Nate Atwood preaches a chapel message entitled "What We Become" on 1 John 4:7 at RTS Charlotte. Good morning. How y’all doing? For the Scripture this morning I have chosen a familiar text as a jumping off point. It’s 1 John 4 and really just verse 7 because it gets to the heart of the matter. "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God." Father, we thank you that this is a living book, that it is filled with your Holy Spirit,
entheosed. We ask that you would speak to us today for the glory of your Son Jesus in whose name we pray, amen. I am one of these preachers of whom it could be said, “prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.” By that, I don’t necessarily mean the status of my soul, I mean more the direction of my feet. I tend to wander around a little bit when I preach. How much does that mess up the whole sound thing if I do that, a lot or a little? Just a little. All right. So I’m going to do if it’s just a little. It’s show and tell at the RTS chapel today. I brought something that a friend of mine gave me many, many years ago. He and his wife departed as missionaries to Nicaragua, and they went up into the back country of the hills, and they were among truly tribal people sharing the gospel. One summer, when he was back on furlough, he gave this to me and he said, “Hey man, I want you to have this.” I said, “What is it? He said, “Well, it’s a spear that the people that my wife and I minister to use to hunt. Among other things they hunt wild boar with it.” It’s just a bamboo shoot. There isn’t much to it. It just barely weighs anything. If you were to hit like a boar, or any kind of animal with it, it would be sort of like, "doink," and fall to the ground. I said, “Are you kidding me? I mean, do they really hunt with these things?” He said, “Oh yeah, absolutely.” The edges of the bamboo are ground to a fairly fine point, and all they are seeking to do is just draw the tiniest little bit of blood because the edges are chipped with a very significant poison. Just a little cut, that’s all they need. Then the poison fairly quickly works into the bloodstream of whatever animal it is that they’re hunting. They just follow it till the thing keels over and dies. I was fascinated when he put this in my hands because I immediately thought of the devil. Because the first image we get of the devil in Scripture in Genesis 3 is of a serpent. You know a snake bite, in and of itself, there’s not much to it. A dog bite would be potentially far more dangerous than a snake bite. But the issue isn’t the bite, the issue is the poison. How the poison gets into you and begins to slowly shut your system down. Now you all are heading into ministry, and this morning I want to protect you from a certain threat. I’m going to talk to you about two figures in Scripture that had every reason to die by Satanic puncture, and yet someway somehow they didn’t.
The Traumatic Ministry and Gentleness of John
The first is the Apostle John. Now I just read to you 1 John 4:7: “Little children love one another.” I love that verse because as I understand it, it was written toward the end of John’s life, and John at that point was on Patmos. I have another friend whose specialty is ancient Ephesus, and he lives over there and constantly does archeological work. One time, I was over in ancient Ephesus, and he was talking to me about the ministry of John the Apostle from Patmos and eventually as the bishop over Ephesus. He told me this story, maybe you’ve heard this story. At the end of his life, John really could no longer walk. He was old and decrepit, and during church each morning when there was church, every Lord’s Day, he would be carried in, he would be sat down in front of the people, and as the tradition has it, he would just begin to weep. And though he had a sermon prepared every week, he generally couldn’t even get to the sermon because of his emotions and he would just barely be able to choke out, “Little children, love one another.” The more I thought about it, I thought, “What an unbelievably tender heart.” I reviewed in my mind the events of John’s life, and I thought specifically about he was the one apostle who was at the cross when Jesus was crucified. I don’t know if you’ve ever in your life experienced something which is so traumatic, so violent, so intense, so cruel that it could be like a serpent’s bite. It could slowly poison you over time, increasingly haunt you and own you. I’ve been in pastoral ministry—I was ordained in 1987—but I’ve been in pastoral ministry as a non-ordained person since 1982. I’ve known a lot of people who’ve had events in their lives which are intensely traumatic. Maybe 10, 20, 30 years later, they’re still working on trying to get over. The child who was abused. Maybe the SEAL who went to war and who saw horrific things, was involved in horrific things, still trying to overcome his nightmares, which he has almost every night.The Traumatic Ministry and Love of Paul
I thought about John; I also thought about Paul. Paul lived his life with just unbelievable intensity. You all know the story of Paul’s life: the stonings, the shipwreck, the serpent bite (literally), the numerous plots to kill him. I thought about Paul, and I thought, “If you live a life like that, that’s going to get inside you. All that violence, all that cruelty, all those attempts on you.” For most of us, candidly, that would warp us. It would mess with our soul. It would be like the spear successfully placed; the initial impact, though somewhat shocking, isn’t the real deal. It’s the poison that begins to embed itself in your soul as the years pass. [epq-quote align="align-left"]You will have things that will happen to you that have the ability to sour you on life, sour you on church, sour you on people.[/epq-quote]Let me tell you something. Satan still hunts the servants of God by spear. The reality is you’re going to have events in your life where you’re going to have some trauma. The event itself, whatever happens, the impact of the spear is not the real danger. The real danger is whether or not you get poisoned. Here’s the truth: the devil wants you hard, and he wants you mean. I wish it weren’t the case, but regrettably, as you go through your years in ministry, you will have things that will happen to you that have the ability to sour you on life, sour you on church, sour you on people with Satan’s poison. The way poison works, in most snake bites, the deal is that it begins to shut down your nervous system. You lose the ability to feel. But while Satan wants you hard and wants you mean, Jesus wants you soft. I mentioned to you John the Apostle, and I’m still trying to get my head around it, how does how does a guy who lived through events like John the Apostle lived through, how does he get to the end of his life and he’s just not crazy? How does he get to the end of his life and he is not hard and almost become cruel himself? You all know the passage out of 2 Corinthians 11. I’m just going to read a little bit. This is Paul’s experience in life:Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false brothers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked.All this stuff pressing against Paul, each one of those events like the spear thrown at him laden with poison. Satan trying to atrophy Paul from the inside out. Yet the amazing thing is that after a lot of those events had happened, because a lot of them happened during the 40s and the 50s, Paul wrote this: "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs."
