Dear Church family, as always, I enjoyed worshiping our King Jesus with you yesterday and I enjoyed preaching the Word. That’s actually one reason that I love Sunday mornings so much: I get to spent personal time with all of you, my Church family, and I get to preach God’s Word. I always come with a passionate burden from God’s Word that I so badly want to unload and bless all of you with. I went into pastoral ministries because God gave me two main desires, a desire for God’s people and a desire for God’s Word (& in both of those things is a love for Jesus).
Well yesterday, I was blessed to be able to preach one of my favorite sermon Texts: 1 John 3:19-24.
I absolutely loved what the Holy Spirit wrote through John to us about the condemning heart. My heart can easily condemn me, as I am very aware of my own failures and sins. I’m also a perfectionist. As I said yesterday, perfectionism can be just another way for us Christians to deny the fact that we are saints and we are justified by Christ’s righteousness (1 John 1:9 & 2:1-2!) and not our own! When I condemn myself for my own failures, it’s because I don’t believe that Christ’s righteousness is enough for me. I want perfection to come from the performance of me, not Jesus. In that way, I believe perfectionism, if it plagues you with a condemning heart, is just another mask word for idolatry of self (I want to be Jesus, I want to be perfect) and pride. It becomes about my performance instead of Christ’s. 1 John 1:8-9 already laid out for us how vital it is for us to admit that we sin and fail so that we trust in Christ’s power to cleanse us from unrighteousness. In my perfectionistic state, I want to do it on my own, and this will inevitably lead me to become this tyrant of a judge that condemns myself instead of looking to Jesus, our Gracious Judge Who was judged in our place.
So ultimately, the Christian who suffers from a condemned heart has a guilt complex, but not a good grasp on the Gospel. That will be crippling.
So I hope and pray that you felt John’s comforting and reassuring words to you yesterday from God’s Divine Text: God does not want us to have condemning hearts, and we can persuade ourselves into a confident relationship with the Lord when our hearts condemns us for whatever reason (even when it’s due to sin).
Remember that God is greater than your heart and knows all things. He knows who you are. He knows that you are His child (1 John 3:1, 2 Tim. 2:19)! He knows that you have His heart in you even when your old heart fails to love other people perfectly (1 John 3:16-18). God knows what you did but He knows what He did. He came to justify, not condemn (John 3:17). And as Romans 8 says, “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus….Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died…” God doesn’t forget that, although our condemning hearts do.
So I pray that you would simply believe in what God thinks of you, even when you think less of you than God does.
With love in Christ,
Aaron
