The Essence of Christian Obedience

REFLECTION QUOTES

“The experience of Jesus creates community and community leads us back to the experience of Jesus.”

~Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC


“God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.”

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1909-1945), German pastor-theologian,
executed for his opposition to the Nazis

“Encouragement is words directed in love towards fear.”

~Source Unknown

“I suddenly saw that someone could use all the language of…Christianity, and yet the center was fundamentally the self…and not in the glory of God.”

~Leslie Newbigen (1909-1998), Church of Scotland Missionary to India

“The central defect of ‘the evil’ is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it.”

~M. Scott Peck (1936-2005), American Psychiatrist
in his book People of the Lie

“…a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man…enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble–because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.”

~C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

SERMON PASSAGE


1 John 2:1-11 (NASB)

1My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; 2 and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.

3 By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. 4 The one who says, “I have come to know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him; 5 but whoever keeps His word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By this we know that we are in Him: 6 the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.

7 Beloved, I am not writing a new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word which you have heard. 8 On the other hand, I am writing a new commandment to you, which is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true Light is already shining. 9 The one who says he is in the Light and yet hates his brother is in the darkness until now. 10 The one who loves his brother abides in the Light and there is no cause for stumbling in him. 11 But the one who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes.