I am not a numbers person. I am a word person. Thus you have been very patient with me these 22 years. You would have preferred a preacher who delivered tight little packages of outlines you could follow with your fill-in-the-blank sheet on the back of the Sunday announcement page, or who served up bullet points each Sunday on a screen above our heads. Instead you have had to endure a preacher who delivers one linear thought (without a screen), and who insists you listen, and not work ahead on the work-sheet. For a congregation filled with engineers, project managers, and math teachers my style is not the best fit – but you have been patient.
I have made so little accommodation to the congregational left-brain over the years that I sometimes forget to be careful how I use numbers when I do use them. Last Sunday, during Bible class, I talked about probabilities – 90%, and 65% probabilities. My daughter Julia (both a numbers and a word person) said, “Dad, the minute you mentioned probabilities everyone’s eyes lit up and half the people stopped listening so they could crunch the numbers.” She was right. I lost some of you for a minute,
The verse we were studying was I John 2.1 – specifically the phrase I am writing this that you may not sin. If anyone does sin we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous. We were trying to reconcile sin as a possibility in I John 2.1, with John’s description of it as certitude in 1.5-10. I have wrestled with this for 30 years, and thought I had a breakthrough. At the risk of losing some of you again, let me repeat my thought.
If I make 100 moral choices in a day, and choose to do wrong 10 times – I have also chosen to do right 90 times. The means for any isolated choice the 90% probability is that I will not sin. Righteousness is the likely response of a person walking in the light. This is true even for a person who makes 35 bad choices out of 100. It is right and proper for John to describe sin as certitude in chapter 1, and a possibility in chapter 2.
The problem is this – when I start talking about being good 65%, or 90% of the time I start sounding like God is involved in double entry book-keeping. I start to sound like I’m asserting works salvation.
Luckily Mickey Yost spoke up and reminded us that we are saved by grace or not at all. Thank you, Mickey.
The point John makes is a necessary one, nonetheless. If we are walking in the light there is an expectation of righteousness, and of growth in righteousness. Without Chapter 2.1-2 we could easily be discouraged by sin, or feel we have been given license to sin.
One could read those lines about us all sinning and feel we will never do better. One could read those lines about the blood continually cleansing us, and Jesus being faithful to forgive us and think we have two get-out-of-jail-free cards. In describing sin as only a possibility, and saying that he expects we “may not sin,” John is reminding us that we are expected to live righteous lives. We have been redeemed. We are being sanctified. We follow a path blazed by Jesus. He walks the path with us. He is our companion and advocate every step of the way. We are given grace when we fail. We have “everything that pertains to life and godliness” (II Peter 1.3).
John is reminding us this. We have every expectation of success because we have every resource needed for success.
We don’t need numbers to quantify this.
