is okay not being gathered under the head with the body. So be careful if you think that it is preferable to live your Christian life apart from the body when the text just told us that the the people who went out from us and didn't join with the body and didn't continue with the body under the teaching of the word of God and its apostles, those people are called antichrist. Very different than in our day. Very different.

Look at what it says next. It says, for if they had been of us— this is— he's saying this is an axiom. This is a matter of self-evident fact. The way you know you're not antichrist is that you continue with the people who are of Christ. There's so many people who think, "Yeah, I'm a Christian. I prayed a prayer. I love Jesus, but I don't have to join with His people. I don't have to serve His people. I don't have to be a part of what He's doing." If they had been of us, they would have continued with us.

Listen carefully to what Jesus says in the book of Matthew as He's giving those very much eschatological statements about end times. Jesus says, "For false Christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. False teachers are trying to deceive the elect. But what did John just tell us? The elect can't be deceived. You wanna know why? 'Cause they would have continued with us who are in the truth. So believers cannot be deceived. That's good news, but it also should make you wonder about a lot of people who are not of us, with us, gathered with us under the teaching of the truth who will fall for any lie out there. A true believer can't in good conscience be apart from a body of believers, be apart from the true gathering, whatever that means in the way that we understand that in Scripture. The ekklesia, the called-out ones, the elect. I don't know if you know, but the word elect and the word church are directly related. They're actually the same word in two different forms. The elect are the called-out ones, and the church is the called-out one in the feminine. The elect is masculine and the church is feminine, but it's the same word, the called-out ones. So we have been called out of the world, called out of darkness, called out of sin, called out of being enslaved, called out of slavery. We are now joined to Christ, and we're joined together as a body of believers. We are one in Christ. And now that we've been called out and gathered, if one of us thinks we can leave that and be deceived and fall for a lie and go out and be our own Antichrist, John is saying, you're not the real thing. If you can be deceived, if you can leave the body, if you can leave the truth, you are not a Christian.

But they went out. Now look at this language, because John uses language that I think many modern Christians would never use. I've always said that, that a lot of churches would not want Paul as their preacher. Not only maybe because of the hard things he says, but because he might not have been a good speaker. He says, "They say my speech is contemptible." He might have been telling the truth. Well, same with John. John is the love apostle, right? He tells only loving things, "Love one another." John's the soft teddy bear guy. Well, let's look, the last part of verse 19, "But they went out that they might be made manifest," apparent, clear, "that none of them were of us."

I'm going to say something right now. I debated, I put it in my notes, and then I even joked about it with my family. I bragged about this. Thing I came up with. Like, man, I should be on Twitter. This is the kind of thing you would say on X. That's clever, right? I'm going to put this on a t-shirt. And I did this with my family jokingly saying I was clever. So I'm going to tell it to you now, this church that I love so much. I don't want you to take it as me being clever.

Please don't take it that way. I mean, it is clever and it's funny and yeah, it's a zinger and you go, ooh, that's a good one. You're going to say all of that, but I do want you to catch the truth of it. Don't lose the truth of it and the cleverness of it. It hurts my feelings sometimes, people, when they say, "It was funny when you used that funny voice." I'm like, "That's all you got out of the sermon is when I said something stupid or silly?" I want you to get the truth of it. So it is funny, it is clever, it is silly, but I want you to take it with you. I'm not on social media, but you might want to post it on social media or put it on a t-shirt or bumper sticker.

Jesus said, and you know this well, "My sheep hear my voice and I know them." Finish it for me. What do they do when they hear his voice and he knows them? Follow him. I'm gonna suggest to you that Antichrist's goats hear his voice and he knows them and they follow him. Clever, huh? You impressed with that? Put it aside though, please. Put aside the clever because it is true what I just said. That the deceivers who go out from us, the deceivers who say you don't have to be involved, gathered, collected, as a group of people, the called-out ones gathered together. Those people who say you don't need that, those people who say you can be a Christian without that, those people who say that you don't need the body of Christ, that you don't have to serve the body of Christ, that Christianity is about you, anybody that's saying that is antichrist. It is antichrist, and you don't want to be involved in it or confirm it or affirm it.

