At One

1 John 4:9-12

July 13, 2025 • Mount Pleasant UMC

When I answered God’s call to be a pastor, to spend my whole life in the church, I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. Many of you know that Mount Pleasant is the fourth church I have served, the third one I have been the lead pastor for. For the first four years of my ministry, I was an associate pastor, and as Pastor Rick will tell you, that’s the best job in the world because you have someone to blame for everything! Then I was appointed to a country church and the first day I was there, the Trustee chairperson called me and wanted to have lunch. Well, that’s really nice, I thought. And it was nice, and he has become a lifelong friend, but that day who I met was a fairly young Christian who was beginning to step into leadership in the church finding himself honestly shocked by the way things happened. He told me he went to his first Council meeting and almost quit after that because of the way people treated each other. Church people can be very difficult to get along with. The hilarious irony to me, however, is that that Trustee chair is now a pastor in our Conference.

N. T. Wright tells of a friend of his who said churches ought to have a “danger” sign posted outside. His experience told him that you should expect “nasty, gossipy, snide conversation and behavior” when you enter (Wright, The Early Christian Letters for Everyone, pg. 158). Rather cynical, but if you’ve been in the church for very long, you’ve probably experienced that. In my years as a pastor, I have witnessed multiple people who liked to set up ambushes at business meetings, one man who stormed out of a meeting and slam dunked his can of pop in the trash can because he didn’t get his way, and another person who shared a prayer request in a worship service that basically asked for a better pastor. I can’t blame them on that one—and that was before all the denominational stress of the last five years or so. Now, I’m not saying I regret answering God’s call; not at all. I love the local church, and I love being here at Mount Pleasant. The days of blessing far outweigh the days of stress. But I also know there are people who leave the church or who never enter the doors because we, the church, have failed to be who we should be. We who have been forgiven sometimes forget to extend forgiveness toward others.

This morning we are continuing our series, “Live It Out: Discover How to Love Like Jesus,” which oddly enough is also the theme of our Vacation Bible School that starts a week from tomorrow. Actually, we’ve done this for a number of years now, where we go through the themes of VBS in “Big Church” so that when kids are learning the stories in VBS, you’re ready to talk with them about what it means to “love like Jesus.” This year, our themes revolve around some of those “one anothers” that are in the New Testament, things like “love one another” and “be kind to one another.” And then this week we come to what may be the hardest thing to do, or at least it’s in the top three: “forgive one another.”

This letter was written probably near the end of the first century by John, son of Zebedee, who is the last living disciple who actually walked with Jesus. It’s not been that long since Jesus walked on earth, but as the church has grown over the last sixty years, there has been occasion for false teachings to creep into the church. It never takes long; the church is always just one generation away from extinction, from failing to pass on the good news of Jesus as it becomes focused on other things. So John writes this letter and a couple of others. Actually, 2 and 3 John are more letter-like; this particular writing seems to be more of a sermon or a pamphlet that was circulated among various churches (Thompson, 1-3 John [IVPNTC], pg. 18). It was possibly read by John’s representatives to at least churches nearby, and someone thought to preserve it as one of the last writings of what became the New Testament.

The problem that seems to be facing the churches John is writing (or preaching) to involves a group of people who have left the church because, basically, they believed themselves to be spiritually superior to everyone else. Once, this group believed, they needed Jesus’ forgiveness, his atonement, but now they have come to a place in their lives where they have risen above temptation and sin and therefore they no longer need Jesus, his atonement or the church. In essence, they disagreed with the church’s teaching on salvation and believed they had come a place where there were no more demands on the way they live. Because they were sinless (in their own eyes), they did not need confession or atonement or spiritual disciplines (Thompson 15). It is always amazing how the challenges that the church faced nearly 2,000 years ago are still around here and now. Today there are somewhere around 47,000 different Protestant denominations in the world. Many of them are small, maybe even just one or two churches, but still that’s a huge number when you consider that Jesus said he came to establish his church (Matthew 16:18), not his “churches,” and when you consider that he prayed that his followers would be “one” (John 17:21). Every single one of those modern denominations was started because person A disagreed with something that person B did, there was a church fight, and someone left to start their own thing. Protestantism itself began that way. You’ve probably heard the story before of the man who was rescued after years of surviving alone on a desert island, and when his rescuers asked about the three structures on the island, he said, “Well, that one is my house. And that one is my church.” What about the other one? they asked. “Oh, that’s the church I used to go to.”

