Remind Me

Here's the reality of the cross: Our sin is a massive deal, and our sin touches everything, including our relationships, our heart, and our addictions. The cross is the perfect example of what sin would love to do to us. But the cross is also proof of his grace. Some of us are holding onto things out of shame, and it is robbing you of your hope and your confidence in the Lord. However, the second you turn to Jesus and confess your sin, He forgets it completely. We have hope through the cross. We also have hope through the resurrection. John spends so much time throughout the Gospel that he wrote helping us understand the promise of the Spirit, and helping us understand that He is faithful with promises. After promise, after promise, after promise, after promise, after promise, he proves he can be trusted to fulfill whatever he says. 1 Peter 1:3-4 says it like this: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you.” So by the power of a resurrection, the resurrection makes a promise to you that you are now sealed by the Spirit, that you are kept in Heaven for him, and that your salvation is secure. It's a done deal. He made a promise, and he'll keep his promise. Your hope should be an anchor for your soul. Life is going to pull and push you around in its waves and make you feel uncertain of God’s promises. But you have an anchor of Jesus! Take confidence because the resurrection is a demonstration of God's power at work to fulfill his promises. God is a promise keeper. If the resurrection shows you anything, it should be that, even when it seems impossible, God will keep his promise to you. Reflection/Discussion Question: What have you allowed to push and pull you in life when you should have been anchored in the hope of Jesus?

Throughout difficult and trying times that we encounter, we discover that we can find hope by really getting to know Jesus. You find out that the more you see him, the more you will want to be with him. The more you are with him, the more you will want to be like him. The more you want be like him, the more you will want to start acting like him. And the more you start acting like him, the more you life starts getting filled with hope. Wherever Jesus is, you are going to find fullness and hope through the incarnation. You also are going to be able to find hope through the cross. Verse 17 of John 1 says this, “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Unfortunately, it can become really simple for the church to take the cross out of all this. Dangerous things can start happen when you begin taking the cross out of the message of Jesus, even when you don't mean for them to happen. When the cross is gone, we have a tendency to minimize our sin. You think you are a pretty good person on your own, and your sin isn’t a that big of a deal. We realize that Jesus did some "stuff" for us, but we don't have this overwhelming sense of being a sinner saved by grace that we should. Reflection/Discussion Question: Have you struggled with minimizing your sin and downplaying the importance of the cross in your life?

John 1:1 starts the Gospel off like this: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Jesus was with God in the beginning, and through him, all things were made. Without him, nothing was made that has been made. And John goes on to say in verses 4-5, “In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”  So, John just comes straight out of the gate to make sure his readers know that you are only going find hope that's secure and anchored through the incarnation. We also read in Colossians 1:15 that, “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.” For the very first time, we have Jesus and Jesus is the image of the invisible God. And without a picture of Jesus, there’s a lot questions that we have about God. In our society right now, it feels like there are a lot of questions about God’s word, questions about God’s character, questions about why would he do what he did, and how he did it. Jesus character and life on earth gives us many of the answers to explain God’s character and heart in a way that nothing else could. Reflection/Discussion Question: What about Jesus's life encourages you the most about God's character?

When John wrote his Gospel, we are able to look historically at what was going on in the church at the time that was causing people to lose hope. These circumstances are why John writes his Gospel in the way and language that he does. First, in the nineties, when John wrote this book of the Bible, there was a whisper of theology sweeping through the church where people were denying the incarnation. This meant that people were suggesting that God never really came to earth as a man. Simply put: There were people that were beginning to believe that Jesus was just more of an incredible prophet, but he was not really God who took on flesh.  Secondly, there was also a way of thinking that was moving through the church where they were denying the saving significance of the death and the resurrection of Jesus. They just started downplaying or denying what death and the resurrection of Jesus truly meant in comparison to everything else and what it meant for them now, not just historically.  John, as a seasoned pastor, is seeing the people of the church start to buy into the fact that Jesus might not have really ever been fully God and fully man, and people begin to downplay the importance that the cross and the resurrection really had in their lives and what it meant for them going forward. In turn, John was also watching the way hope was starting to leak out of the church, watching anxiety rise among the Christians, and people spending all of their energy and time on things that won't ever matter. And so, John sits down write a letter to that will tell the story of Jesus in a way that, by the time I'm done, nobody that read the letter was going question whether Jesus was really God with flesh on and nobody was going to ponder the significance of the cross and the resurrection. Reflection/Discussion Questions: Do you ever struggle to believe in the incarnation or the significance of the cross like the early church? What impact does this have on your hope?