Be careful, because in our culture, to say something like that, to say, like my professor would, that if you're not a part of the church, you're probably not a Christian and we don't treat you as a Christian. So somebody comes into the church as a visitor and complains about what's happening, my professors essentially say, "So what? So what if you're just dating the church? Why should I treat you like a spouse? If you're not committed to a body of believers, you're self-accountable to that body, why would we give you credibility?" So I have adopted some of that. I don't go all the way with it and say that there are no Christians outside the church, but I think there's something to that idea that I am saying, if I say I'm with Christ, then that means I'm with his people because he's the head over his body. And I find some way to be accountable to that thing, to be under the headship of that thing, and to not try to find my identity as a Christian apart from that thing because that's what antichrists do. I don't want to do what they do. I'm pro-Christ, not antichrist. So his people are here. The accountability is there. My accountability with them is there. Their accountability with me is here. Their prayer support of me is there. My prayer support of them is here. This is where we gather and support each other. And John is saying it was evident they weren't of us. Why? They left. If they were of us, they would still be here. And now he's saying, it was obvious that none of them were of us. It's obvious. It was indicative. We had a meter. We found a way to test whether somebody is a true believer or not. And you take your meter and you turn it on, you put it on the right setting, and you put it on their heart, and it says, they left the Christian church. Not Christian. The meter tells you they're not the real thing. They're antichrist.

So we need to be really careful trying to call people Christian trying to talk people into heaven, trying to convince ourselves and others that they are Christian when John is literally saying there is a way to know. It's made manifest. It's obvious. It's apparent. It's shown to you in front of you who is and isn't. The ones that go out, the ones that are deceived or become a deceiver. You'll see that in a moment.

Now, I love what he does here. He does a— there's an interesting grammatical thing here that I'm just not capable of relaying to you. It isn't that you're not capable of understanding it. I'm just not smart enough to put it in the right words. So do your best to overcome my weakness, okay? I'm not a scholar. I'm a normal guy. I try to be a scholar, but I'm not, okay? I'm not an academic. I'm an ex-janitor trying to preach the word accurately, okay? So follow me on this. Grammatically, there are words called— well, first of all, you know what conjunctions are, right? Remember Schoolhouse Rock? Conjunction junction. Yeah? Yeah? OK. I hear people singing it. Hooking up words and phrases and clauses. That's how I learned grammar, by the way. So sorry, I learned it from a cartoon. I went to 16 different schools from first grade to high school. I moved around a lot because of my mom.

So follow me. A conjunction is a word that joins usually nouns, phrases or nouns, right? There are adversative conjunctions, and then there are additive conjunctions. An adversative is usually the word "but," B-U-T. Not this, but that, right? And there are two different kinds of adversative. There's a strong one and a weak one. Now, here's the crazy part of Greek. I already told you my professor, we used to call him Dr. Usually, because there's these rules, but then there's all kinds of exceptions to every rule. So usually means this, but it can mean that. Okay, there are two different B-U-T words. One of them is the Greek word de, delta epsilon. It's a little word. Is a weak adversative. So it's the word "but," but it's not a strong one. Right? It's not strong. The other word, "ala"— A-L-A-O. Sorry, alpha, lambda, lambda, alpha. Don't want my professor to get mad at me. You're always supposed to use the Greek letters, not the English. That word, "ala," is a strong adversative. Right? There is false gospel, not the false gospel, but strong, the true gospel. Very strong opposites, black and white. Got it?

So here, the crazy thing is almost all your translations say, "But they went out from us." Then it also says in verse 20, "But you have an anointing." Well, in verse 20, it's not an adversative. It's actually the additive. It's the word "kai," which is almost always translated "and." Not either/or, but this and that. So if you were to read that, "They went out that they might be made manifest that none of them were of us." and you, that sounds a little strange. There's a reason why they give it the adversative instead of the additive in the translation. I'm saying that to you because I want you to see that there is the idea of you are not like them, but there's also the idea like this is a big amplified reality. That's the idea with the word and. So I'm not going to translate it and. I'm not going to argue with the translators and make it and. I don't feel that I'm not scholarly and capable as a translator, even though we would have to translate these kind of things in class. I do want you to see it, because I think there's something going on there. I even think, and I'm going to say something that I saw in no commentaries or anybody, and I might be wrong, so take this with a grain of salt, but it's really— what's a super theological way to say neat? Neat. Cool. Cool? That's not theological. Help me with a theological way of saying extremely compelling. I don't know. I'm trying to find a theological way to say it's compelling. I'm going to say it, and it's a grain of salt. Don't go beat your neighbors over the head with this, and my pastor says this, so it's true. No. But there is something interesting that happens with that additive and with what comes after it. It's interesting that John does this. If it's wordplay and we get to heaven, he's going to give me points for catching it. That you saw it, PJ. Good job. He's not going to call me PJ.

