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Water, Blood and Spirit |
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Water,
Blood, And Spirit
Sometimes there are things we should know, things even about ourselves,
but we don’t know them . . .
Take the American Idol or Canadian Idol
shows for example. I don’t really follow the shows, but, I
think we can all appreciate that while they have to eliminate a huge
number of very talented people, there are occasionally people who
should have known, before they went to audition, that it wasn’t going
to be their thing. Some of those folks, someone, some friend,
some parent, should have said: ‘this is not your gig.’ I was
going to play a clip, but, they’re so sincere, and we’re all laughing .
. . it’s a painful guilt making experience.
Not all the things that we might not
know about ourselves, are bad. The passage today is about
knowing some things about ourselves. Verse 3, “This is how we
know we love . . .”, vs 13, “I write these things to you . . . so that
you may know that you have . . .”. This passage
today is about knowing. Knowing that we’re doing the right
things, and knowing that we have the good thing for which we hope –
eternal life.
A short time after I became a Christian,
I was concerned that maybe something was wrong. I began to
wonder if maybe I wasn’t really a Christian after all. Part
of it was that there were other Christians I’d see or hear about, and
their experience of being a Christian seemed so different than what was
happening with me. I wondered if something about me was the
problem. I knew that some of the things I thought weren’t
good, and some of the things I’d been doing weren’t so good . . . and
so when I heard about other people’s experiences of God or the Holy
Spirit or Christian life . . . I was anxious. Maybe there was
stuff I didn’t know, or something I hadn’t done.
I was out one night with a very good
friend from my church . . . and I got up the courage to ask
him. Do you ever wonder if there’s something else that you’re
missing? His answer was timed perfectly for where I was at
that point in my Christian life. He said if God wasn’t
already active in my life, I probably wouldn’t be concerned.
The fact that we were concerned about it was a sign that God had
started something genuine in our hearts. And God had started
something very real in our lives. It was early in the
journey, there was a lot to come – there still is – but what God was
beginning in our lives was the real thing. My friend’s answer
that night helped me to know that was so.
John is writing with the same kind of
heart. He’s concerned that his people are able to tell what’s
true from what’s false, and he’s concerned that they know when they’re
experiencing the truth and reality of God’s work. It matters
that you know what’s happening in your life and relationship with
God. It matter’s, because if you don’t know, there is a kind
of anxiety that will push you through door after door looking for that
knowledge. We’ll keep sniffing after affirmation,
auditioning, in a way, for all kinds of lives and attitudes, and
decisions and directions and beliefs . . . and that kind of life has no
peace in it. It’s an ongoing cycle that will whip you
along. And John doesn’t want that for his people; God doesn’t
want that for his people. And so we find that there are some
things that can help us settle down with gentle knowledge about our
standing before God in his kingdom.
The first few verses of our passage
today summarize a lot of what we’ve already read in John, all the
themes of obedience and love and faith and being children of God are
woven together in the first five verses. And they’re woven so
tightly, that when you read it you feel like your mind is going to spin
out of your head! Let me take a shot at simplifying the first
five verses.
When you are born of God, God is like your father. And if you
really love your father, you’ll love all his other kids as
well. To love our father God is to love his
children. That’s actually his command too. One
command Jesus gives us: love one another. The Apostle Paul
says in Romans 13:8-10 that all the commandments, and “whatever other
commandment there might be, are summed up in this one rule: ‘love your
neighbour as yourself.’” “Love is the fulfilment of the law”,
he says.
The thing is that it’s hard to
love. So hard, that John calls it overcoming the
world. The features of our world, from the most diabolical
systems of evil down to our own earthly nature, make it hard to
love. Jesus sweat drops of blood carrying his work of love
through . . . to love as God commands will make us sweat, and maybe
bleed, too. And that struggle to love – to overcome the world
and be what God has called us to be – that struggle can affect our
confidence before God. What John says, in effect, is that our
assurance and confidence before God is tied to the way that we love
faithfully.
There’s a risk with just that, though.
The day comes when we think we’re doing ok, and then we laugh in
someone’s face when they fail. Or something we say bites – or
worse. If our assurance – our Christian identity – is tied
only to the way we carry out the command to love, then there is a risk
that relational or moral failures could tear at our roots.
And so there’s more that God does to help reassure us of his love for
us, and the certainty of his grip on our lives.
There’s the way that we love, but
there’s also the testimony of God. As though our inner person
were having a trial, the forces of the world denying and accusing and
sowing doubt and mistrust on the one side of the court, and then God
and his witnesses lined up on the other side. God’s testimony
in our inner court – his voice which reassures and calls out his love
for us – comes in three things that John lists for us here.
Verse 7, there are 3 that testify. The Spirit, the water, and
the blood.
John says that anyone who believes in
the son of God has this testimony in his heart. The Spirit,
the water, and the blood.
