Scripture: 1 John 3:11-12; John 3:1-21; Genesis 4:1-16 Series: 2020
A short Super Bowl-Sunday sermon on 1 John 3:11-12. Pruitt opens with football cliches (‘it’s not how you start but how you finish’) to contrast finite games with the unknown length of a life. John points back to the beginning, Cain and Abel, with blunt advice: love one another and don’t be like Cain, because a heart without love leads to death and causes death. Drawing on Jesus’ words to Nicodemus about a second birth, the sermon argues that people of faith are not limited to one beginning: through the explicit act of repentance and conversion, metanoia, God offers a do-over and a new beginning every day.
Illustrations: super-bowl-sports-cliches, finite-games-vs-life, cain-and-abel, nicodemus-second-birth
February 7
Spilling things
God offers us a chance for a do-over
“For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous.” 1 John 3:11-12 ESV
Super Bowl and sports cliches
- “one game at a time.”
- “We need to play 60 minutes of good football.”
- “Our guys gave it everything they had” or “they left everything they had out on the field”
- “It is not about how your start but how you finish.
Games like football are finite games. Life is not finite because we don’t know when it will end. We also don’t know when it will end, but I’ll get to that.
The beginning is really important for John. Creation, Eden, Adam and Eve, but then we jump to Cain and Abel and John has some pretty obvious advice: don’t be like Cain.
This can seem cliched like all the sports lines: love one another and don’t kill your brother. It even rhymes!
But John is getting to a trickier notion: a heart without love leads to death and to causing death.
This is where we get back to the beginning. For most people, you only have one beginning, right? Your birth? It is so obvious in needs to be stated. But Jesus talks about a second birth and John lets us understand what is going on.
John 3 and Nicodemus
As people of faith, every day we have a chance for a new beginning. Not just by waking up every new day or a new week or a new year, but through the explicit act of repentence and conversion: metanoia. Turn around.