I don't know what he's going to call me. But I do want you to see it. If it's there, I want you to see it. But I don't want to say it with authority like it is there and you have to see it, okay? Here's what I think is happening. When he says, "And you have an anointing," do you know the word here for anointing for the believer, for the little children, is the form and the lexical stem of Christ. It's Christ. So the word Christ means anointed. Christos, that's the word for anointing. When we call him Jesus Christ, Christ is not a name. It's a title. It's a designation. His name is Jesus, Yeshua. But Christos means he is the Messiah, the anointed one, the one chosen by God by endowment, by anointing, the one that God has approved of. That's what his name means, right?

So in an interesting wordplay, I think John is doing this here, you are of Christ because you have an anointing. That word is used here, chrismō. The same form of the word Christos. Not the same form, but the same stem, the same root word. So if I'm right, he's saying you are not— literally, he's saying you are not the ones who are anti-Christos. You are yourself Christo-ish. You have a gifting like Christ has a gifting. Not the same kind, not the same level, but you connected to him instead of going out. You're so in that he's using the same kind of word, the same related word to Christ himself. It even says it. You have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things. It's powerful what John is saying.

If I understand him correctly, he's saying something really powerful, like you are not only not antichrist, you are connected directly to Christ to where what the anointing that Christ has as Christ, you have a special anointing. It says of the Holy One. So this, in my opinion, elevates our connection with Christ to an amplified major degree. That we are not just here in the group, we are here in the body and anointed with the Anointed One himself, so associated with him that we get the title of being anointed. It's powerful, it's humbling even. Instead of that giving you a big head, that should give you a really small head. Like, wow, he would associate with me and I couldn't leave him. I'm evidently, obviously, axiomatically, truthfully, genuinely one of his. So much so that I get some form of the title that he gets as anointed by God. It's powerful, the connection we're supposed to see with Christ. I think John wants us to see. And I love the way he amplifies it in verse 21. I have not written to you because you do not know. That's the way I would talk. I'm not writing to you because you don't know, he says, the truth, but because you know it, and that no lie is of the truth.

"You see how strong it is that the little children connected, not the ones who leave and that are anti, but the ones who are here and pro and anointed themselves, the ones who are connected, the ones who are not like the ones in the previous chapter, all right, leading up to this." You remember when he said over and over again, the things that people say, but the truth isn't in them, the things they treat, the way they treat their brothers, but the word is not in them, right? This idea of claiming or professing to be a Christian, but all you are is a fake, you're phony. You're cubic zirconia. You're not real, right? You say you're one thing, but you do another.

Listen to how strongly he's saying of the real believers, the real little children, the ones who are still of us. Now, there's a meta thing here. I don't like doing what I'm doing, by the way. I don't like pretending I see things that nobody else has seen. But sometimes when you're studying, you see things, and I want to share it. So this is me again. This is just another PJ-ism. The other one was— Maybe he is saying anointed like Christ is anointed, or to some degree connecting our anointing to his because it is the same form of the Greek word. There's something there. I don't know the volume that should be in your ears. Okay, take it as a grain of salt.

Similar here, but I am going to say something funny. This is interesting to me, that if you were not of us or among us, if you weren't of John or of the little children, you would not have been reading or hearing the letter of 1 John. Do you all understand that? So I want you to imagine, here is a church. Let's say we are one of the churches that John is writing to. I'm writing to you, little children at Sovereign Grace Baptist Church. You are not them. They left. They are gone. They are antichrist. And we're going to see in a little bit they've been deceived. But not you. You know things.

Now the thing that's kind of meta here, that's got layers, is that John is writing that. And in order for that to have any impact, someone has to read it. And in order to read it, you got to be at the place where it's read. So just by virtue of the fact that he's saying, "I am not writing or I have not written to you," you are still here. So you have to hear it. You have to be there. I say that's important in the bigger picture of things to people who think that they can just go read the Bible and be a Christian on their own. The New Testament hadn't been written yet when these people were reading it. The Y-O-U here, the little children, they didn't have Bibles. They knew the Old Testament by practice and by their life, but there's no doubt that there was no collection of New Testament writings at this time yet. So in order for them to know things and hear things, they had to be of us. They had to be here.