John wants to bring the church back to the center, to the core of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, and if we’re at all familiar with the way John writes, we should’t be surprised that for him, the core is “love.” In fact, in the verses surrounding our passage this morning, verses 7-21, John uses the word “love” (agape) twenty-seven times in fifteen verses (Wright 158). It’s not hard to know what his main point is! But he’s using that word to draw a contrast. Christian faith has never been about our love or our devotion or our feelings. Christian faith is and always will be about Jesus and the fact that God loved us long before we ever knew him. It’s isn’t about our love; it’s about his. And love isn’t a feeling, anyway, John says. Feelings come and go but actions are what matter. Actions are what demonstrate love. John reminds his readers that God made the first move, showing us his love by sending Jesus in the first place (4:9-10). Jesus came, lived, taught and healed. He showed us how we should live, pointed us toward the kingdom of God, and ultimately he gave his life on a brutal, bloody cross. He took the worst the world had to offer and became the “atoning sacrifice for our sins" (4:10). And there’s the action: “atonement” is what ultimately demonstrates God’s love.

“Atonement” is one of those words that today has mainly been confined to either religious or sometimes legal settings. In its original, ancient usage, it meant “in harmony,” and a dictionary definition today reads like this: “satisfaction or reparation for a wrong or injury; amends.” So, in other words, when someone commits a crime and is caught, whatever they are sentenced to is their act of atonement. They pay a fine, or they serve a sentence in jail, or they have to make it up somehow to the person they offended—all of those are forms of atonement. The goal is to restore harmony in the society in general or between neighbors. When we move that word into the religious setting, specifically into the Christian faith, it has to do with making our relationship with God right. As Paul put it in his letter to the Romans, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). In Romans, Paul is using that as evidence that both Jew and Gentile alike can be recipients of forgiveness because every one of them have sinned. We all have sinned. We all have missed the mark, which is what it means to sin. None of us are able to live up to God’s standard of holiness on our own strength, no matter what those folks in John’s church think. We mess up, we do or say the wrong things, and in varying degrees we hurt our fellow human beings, we ruin relationships and, most importantly, we offend God. It’s been that way since the beginning; it’s at the core of who we are. And when you think about it for very long, you’re likely going to end up asking the question Paul asks at the end of Romans 7: “Who will rescue me…?” (7:24).

Thankfully, that’s not a question without an answer. Paul practically shouts off the page: “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25). John, in this morning’s passage, puts it this way: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (4:10). Atoning sacrifice. Something in what Jesus did on the cross made atonement toward God the Father for our sin, our brokenness and all the ways we had messed up. There are a lot of images in the New Testament trying to describe what Jesus did at Calvary, and none of the authors seem to feel they have to settle on just one explanation of what happened there. The dominant theory today is generally “substitutionary atonement,” that Jesus took the punishment we deserved for our sin. Rather than pouring his anger and wrath out on us, the Father poured it out on his own Son. Jesus took our beating, you might say. But that’s not where John settles, as you might guess. John sees the cross as the supreme example of God’s love toward humanity. He sees the cross as a demonstration of the truth that God has loved us from the very beginning and, in fact, there has never been a moment that God hasn’t loved us. There’s never been a second when God’s heart wasn’t bent toward us. Jesus goes to the cross, takes the worst humanity has to offer, and still comes through it on the other side. As he hangs on the cross, his arms are spread out toward humanity, and even after all of that, he still loves us. Christian faith is not about us loving God; it’s about how much God loves us, that he would die so that, somehow, we can experience forgiveness, atonement.

My favorite definition of “atonement” is to simply look at the way the word is written: “at-one-ment.” Somehow, what Jesus does on the cross, John says, makes possible us becoming “at one” with God. We are loved. We can be forgiven. We can live in his presence, if we choose to trust in what Jesus did on the cross (even if we don’t fully understand it). On the cross, God revealed himself to be love incarnate (Wright 158), the only love that can provide at-one-ment.

But here’s where we get stuck. We love the fact, the truth that we can be forgiven. We love to share how our worst sins were thrown into the deepest sea (Micah 7:19) and forgotten. And we love to hear stories of people who were terrible sinners and found forgiveness because that reinforces that if they can be forgiven, then we can too because our sins aren’t nearly that bad, right? But John takes it a step further in this short passage: “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us” (4:11-12). Shortened version: if God has loved and forgiven you, what is keeping you from loving and forgiving the people in front of you? Why do you treat them so badly when, in fact, they are objects of God’s love and forgiveness and atonement as well?

