Note: This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for accurate information and meaning.
Summary
Beginning a series in 1 John 1:1–4, this message focuses on how believers can share Jesus with others not out of obligation or anxiety, but out of genuine joy rooted in a personal relationship with the living Christ, true eternal life, and fellowship with God and His church.
Key Points
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Personal Interaction with Jesus: True faith begins with experiencing the living Lord personally rather than simply checking off religious boxes.
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True Life in Christ: Everything else in this world eventually fades or comes up short; eternal and lasting life is found exclusively in Jesus.
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Vertical and Horizontal Fellowship: Faith unites us both to God (vertical) and to the church community (horizontal), forming a lasting spiritual family.
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Completing Our Joy: Sharing the gospel energizes believers and completes their joy rather than draining them.
Sermon Transcript
Introduction & Scripture Reading
Thanks, Jesse.
Well, as we continue worship, let’s turn our attention to the book of First John there in the New Testament. We’ll be beginning a series through this book in the New Testament. It’s probably most well known for the ways that the apostle John expounds the doctrine of God’s love, but it also just hits importantly on topics of sin and forgiveness and living the Christian life. There’s all sorts of good, hopeful things there that point us to Jesus and the reality of His work in our lives.
So this morning, we’ll be starting with chapter 1, verses 1 through 4, and working through these things. The focus that we’re going to look at is the fact that John is writing this in order to remind and to share the hope of Jesus with this congregation. We don’t know who the congregation is exactly, we don’t know what part of the Ancient Near East or the Mediterranean area that this congregation existed in, but he had a deep love and a desire to share Jesus with those folks.
Often times when we read the letters in the New Testament, these epistolary greetings, which is usually the part where they just start greeting and saying, “Here’s what we’re doing. Hey, how are you doing?” often times we kind of skip past that. But these couple verses have so much theological depth and biblical depth that point us to the heart of John and why he’s writing to these folks. I think the heart of it is that he would share Jesus with these individuals. So the focus of the sermon this morning is that we can share Jesus with others.
With that in mind, let’s turn our attention to the word of God. Let’s give ourselves to its reading.
1 John 1, verse 1:
“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.”
This is the word of God. Let’s pray.
Father, thank You for Your grace to us, that You love us. Pray that You’d show us the apostle John’s great joy and delight was Jesus, and that that can also be our great joy and delight. And from that, we can share Jesus with great joy and delight. We ask all these things in His mighty name. Amen.
The Captivating Nature of Our Passions
When I was in middle school—an unfortunate period in most of our lives. A good chunk of you in this room were, unfortunately, around to witness me in middle school. So, but when I was in middle school, I was really infatuated with Star Wars. I loved the action figures, Legos, the movies obviously, the TV show spin-offs, the board games, the lightsabers, and I even got into the novels written about secondary characters and spin-off parts of the Lucasfilm universe.
I just loved it so much. My dad and I would go up to the library, and inevitably I’d get a stack of Star Wars books together and check them out. At one point my dad, you know, was into Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis and theology, and his son’s just reading Star Wars drivel. At one point, in good humor, but slightly exasperated, he was like, “When are you going to read something other than Star Wars?“
And, you know, being I don’t know how old I was at the time, 9 or 10 or something like that, I was just kind of like, “All right, Dad, whatever.” I’m just going to keep reading Star Wars. I’m happy doing this. This is great.
But inevitably, Star Wars would come up constantly in my life and in my friendships, and I would love to talk about it, love to research things about it. It was just a universe that really captivated me and drew me in.
I think each of us has something like that in our lives. Whether it’s a fantasy series or sci-fi series, or a different book series that we’re very interested in, or World War II history—you know, there’s the joke that once a man reaches a certain age, he either has to start smoking meat or get really into World War II history. You know, I think you could kind of divide yourselves in those two buckets if you all know what I’m talking about. So we eventually get to these spots where there’s these interests, these hobbies, these stories that captivate us to a point that it just sucks us in, and we start posting about them. I don’t know if any of you are friends with Steve Fitzpatrick on Facebook. You know, he smoked a brisket over July 4th weekend, and he loves smoking briskets so much that he forgot to post it on July 4th weekend, and then posted it this weekend because he just had to share it, right?
So all sorts of these things, right, they captivate us, and we want to share it. And why do we want to share it? Because it excites us, and it’s something we’re enjoying, and something we’re more into and maybe in some ways obsessed with.
Point 1: Personal Interaction with the Living Lord
I think the best way to share Jesus is to come and approach Jesus with that same mentality and that same enjoyment. I think as we talk about sharing Jesus, we’re often anxious. We’re often in a spot where we don’t want to say the wrong thing, we’re afraid of being rejected by somebody, and so we kind of hold back and we don’t share about Jesus.
I think in those times it betrays that we have kind of a weak understanding of the foundation for how we and why we can share Jesus with other people. So if we look at John’s example here, I think that helps us understand how we can actually share Jesus and do so in a way that’s full of joy, a way that’s full of excitement, and not in a way that’s just obligation and guilt. Because I think often times we go and we talk about Jesus out of obligation and guilt rather than joy.
So if we look at the first thing that John says there: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.”
Maybe the words of the first couple verses of John’s gospel spring to mind: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And so it seems clear in that context that John is speaking of Jesus. That which was from the beginning—who is that? That’s Jesus. Which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at, and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.
And what John’s getting at there, it’s not just talking about that Jesus was there at the beginning, but that he had a personal interaction with Jesus. That he spoke to Him, that he saw Him, that he touched Him.
And this reality of interacting with Jesus on a personal level leads him to now proclaim these words about Him to this church that is receiving this letter.
I think that’s the basis for all of us as we share the gospel. It’s the basis for us as believers. As we come to faith, it starts with a personal interaction with the true and the living God.
But often times in Christianity, we boil the faith down, or we’re tempted to boil the faith down, just to a set of theological presuppositions, to a set of doctrines, a set of beliefs—well, if we check all these boxes, this means we’re a Christian and we’re good to go.
But that misses the fact that God doesn’t just desire us to have our theology right. He doesn’t just desire for us to get our actions correct, but He desires relationship with us. All through the scriptures, it’s all about relationship.
In the midst of the people’s rebellion during the kingdom of Israel, time and time again, God would condemn them because they were carrying out the worship in the temple perfectly. They were crossing all the t’s and dotting all the i’s of their Bible study attendance, their Sunday morning worship attendance. It was all going swimmingly, and what does He do? He condemns them.
Because they’ve missed the reality that though they are keeping the law, quote-unquote, they’ve missed relationship with Him. They’re not seeking to enter close to relationship with their God, the one who brought them out of bondage in Egypt, but instead have turned from Him in their hearts. And He calls them back to faith and repentance. Because He says, “Look, I own the cattle on a thousand hills. You can’t give Me anything. There’s nothing that I need from you. But you’re just trying to follow the rules and check all the boxes in order to get on with things and to have My blessing, but you just want to use Me for My blessings. You don’t want to actually have relationship.” And so God sets them straight.
As you go all the way through the Bible, Garden of Eden: How is God’s relationship with Adam and Eve described? He’s walking in the cool of the day with them. He’s going on a leisurely after-dinner walk with Adam and Eve.
And then what do Adam and Eve do as soon as they sin? God comes, He’s like, “Where you guys at?” They ran and they hid. They didn’t want to interact with God because of their sin.
I think you and I are the same way. When we realize our sin, and we realize the ways that we’re not in relationship with God, we go the opposite direction. We hide in sin, you know, outward rebellion in some way, or we hide by checking religious boxes. We say, “Well, I’m doing all the stuff. I’m serving You, God.” That’s the older brother, right? “I was here the whole time! I’m just serving!“
But God says it was all yours the whole time, all that I had was yours. He always desires relationship.
You look at Exodus: When the people get to Mount Sinai, they camp at the base. God descends on Mount Sinai in fire and smoke and lightning. You know, His presence could not be ignored in those moments. And He calls Moses and Aaron and the elders up the mountain to meet with Him.
And then at another point, Moses goes up by himself. That’s when he’s getting the Ten Commandments. And while Moses is up on the mountain, what happens? The people get twitchy, and they want to start to control their relationship with God. And so they convince Aaron to make them a golden calf.
And when the golden calf is produced, what do the people say? What does Aaron say? He says, “Behold, the god who has led you out of bondage in Egypt.” And what were the people doing in that moment? They were trying to make God in their own image. They weren’t satisfied with relating to the real God, who was right in front of them in all of His—not all of His magnificent glory, but in this wonderful, powerful display of His glory and magnificence. And rather than trusting and looking to His very near presence in that way, they make a shoddy idol made out of gold to worship instead.
So you and I are always in this place of God’s drawing near to us, but then we draw away, and we don’t interact, and we don’t enter into His presence.
But all through the Bible, God is always pursuing His people. God is always entering into relationship. When I think of this, I think of Paul as he’s on the road to Damascus. Before he was converted, he was going to imprison Christians as an opponent to the gospel, as an opponent to Jesus. And Jesus appears to him on the road to Damascus and knocks him off his horse and blinds him. It’s through that experience that Jesus brings Paul to faith. Then Paul becomes the great apostle to the Gentiles, and we are now, indirectly, the inheritors of Paul’s ministry because he proclaimed the gospel to those who were not of Jewish descent, and that has carried on down through the ages to us.
So the scriptures are full of these examples of God drawing near to His people and having a personal interaction with them.
So if you’re a believer, you can probably think, you know—we don’t believe necessarily that Jesus is appearing to everybody, that He’s showing up in your dreams or that He’s appearing in the night sky to you in some of those more miraculous ways, but each of us has had a personal interaction with our living Lord. Because Jesus isn’t just a good teacher, He’s not just a good myth, but He is alive. As we talked about the resurrection the last three Sundays, that impressed on us that Jesus is not just a good teacher that we follow, but He’s the resurrected Lord. He’s alive, and He’s at work, and He’s living right now.
He comes to us, and He promises to be with us as we gather together. So the first part of coming to a place where we can share Jesus with joy and excitement and anticipation is remembering that Jesus has gone after us, and that we have met the true and the living God, the Lord Jesus, and that He desires to meet with us. And if He desires to meet with us, He desires to meet with others.
That’s the foundation first, is like, we’ve met Jesus, we know who Jesus is.
Point 2: Eternal Life is Found Only in Him
And then John continues there:
“The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.”
It’s not just a personal interaction with Jesus, but it’s John’s conviction then that eternal life is found in Jesus. To the point that Jesus’s name isn’t even used there—it’s “life.” “This life appeared!” That’s how synonymous Jesus is with life, that He is the one who brings life. From sin, from death, from all the things that destroy us, He’s the one who brought us close to God again, brought us from death to life in our sins.
Most of us, as we live our lives, we are in a space where we are trying to fill the God-shaped hole, so to speak, in our hearts. We’re in a spot where we’re trying to find life anywhere we can. Right? Maybe you’ve used the phrase, “Well, this gives me life,” right? It’s coffee in the morning, or it’s going for a jog, or it’s going on vacation, or it’s hanging out with a friend. What we’re noticing in those moments is that those things give you fresh energy, they put you in a better mind space, they encourage you in different ways.
But inevitably, you drink your morning coffee and you’re like, “Oh, this gives me life.” And then the next morning, what happens? You need the coffee again. “Oh, this gives me life.” And so that life that that coffee gives is temporary. It comes and it goes.
And all the things that we try to find life in on this side of heaven—everything that we try to find life in that is not Jesus—eventually fades, eventually comes up empty, and doesn’t actually fill us up, doesn’t actually give us life, and certainly doesn’t save us from our sins or reunite us to God.
But Jesus is the one who reunites us to God, and He’s the one that as we look to Him, as we rest in Him, as we trust in Him, He’s the one who gives us energy and joy in our lives, the one who encourages us in life and in godliness. And He’s the one in whom life is found.
As we’re sharing Jesus with others, it’s our own personal interaction which fuels it, but then it’s also coming to the realization that life is not found in any of these other things in life. It’s not found in good behavior, it’s not found in religiosity, it’s not found in finances, it’s not found in our kids, in our spouses, in our friends, in our hobbies, in our work—none of those things bring life. In fact, eventually each of those things fade and die.
But in Jesus, true life is found.
And so if that’s where true life is found, and we’ve found that life through our interaction with Jesus, then, man, we’ve got the best news in the world. Let’s go and share it. We know where life is.
In the gospels, as Peter makes his great confession, a large group of folks had just left Jesus and weren’t following anymore. Jesus turns to the disciples and says, “What about you? Are you guys going too?“
And Peter says, “Lord, where else would we go? For You have the words of eternal life.“
Life is found in Jesus. Where else would we go? You know, that brings me to the phrase that you often hear repeated—I think I’ve said it several times over the last couple weeks—is that each of us is a beggar telling other beggars where to find bread. We needed life, Jesus gave us life, and now we’re telling other people, “Hey, there’s life over here! It’s for you. Jesus is coming to you, Jesus wants you. Go find life, and life that’s never ending, life that’s everlasting because of what Jesus has done.“
So we share Jesus out of our own personal interaction with Jesus. We share Jesus because He is the eternal life. Life is only found in Him.