So I'm pushing that into the text, but it is there, and I do want you to see. No lie is of the truth. The Spirit cannot give lies. You are not contradictions. You are not hypocrites. You are not antichrist. You're pro-Christ. You're here right now reading my words and you know things. And I might ask you in the room, are you here right now hearing the words of John knowing things? And if you are, say hallelujah. I'm gonna go Pentecostal on you and say you've been anointed. You've been anointed by God, chosen, endowed, loved, blessed if you know the truth. In the room, I'm talking to you right now. I'm not talking to John's audience. I'm talking to my audience.

Are you going to count your blessing today? When you leave here, are you going to count your blessing that you understand things that God gave you to understand? That he gave you the understanding, he gave you the word, he gave you the environment, he worked things out in your life to save you and bring you to himself? So that you right now, if you hear his voice and you hear his word and it's meaningful to you and you are thankful and in your guts you're saying, "I could have been Antichrist. I could have been one of them. But instead I'm pro-Christ and he saved me and he's preserved me and he's taken care of me." Oh, please thank the Lord for that today if you haven't. You are of the truth. You know the truth. I'm not writing to you because you don't know it. I'm writing to you because you do know it. You have ears to hear, to use Jesus' language, right? You can see the truth. You understand the truth. You're of Christ. You're anointed.

And then he goes on to say, warning, verse 22, who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son. Oh, I could go a long time on this right here. I could really dig in right here. Who is a liar but he who denies Jesus is the Christ? Okay. The Bible uses the word Christ in the New Testament, Christos, that's the word. In the Old Testament, the word is Messiah, Meshiach. If you want to impress your friends and spit on them, you can say Meshiach. That's the word in the Old Testament for Messiah. It's all over the place, and it doesn't only apply to Jesus. David is called the Messiah. Even some of the enemies of God are called the Messiah. They're chosen by God to do a thing. They're anointed by God to do a thing, right?

So when God puts his anointing, He puts His hand on you, He either endows you specially with the Spirit of God for a task, for a mission, with a position. If God approves of you and that idea of anointing happens, that's the word, meshiach, in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, that same word is Christos. Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the chosen one, the anointed one, the Son of God, the Savior of the world, all the things that the Bible says of Jesus Christ. Anybody that denies the things associated with his Christ-ness is a liar.

Now, I want to emphasize that because you live in a day— I have literally met somebody, and I'll talk about that in the next point, who thinks they're a Christian who doesn't believe Jesus existed. Who is a liar but anybody that denies that he is the Messiah? You can't deny the Christ and be anything but antichrist. That's why John says it. But I also want you to see the connection with the Father here. The connection with the Father. I'll emphasize it in a second, but notice that he brings the Father into it. He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son.

And I'll emphasize that in a second. But first, for now, there are people that say lots of things about Jesus. He was a great moral teacher. He was really a good example. He was a figurehead, but not necessarily a real person. There are people say lots of things about Jesus. There's lots of false things you can say about Jesus. But if you say anything other than the truth that he is the Christ and the Messiah, you are a liar. And if you're a liar, you've denied not only the Son and the Messiah and the Christ, but you denied the one who sent him.

So now this is important for people who go to the whole, like, higher power idea. You know, like, I can believe in God without being a Christian and God's okay with me. No, I just— in fact, going through this, I had a conviction because there's somebody I know outside of church in another sort of part of my life who is very— he likes the idea that all religions can be practiced freely. He loves that idea. Not that he is necessarily not religious himself. He is religious. He's in a specific religion. But the idea is he wants it to be that all religions are equal. He loves that aspect of especially our culture that says all religions are equal.

And somebody— I heard a conversation between him and somebody else where that somebody says, "No, only one can be right." Right? And he did not understand that. It wasn't landing with him. "No, they're all equal." Well, the person was trying to tell him, "No, some of them are exclusive. Like, they say of themselves they're the only true one, so the other ones can't be true." Right? And we know that. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. Right? So now we see it. Passages I was going through, it reminded me and hit me in the heart, "Man, I need to say that to my friend." I had conviction that I hadn't really ever just like really said it to him. I've said it in other conversations and other contexts, what it means to be a Christian and everything, but I need to tell him, "No, Christianity excludes other religions." It does. It internally says it is the only true religion. Jesus says it. The Bible says it. And so I did. I wrote him a note and a letter because of this text.