The Spirit. The time came for
me to decide if I wanted to propose to Michelle. On my trip
around Wales for two weeks, I had time to talk to God as I made up my
mind. I felt badly about having Michelle back home waiting,
and up until a week before I’d felt distant from God for some
time. The week before, at an Alpha conference in London, was
like reconnecting with God again, and as I left that environment of
talking about evangelism and doing God’s work, and also then an
environment of worship and prayer and growing community where I’d
sensed God’s spirit at work, I was alone again. Would God
continue to speak?
It was in the first few days of my trip that I went down into an area
called the Gower. There were two sights I wanted to see
there, Pennard Castle on the south shore – the ruins of an ancient
Castle filled with sand, and a small peninsula called Worm’s Head (at
high tide the peninsula becomes an Island, and it looks like a dragon
lifting our of the sea). When I arrived at my camp sight, I
was late, and I needed to see Worm’s Head that night because the next
day would be quite full. As I pulled into the car park, the
sun was about to set – and as I looked south along the coast, I could
see that Worm’s Head was some distance away. I’d never make
it before the sun set! But I did make it. And
despite everything I know about astronomy and the fact that if the sun
had held still in the sky someone else somewhere would have noticed . .
. I yet made it in time to get beautiful photos of the sun
setting. I felt as though God had held the sun in the sky for
me.
It is possible for God to speak to you in a personal way that satisfies
your spirit. That reassures. The Spirit of God can
testify within your spirit that you are loved, and that you are secure
in his hands. That’s not the only way the Spirit speaks
though, and maybe it won’t even be the primary way. And so
while we may hear God speak to us within, in some intimate radically
personal way, the Spirit also speaks in other ways. He speaks
to us through others. Sometimes in the midst of a
conversation, someone says something, and we have a deep sense that the
world is spinning around that moment, and those words are intended for
us. Or God speaks to us not by some moment, nor by some words
we hear, but over time in our lives. One day we look at
ourselves, and we recognize the changes, and we can even be awed that
God’s Spirit has been able to get a handle on things we once though
immovable in our lives. The Spirit testifies in all these
things that we are well in God’s hands.
Telling you about the Spirit speaking this way, though, isn’t to set
you on a quest for spiritual experiences. We’re not to be
chasing an emotional spiritual rush, looking for spiritual highs, and
then falling into crisis because the moment hasn’t come through, or
because we’ve failed again at something we thought was no longer an
issue. On the contrary, we’re to be living in a healthy
ongoing relationship with our maker because of what he’s done for us in
Jesus Christ. And so, I think, the Spirit – God himself –
will often choose to speak to us in ways that pull us back to that
foundation. Jesus is God’s word, his statement and promise to
the whole world. If you could take everything God wants to
say to us about himself, his love, his will, his perspective, his
intention, and his feelings – even his feelings about us – and put it
all into words – you get the person, the life and death of Jesus.
And that’s where the water and the blood come in. There is
some debate about the particulars of what John means by the water and
the blood – it’s not an easy reference. Some used to think it
was reference to the moment during Jesus’ crucifixion when a soldier
pierced Jesus’ side with a spear: when he removed the spear, both water
and blood flowed from the wound. This then would be saying
that God testifies through the fact that Jesus really suffered and died
for us.
But it seems more likely to me, that what John is referring to here is
actually Jesus’ baptism, where he was immersed in water, and then
Jesus’ suffering and death, symbolized by the blood that was shed that
day. Those moments speak to us.
The moment of Baptism – Jesus submits to the father’s will, and the
father expresses aloud his pleasure with his son. That’s what
our relationship with God is to be like – and he wants us to hear his
voice of pleasure.
The moment of his death – Jesus, again submitting to his father’s will,
goes as far as humanity can go – death itself. His suffering
overcoming our sin, and his resurrection overcoming death, meaning that
he’s blazed a trail through sin and death which we can
follow. Our relationship with God is to be equally
submissive, and equally willing to go as far as we can go for his
purposes, and God wants us to hear that our lives are safe for eternity
even if we should have to lay them down.
We hear about those moments intentionally from time to time.
When we start our Christian lives and are baptized by our choice, we
are saying to God that we’re willing to lay our life down for his sake
– and the Christian hope is that we can look back to that moment as a
time when we’ve sensed God’s pleasure with our choice and
love. As we follow Christ into the waters of baptism, or
witness another doing the same, the symbolism of the water speaks to us.
And in the same way, each time we gather at the communion table, month
by month, we are intentionally putting ourselves in a position to
re-experience the testimony of Christ’s blood in the symbolism of
taking the cup. The symbolism of the water and the blood is a
powerful and universally understandable way to recognize what Christ
has done and what God is saying to us. As we celebrate
communion today, our hope is that it will be one more opportunity for
you also to hear God speak . . . let’s do this together . . .
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