Point 3: True Fellowship with God and His Church
But we also share Jesus because in Him, we have fellowship with others and with God.
“We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.”
As we have that personal interaction with Jesus, as we find new life in Jesus, that then initiates us into His body, which is the church.
Each of us, as we trust in Jesus, are now bound together by the new life that He has given to us. To the point that your brothers and sisters in Christ are closer to you now than blood relatives that don’t trust in Jesus. Because the life which we all share is life in Jesus. Jesus transcends space and time, and our eternity is going to be spent with Him and in His presence and in fellowship with each other. That is a reality that transcends anything else that really that we know on this side of heaven. Even that reality is kind of mind-boggling to us, of like, well, how can we all be connected in such a profound way across time and space and in history?
But that’s what gives John delight. He’s like, “We have fellowship. We share this with you so you might have fellowship with us, that we might know each other.“
This emphasizes to us this morning that it’s important for us to be with the body of Jesus, to be a part of a church, to be fellowshipping with other believers. Often times you’ll hear—you know, there’s that country song, “Me and Jesus have our own thing going. Me and Jesus have this all figured out,” right? And occasionally, at least in this part of the world, you’ll hear, “Well, I experience church just as much in a tree stand as I do in a pew.” You know, maybe not in our congregation, but other churches I’ve served, that happened, I would hear that phrase a good bit.
And while I get what they’re saying—they’re saying when we’re in nature, when I’m in a space where I’m resting and relaxing, I feel God’s presence more deeply, I feel like I’m more connected and more aware of His presence in those moments—they’re not a substitute for the church. They don’t replace our fellowship with each other, because our fellowship with each other is bought with Jesus’s blood and is established in our relationship with Jesus.
Because there’s the horizontal reality that’s happening right now, but it’s also vertical, right? Because that’s where John goes: “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.”
So as we have fellowship with each other, it’s because we have fellowship with God and with Jesus. And so there’s this vertical-horizontal reality happening, that as we’re united to Christ, we’re united to each other.
That’s an essential part of sharing Jesus, because:
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We need to be reminded that as we slip off into sin, “Hey, you’re straying, you’re getting off a little bit.” I don’t know if you’ve ever watched National Geographic documentaries. There’s one where there’s a bison herd going through somewhere out West, and there’s wolves kind of circling the herd off in the distance, just waiting. Then eventually, a small bison calf kind of splits off from the herd and thinks it’s okay. Then pretty quickly, the wolves swoop in, tackle the calf, drag it to the ground, and yeah, then it’s over. The calf probably felt, “Oh yeah, I’m good. I’m just going to be over here by myself, get some me-time.” And then unwittingly exposed himself to danger, right?
And you and I are pretty similar. That’s why the scriptures are full of stories about lost sheep, right? As sheep, we’re not meant to be alone, because what happens? We break a leg, we get eaten by a wolf, you know. We get off to our own devices and don’t have somebody helping us look back to Jesus, and we get into all sorts of mess left to our own devices. And so God gives us this fellowship with the body of Christ. As Paul talks about in Corinthians, we each serve a different function. Some of us are hands, some of us are feet, some of us are eyes, and it’s all working together. We all need each other. We need to help each other and to point each other to Jesus.
So as we have fellowship with Christ, we have fellowship with each other.
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And then it’s also a space where we get to encourage other people to share Jesus as well, because we become an outpost of the kingdom of God, so to speak, saying, “Hey, we’ve interacted with Jesus, we know Jesus, we have eternal life in Jesus. Here’s what it’s all about.”
So what I tell youth kids all the time—because sometimes we talk about sharing Jesus, it can be a little overwhelming for us and scary if you haven’t talked about Christ with people too much. What I tell youth kids a lot is, you know, you are pretty young and you might not know your Bibles very well yet, your understanding of the faith might be not where you would like it to be yet, but that doesn’t mean you can’t share Jesus with people. Because there’s a really easy way for people to hear about Jesus, and that’s church.
If you invite somebody to join you at youth group, or join you at a Bible study, or join you on a Sunday morning, they’re hearing about Jesus. It’s going to happen, and you don’t have to do it! You just have to have the invite, you know? And that’s one of the values that God gives us in having brothers and sisters in Jesus, is that we can invite and welcome other people into the fellowship and help each other in that process as well.
So we can share Jesus because of our personal interaction with Him, the eternal life which we have in Him, because of the fellowship which we have with Him and with others.
Point 4: Sharing Jesus Completes Our Joy
Then verse 4:
“We write this to make our joy complete.”