Because there are people who say they can be of God, they can be spiritual, they can be religious, and think they're okay with the Almighty when this says they're antichrist. Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either. Verse 23, he who acknowledges the Son has the Father also. Jesus said he and his Father are one. They have unity together. So let me just say it plainly if you were wondering. If somebody thinks they're spiritual and worship God and have a relationship with the Almighty God, but they deny the true Jesus of the Bible, they are lost and will be condemned by God. God does not count their religion as a good thing because they're denying his Son.

So make sure, make no mistake, our culture is pluralistic. That means it allows all religion. Our culture stands for religious freedom. It's in our Constitution. These are things that are foundational to our country. And you might get the idea that because our country saw fit to make it foundationally free that there will not be a state-run religion, that what it intended was that all religions would be equal. That wasn't true even with the founding fathers. Just so you know, they expected Christianity to be the only true religion in the country, even though there were deists and other people in those things. So they would never have had the idea that— I'm sorry to say this to you— Islam would have been okay in the United States of America. That would have never been on their minds.

So if you think that the idea of our nation, that pluralism and freedom of religion and everybody believing their own things, if you take that idea and try to shove it into the Bible and say, "God is okay with me thinking that," he just told you he's not. Jesus is exclusive. And he said it himself, "You're either with me or you're against me." So look at my note in verse 23, "Christians do not deny Christ." That looks dumb, doesn't it? It's not dumb. That's what I'm telling you. I've met more than one person, but I've only met one person that actually said it out loud, that they are Christian. I am a Christian, but I don't believe Jesus was a real person. They didn't say that sentence. They said they don't believe that the New Testament actually records the life and the experience of a real person, but that the main idea is conceptual to impress upon us the morals and ethics of what we know as Christianity.

So they'll say, I'm a Christian, even though I don't believe the historical narrative of Jesus. Well, you can't be a Christian and ignore the real person Jesus. You can't. He was real. He was really born. He was born of a virgin. He lived on this earth 2,000 or so years ago. He walked the land of Israel. He died a cruel death, and he rose from the dead. All of that literally happened in the body of a human being named Jesus of Nazareth. If you deny that, you are not Christian. Please stop trying to make people Christian. Stop trying to tell God people are Christian that God says aren't Christian. Stop trying to say because someone points up at the end zone and this guy in the end zone when they make a touchdown that they're a Christian. Or because they thank their Lord and Savior after a sporting event or winning an award that they're a Christian. We need to be careful when the Lord is literally telling us. He said, "It's manifest that they're not of us. I'm trying to tell you who's not of us."

It's the ones that went out. It's the ones that aren't joined. It's the ones that don't have the truth abiding in them. It's the ones that aren't anointed. Those ones who don't walk as Christ walked, who don't hear his voice. They're not his. So please, my fellow Christian in this room, let's stop trying to tell God, "No, I think they're yours. You need to love them the way I think you should love them." Let God sort that out. Don't deny the Father or the Son. Be careful of what's called Christomonism. You might go the other way. Instead of just saying general, vague, spirituality, a higher power, I believe in something so that makes me Christian. You might go the other way and say, no, I'm so Christ-centered that I'm a red-letter only person and I only believe in Jesus and I don't look at the Old Testament and I don't look at the Father-related passages, only the Jesus-related passages. That's an equal mistake, just on the other end of the pendulum.

The Father and Son are undeniably unified. Same with the Spirit. You can't separate the triune God into pieces. So if you think you honor the Father, you have to honor the Son. If you think you honor the Son, you have to honor the Father. It's called Christomonism, where you make Christ essentially the only deity, the only object of worship, and you deny his Father or the Spirit. Now look at verse 24. Now we get some commands. We're getting close to the imperative pressure on us to hear what John is saying.

So John is saying it's the last hour. And the way we know it's the last hour is there's a lot of people that are against Christ in my time, John's time, but there also will be a future individual that is the Antichrist. He will rise up and try to take the— if you believe in the eschatology that we do, you know he'll set himself up as Christ, right? He's going to essentially try to take the shine of Christ. And John is telling us, don't fall for anybody that would take you out from among the gathering of believers. Don't get off like a maverick Christian on your own and think you're okay with God. You need to join with solid, Bible-believing, truth-exalting believers, people who handle the Word correctly, who put your attention on the Word, who tell you what the Word is saying about the He's the true Christ.