Jesus once told a parable about a king who needed to settle accounts with his servants. The servants were called in and told they had to pay the debt they owed the king. One man, however, owed (as the NIV translates it) 10,000 bags of gold. The original language indicates that’s about 200,000 years worth of salary. It’s an astronomical amount, in other words, more than any normal person would ever earn, certainly more than any king’s servant would have. How will be pay the king? Just as the king is planning to put the servant and his family in debtor’s prison, the man begs the king to have mercy. “‘Be patient with me,” he says, “and I will pay back everything.” Now, the king knows that’s not possible, but he is filled with mercy and goes above and beyond what anyone would expect by cancelling the man’s debt. He takes the initiative to provide atonement for the servant. Can you imagine the relief and the joy that should have filled the servant’s heart? But it doesn’t seem to have, because the man leaves the king’s presence not happy but embarrassed and angry. He runs into a fellow servant who owes him money—the NIV says “a hundred silver coins,” which amounts to about a hundred days’ worth of salary. And when this second servant asks for mercy in exactly the same words, the first servant is not moved. He has his friend thrown in debtor’s prison (cf. Matthew 18:21-30).

And John says, “Since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (4:11). “God’s love is a model for how and why we are to love one another” (Thompson 121). And more than that, John says others will only see Jesus if we love and forgive one another the way God has forgiven us. There are a couple of websites I check most every day to keep up on news and happenings in the larger Christian world, and most days when I finish at those sites, I am discouraged. Every single day there are stories of pastors abusing their authority, of being caught in sexual misconduct or power struggles. There are stories of church members embezzling from church funds, of camp counselors and youth pastors who do not act in loving ways. And then there are the bigger stories of so-called “Christian celebrities” (which is actually an oxymoron) who live one life on stage and another behind closed doors. And the stories themselves are bad enough, but then you read the comments and see the judgmental and ungracious ways the church (again, big C church) responds. It’s enough to make you want to weep. It’s been said that Christians are the only ones who shoot their wounded, and I’ve come to believe that is true. We who have been forgiven aren’t that interested in forgiving others, and so why would the world believe that our savior is real? An Indian philosopher named Bara Dada once said (in a quote that is often misattributed to Ghandi), “Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians, you are not like him.”

So, the bottom line today, again, is this: “Forgive one another.” The goal is to not only be “at-one” with God but “at-one” with each other as well. The song says they will know we are Christians by our attitude? by our judgment? No, they will know we are Christians by our love. Now, I know that when we talk about forgiveness, there’s a wide range of things that hurt us. Some of them are like little rocks in the shoe—irritating and maybe a little painful, but easier to shake off. Some things are like a punch in the gut—the effects linger a lot longer. And others feel like a mortal wound and will often require someone else to come alongside—maybe a trusted friend or a therapist—to help us deal with what happened. I would never tell you that forgiveness is easy, but there are certainly some hurts that are easier to get past then others. Just like a physical injury, these wounds to the soul require appropriate attention and care, but the work really begins with and in us. When confronted with hurt, we first need to name it. What was the hurt that was caused? Maybe to a friend or a therapist, maybe just between God and me, give a name to the wound. It’s easy to get all sorts of things tangled up in our mind, and we pile on thing after thing until we have no idea why we are feeling hurt. We lose track of the source. For instance, let’s say that this thing our spouse said to us was hurtful. And then we begin to remember other times that other people said hurtful things and that leads us to feeling like maybe we aren’t that valuable, and…and on it goes. Name it. Know what it is that you’re seeking to forgive.

Then, remember your shortcomings. How many times have you done or said things similar to what was said or done to you? When someone cuts me off in traffic, for instance, I get irritated and start to feel the road rage kick in. But I need to remember that I might (probably) have done the same thing to others, maybe even that very day. Maybe I’m not as perfect as I think I am, especially when I remember my shortcomings. That ought to lead me to assume the best of the other person. So that person ignored me and didn’t ask how I was doing. Does that make them a bad person? Do they not care about me or is there something going on in their life that is distracting them from the world around them? Assuming the best of someone else then will lead us to pray for them. “Lord, you know what is going on in their life. Please help them and help me to forgive them for the hurt I feel” (cf. Hamilton, Forgiveness, pgs. 55-56, Apple Books edition). Now, I’m not saying forgiveness will happen instantly; very often, especially for the larger hurts, it will take a long time. As I said, the larger and deeper the hurt, the more likely it is you will need a trusted person to walk alongside you. The point is, no matter how large or small the hurt, we can’t let unforgiveness fester in our lives. If we aren’t people of forgiveness, John says, the world won’t be able to see Jesus living in us.

At the end of Jesus’ parable, the “unforgiving servant” is the one who ends up in prison—presumably for the rest of his life because, as Jesus tells it, the master says he is to be there “until he should pay back all he owed” (Matthew 18:34). Which, as I said, would be more than one lifetime. And Jesus’ point is pretty clear: unforgiveness is a prison. It’s a prison of our own making, but a prison nonetheless. It has no bars and no doors and no walls and no windows, but we are trapped there nonetheless until and unless we can begin to move toward forgiveness, toward “at-one-ment.” Unforgiveness will leave you trapped; forgiveness will set you free. The choice is yours: will you stay in prison or will you forgive one another? Let’s pray.