We can share Jesus so that our joy may be complete. What John means by that phrase is saying, you know, so that my joy can kind of be maxed out. You know, I’m not—like this is the thing that fills my tank, so to speak. “We’re writing this to you because we love to share about Jesus with you. We want you to hear about this. If I—basically he’s like, I would work an 80-hour workweek, come home, and still write this letter and send it to you because it fills me up this much. This is what I want to be doing, so that my joy, our joy, may be complete.”
And you and I, I think, sometimes when we think about sharing Jesus with other people, usually it requires a conversation. You know, most often. Usually a drive-by, you know, pelting somebody with a Bible or something isn’t going to cut it, you know? We want to have a conversation.
But for some of us, conversations take work. They take energy. If you’ve been on the phone all day at work, or you’ve been interacting with people all day at work, and then somebody seems to be in a spot to talk about Jesus, sometimes we just don’t want to talk about Jesus. We’re just like, “Ugh.”
But I don’t know if you’ve been in a situation like I have, where often times I’ll be like, “Oh man, here we go. All right, let’s have this conversation.” And I kind of dread having the conversation. But then on the other side of the conversation, I’m like, “I’m really glad I had that conversation.” And I’m way more encouraged than I think the other person was by this conversation.
The reason I’m in pastoral ministry, when I was in college, I worked at a church when I was about 20. The pastor of the church gave me great opportunities as an intern to do pastoral visitation to folks in hospice, in the hospital, shut-ins, things like that. One older lady who was just the most encouraging, delightful soul, who ended up having stage 4 ovarian cancer and was in hospice up in Mount Joy at the time—Sarah and I were still finishing up college in Lancaster, so we lived in Columbia, so it was only a 20-minute drive up to the hospice, so I was going up a couple times a week to visit with her.
She came to faith later in life, you know, later in her 60s, and just had a radical transformation. She went from being somebody who was just very, you know, kind of downcast and grumpy, to just a delight to be around, just a constant encourager, someone who constantly found joy in Jesus. And so I would go up, and Sarah and I would go, and other folks would go with me, and I would take folks from the worship team and we’d go and sing worship songs with her. She’d be sitting in the bed, you know, emaciated from cancer, and you know, arms outstretched to Jesus.
And you go into those settings, and you feel like, “Okay, I got to go and I got to talk about Jesus with her, and I got to talk about Jesus with her husband and with her family.” And we talked a whole lot about Jesus, but none of it felt like work. None of it felt difficult. Instead, as we went through those conversations, I was filled with encouragement and joy. It was in those contexts that I realized, man, the thing that I would like to spend my life doing is sharing Jesus with other people, and specifically sharing Jesus with people who are in, you know, their worst circumstances that they’ve experienced in life. Because it brought me deep joy.
So my point of that is to say that sometimes when we’re sharing Jesus with people, we’re afraid it’s going to drain us. We’re afraid it’s going to really take and tax us. But instead, like God often does, He energizes us and gives us great joy as a result of those conversations.
So I think what John is encouraging us towards here is rather than approaching sharing Jesus with a sense of dread or a sense of anxiety, approach it with joy! Like, man, my joy as a believer, as someone who trusts in Jesus, my joy might not actually be complete until I’m having some of these conversations. Have you thought about that? What would change in your life if you were talking about Jesus more?
Sometimes I don’t even think about it, you know? But this reminds me that, hey, yeah, what if I did talk about Jesus more? And as a pastor, you know, that’s one of those like, “Can you talk about Jesus more?” Yes, I can.
But it’s like, man, if we just talked about Jesus more, what would that do for our joy? And I’m not talking about theology, I’m not talking about arguing with people, but man, what if we just talked about, “I know Jesus. Jesus has given me life. Jesus has given me a family. Jesus has given me relationship with God. And man, now I get to tell it to you, and that gives me great joy.” What if that was our paradigm for sharing Jesus? I think that’s what John’s was.
So, friends, we can share Jesus because we’ve had a personal interaction with Him, because He’s brought us to new life, because He’s brought us into a new family, He’s given us new relationship with God, and we can share Jesus so that our joy may be complete.
Closing Prayer
Let’s pray.
Father, thank You for Your grace to us, that You love us. May You fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our salvation. Remind us that He is for us, that He is not against us, that He delights in His people, and that we have everything we need in Him. May we look to Him each day, and may You give us opportunities this week to share Jesus with those in our lives. We ask all these things in His name. Amen.