And you're not the person I'm writing to that doesn't need to hear that. You know the things I'm telling you, John is saying. You know what I'm telling you. You don't walk in lies. You walk in truth. You're not a hypocrite. You're consistent. You're not antichrist. You're pro-Christ. You're anointed like he is. And now he's gotten to this point where he's saying, whoever denies him denies the Father and the Son. So you don't get to just say, like maybe a Jew might say, that I believe in the Father of Abraham, but I don't believe in the Son of God. Nope. That's not Christian. It's not enough to believe in Abraham's God. You have to believe in the Son that Abraham looked forward to.

So these are all important things that tell us we have to believe in the Son and the Father. Then he says in verse 24, "Therefore let that abide—" this is an imperative command— "Therefore let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, you will also abide in the Son and in the Father." The Father and the Son are unified, and if you walk in the truth that you heard, you are in the Father and in the Son. You have unity with them. That's exactly what Jesus prayed in His high priestly prayer, that they may be one as you and I are one, right? So unity, the union with Christ, I want to preach on that sometime, union with Christ. I remember in seminary I did a big long study on it and it never left me.

What is John talking about, what you heard from the beginning? He opened his letter with it, that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us, and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. That which we declared to you. You believed the truths that we gave you. That's what he's saying to the audience. The little children received the truth. They did not go out as antichrist. They stayed in the truth, in the body of believers, to put it in our language, in the church. They stayed with the people. They were born again by the word, like Peter says. They stayed connected. And you know the truth. You abide in the truth. You don't follow the lies. Liars say that Jesus isn't the Christ. You say that he is the Christ.

So he's drawing this distinction between true believers who believe in Christ who trust in Christ, who don't believe in the deceivers out there, and they stay joined. And now he's saying, "This is what you heard from the beginning, and if you abide in it, you have unity with the Father and with the Son." You are connected to God if you stay in the truth. Jesus says this even when he says, "If my word abides in you," right? The idea of abiding in truth, the idea of staying in the sphere of truth, surrounded in truth, immersed in truth. John had declared the word to them. The word connects them to the Son and the Father, and now they are abiding in it. And instead of following the lies that are outside, they stay with the truth that's inside. They're committed to the truth.

In verse 25, "And this is the promise that he promised us, eternal life." He's going to say something like this later more explicitly where he says, "He who has the Son has the life." He's going to say that in those words later, but he's saying it here too. That if you abide in truth and you're sphere'd in the Father and in the Son, and instead of following those who went out from us, instead of leaving congregational ecclesiastical safety and going out by yourself and becoming a maverick loner who's trying to do your Christianity apart from the body of believers, instead of somebody that's trying to wing it and figure it out on their own, you're connected with truth, you're connected with the people of truth, you're accountable, you serve each other, you love each other, you're listening to the teaching of, in this case, John, and you're connected in that way, you see that you now are connected to the promise. All the promises God made apply to you. Not only are you anointed, but you have eternal life. You're connected to the place and the people of eternal life because they are connected to their head, the Christ. You're in the safe place. This is the safe place around God's people, with us, John and the little children.

And then he says it so clearly, just as clear as it can be, in verse 26: These things I have written to you concerning those who try to deceive you. Now, we don't have time for me to go around the room and ask, but I would love to ask, and now instead of you answering out loud to me, answer yourself. How do you know whether or not you're being deceived? How would you know if you are being deceived? Or even more generally, how do you know when someone is trying to deceive you? How do you know? Because we can't all be right. I'm in a pulpit. Does that make me right? I'm on YouTube. Does that make me right? I wrote books. Does that make me right? I went to seminary. Does that make me right? How do we know if we're, first of all, ourselves being deceived? And then secondly, how do we know if somebody's trying to deceive us? How do we indicate these things?

One indicator is right here in the text. They went out from us. If they're not of a congregation or accountable to the congregation that speaks truth in the Word of God, you can just dismiss them. "No, they say they're a Christian." Ah, a lot of people say they're a Christian. There's a lot of people that also say they love their brother and walk in darkness. "I've written to you concerning those who try to deceive you." Antichrists follow deception. But I want you to know they don't just follow deception, they turn into deceivers themselves. Nobody stays neutral. If you follow a teacher, you don't want to be an idiot that says, "I don't know why I followed him." So what do you do? You not only adopt his teaching, you start promoting his teaching. What does that make you if you're promoting a deceiver's teaching? A deceiver, whether you know it or not.

But I don't think you can be deceived because you're the elect. So John is saying, I just want to make sure we're clear. I'm not writing to you because you don't know. I'm writing to you because people are trying to deceive you. John might be saying, stay sharp, be vigilant, keep your eyes open, don't fall for everything that's being said out there. Listen carefully to the things that accord with reality and with the truth. Because deceivers don't just go out and stay the lone deceiver. They get followers. And those followers will also try to get you.

And then here it is, there's our word again in verse 27. But the anointing which you have received from him abides in you, and you do not need that anyone teach you, but as the same anointing teaches you concerning all things and is true and is not a lie, And just as he has taught you, you will abide in him. I could see somebody abusing this verse saying, we don't need teachers then, right? Because I've already been taught. Who are the people reading these words from? His name's John, and John is teaching them. Is John teaching people that they don't need teachers? Because if that was true, they wouldn't need John. So he's not saying you don't need teachers. That is not what he's saying.

He is saying, you who heard from the beginning, who received the truth of the gospel, you who know what John declared in the first verses of the book, you who know Jesus, you who heard the gospel and responded to the gospel with faith, you who repented of your sins, became a Christian, joined the body of believers, became one of the true followers, not the antichrist, but the pro-Christ, you people who know the truth, you are the ones, you who receive the anointing, you who are connected to the anointed one with your own anointing, You who he loves, you who he gives the promise of eternal life to, you know these things. So I don't need to repeat them all to you to teach you like you don't know again. You know them. Now establish yourself in them. Fortify yourself in them. You have the word of God. You know the teaching of Christ. Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would teach, right? The Holy Spirit would come and teach his disciples all things and remind them of all things. You were taught, now abide in him.

Do you see it? You will abide in the truth because you've been taught by the real God. You're anointed, so you're in the truth. So I say to us in the room by application, the way we use this verse is not to say we don't need teachers, it's to say the things that we've been taught are so strong and meaningful and truthful that we need to abide in those things and grow in our understanding of them. Not get casual, not say it doesn't matter if I'm with the body or not. He goes through all this trouble to say, John learned from Jesus, we learned from John, the Spirit of God taught the apostles, now the Spirit of God teaches us. We're connected with the Spirit, with the Son, with the Father, even with the apostles. All of this truth was given to us so that we would be pro-Son and pro-Father and pro-truth, and we would be abiding, remaining. That word means to remain so that nobody can shake us from the foundation. We are locked in to the true word. God and his realities of Scripture.

So I can just ask you plainly, is it your desire— do you have a heartfelt desire to be outside of Christ, to be separate from God? Now you might say, I have trouble being with his people. Or you might be like me, and I know you all don't believe me, like I would just lie to you from the pulpit, but I am an introvert. So if I'm by myself, I'm okay. I'm never sitting by myself saying, "I wish I was around lots of people." Now let me tell you something. I love you people. I think of you all the time. I pray for you all the time. I love you. I love being with you when I'm with you. That doesn't mean I'm social. But me, that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm not social, but I want to be around you. Are you following me? Because you are God's people. You're good for me and I want to be good for you. You feed me and I want to feed you. We look out for each other. We're safe together when we're doing it right. This is where Christ is. This is where the body is. We're gathered.

So I'm asking you, does that appeal to you to be with the body of Christ, to have that accountability, to know that I'm safest when I'm with his people, when I'm under the preaching and teaching of the word, when I'm being discipled, when I'm learning, when I'm prayerful, when I'm around God's people, when they serve me and I serve them? Is that where I want to be? Or do I really want to be where the antichrists are? Do I want to be my own little maverick religion out there, saying what I want is true, making the Bible say what I want it to say, just being my own little individual island out there of Christianity? I suggest to you that you want to be here and should want to be here. And again, I don't just mean Sovereign Grace, but to you, I mean Sovereign Grace. I mean you here in this place with these people. Be anchored in truth. Be anointed. Walk in truth.

Let's pray. Father, now as we close this service, I would ask that we would very much want to be pro-Christ, that we would not have any inclination in us at all to not be of Christ or His people. First of all, that we would take the warnings of the text and not be deceived. But even more today, Father, that we might— maybe today there might be someone here that has walked with you for a good amount of time of their life, that maybe they do know you, maybe today might just spark a refreshed zeal to be connected to the Anointed One. And maybe, Father, there's someone who has never committed to Christ. Maybe they need to make a clear decision to trust and follow Jesus, and that this might encourage them to do that. And Father, for all of us, that none of us would follow deceivers, that we would not be antichrist. Help us please to that end. In Jesus' name, amen.

You can stand. We'll sing the last verse.