1 John 3:19-24
you to turn with me in your Bibles
to 1st John chapter 3. We’ll be looking together at
1st John chapter 3 this morning and we’ll be reading together
verses 19 through 24. If you’re looking for that in
your pew Bible it’s on page 1022, page 1022, 1st John chapter 3
and we’ll be looking together at verses 19 through 24. Before
we hear God’s Word let’s take a moment and pray and ask for God’s blessing upon it this
morning. Father, we need you to feed us
with your word. Every bit as much as we need
food for our bodies, we need your word to feed our souls. We recognize that it is useful
for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in the way of righteousness
that we might be fully equipped for every good work. And so we
ask, Lord, that we would trust you, the one who has breathed
out your word to us to accomplish that end in our life. And we
ask it in Jesus’ name, amen. 1 John 3, beginning in verse
19. By this we shall know that we
are of the truth and reassure our heart before him. For whenever
our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he
knows everything. Beloved, if our heart does not
condemn us, we have confidence before God, and whatever we ask,
we receive from him because we keep his commandments and do
what pleases him. And this is his commandment,
that we believe in the name of his son, Jesus Christ, and love
one another just as he commanded us. Whoever keeps his commandments
abides in God and God in him. And by this we know that he abides
in us by the spirit whom he has given us. Amen. This is God’s
holy, inspired, and inerrant word. May he write the eternal
truth of that word upon all of our hearts this morning. If you are someone here today
and you consider yourself to be a Christian, my question for
you is this. How do you know that? How do
you know that you are a Christian? There are certain things that
you can be reasonably sure about regarding yourself, right? You
can know how old you are. You can know what your ethnic
background is. Contrary to popular belief, you
can actually know whether you are male or female. You can know
these things. But knowing whether or not you
are a Christian is not quite as obvious, is it? In my own
personal life, I have struggled with doubts and questions that
I couldn’t answer very well or haven’t always been able to answer
at all. And I’ve thought and said and done things even over
the course of the past week that didn’t exactly reflect the Ten
Commandments very well. And I would imagine that if you
have professed to be a Christian for any significant period of
time, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Because you’ve
had your own struggles, your own doubts, your own questions,
your own sins, that lay upon you and it stirs up this question
in your heart Am I really who I say I am? Am I really a Christian? It’s hard to believe and to live
a faithful Christian life. And when our faith is wobbly,
and our love for others is frail, and our obedience is fickle,
it’s not unusual to question whether or not we know Jesus
at all. And I think because that is so
part and parcel of my life and probably of yours as well, it’s
one of the reasons why I love 1 John so much. Because what
the Apostle John is seeking to do here is to grant assurance
to true believers, to help true believers know that they can
know that they’re in Christ. In fact, when you flip forward
two more chapters to chapter 5 verse 13, you discover that
the reason why John wrote this letter is so that you may know
that you have eternal life. In other words, he wants to comfort
and assure true believers that they are in Christ. So How can
you know that you know? How can you know that you are
a Christian? What are some of the marks of
a true Christian? The marks of assurance. That’s
what John is trying to get us to consider here. And what he
does is he lays down some tests, some markers of what a true believer
is. And he lays out three of them.
He lays out three of them throughout the course of this book. This
particular passage is a great summary of what this book teaches,
of what this letter teaches. And so these three tests of assurance
are as follows. Number one, there’s a spiritual
test. Number two, there’s a moral test. And number three, there’s
a relational test. There’s a spiritual test. It’s
a question of what do you believe about Jesus? That’s a spiritual
test. The moral test is this. Is the
holiness of Jesus, is who Jesus reveals himself to be and who
God throughout the course of scripture reveals himself to
be, is that in any meaningful way reflected throughout your
life? Is it reflected in your actions,
in your thoughts, in your words that you speak? That’s the moral
test. And then thirdly, there’s the
relational test. The relational test is this,
is the love of Jesus being manifested in your life as you relate to
others, particularly with one another in the local church,
particularly with other Christians. There’s the moral, the spiritual,
the moral, and the relational test. And let’s dig into each
one of these. First of all, I want to start with the spiritual test.
Because underlying this whole passage is the notion that faith
in Jesus Christ alone, as he is offered in the gospel, is
essential to be assured of our salvation. In fact, when you
look at verse 23 of this passage that we just read, you’ll see
this. John writes that this is his commandment that we believe
in the name of his son Jesus Christ and over and over and
over throughout the course of the letter of 1st John you see
him reiterating the same idea that that we are that a person
can be assured of their salvation assured that they are in Christ
through faith in him. And all that John writes, all
that John writes throughout the course of this letter should
be understood with an eye towards what God the Father has done
in sending his son into the world and in Christ becoming the final
sacrifice for our sins. The gospel is fundamentally about
what Christ has done, not about what you do. And our trust is
to ultimately be resting in him who accomplished our salvation
and applied to us all of the benefits of that salvation. And that may seem. like a rather
obvious point to many, if not most of you here this morning,
right? I mean, you’ve taken a perfectly
good hour of a Sunday morning on a beautiful fall day and you
have determined to come to church. And some of you even went to
Sunday school and others of you will even come tonight to hear
the word of God because you trust in Jesus Christ. You want to
feed upon him. You want his word to be implanted
in your heart. You want to grow in the grace
and knowledge of him. And so it may seem very obvious
that one of the ways in which we are, and I would suggest to
you the most fundamental way in which we’re assured of our
salvation is by trusting in all that Jesus has done for us in
the gospel. But that is a message that doesn’t
fly too well in a world like ours. In case you needed a Captain
Obvious moment, right? Because ours is an age in which
expressions of our individualism are ultimate. That is what is
ultimately worship. That’s what matters most. The
only identity that matters in the world in which we live now
is the one that we create for ourselves. And what we discover
about Jesus is that he says, no, I am the one that defines
you. I define who you are. You were
created by me. You exist for my glory. And that
sounds, on the surface of things, like a wildly egomaniacal perspective
for God to have, but the fact of the matter is this. Your ultimate
joy, and your ultimate hope right now and in eternity rests only
in the Lord Jesus Christ. So when he is calling you to
glorify him and enjoy him forever, You have to understand that those
are two sides of the same coin. When you turn your sights towards
Him and you live your life in such a way as you see in Psalm
29, I believe it is, where we Give him the glory that is due
his name. What we’re doing is we’re not
just feeding the ego of a distant and malevolent deity. But what we’re doing is we’re
actually even pursuing our own joy. Because our joy is found
ultimately in giving him the glory that is due his name. And so we were created by Him
and for Him and our ultimate joy is found in Him and in following
Him and believing Him and in obeying Him. And what John wants
us to see here is that the basis for the assurance of our salvation,
the assurance that you and I have any hope in life and in death
at all is that we have a personal knowledge, a personal knowledge
of Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Savior of sinners. Our assurance that we are in
Christ and that we belong to him and that he has saved us
from the unmitigated wrath of God that we deserve for our sins. Our assurance is based on the
fact that he lived just as we did but without sin, that He
came in our place, that He paid the price for our sin, that He
satisfied the Father’s wrath for our sin, and that He has
forgiven us, plunged our sins right to the darkest, most pressurized
depths of the sea, cast them off as far as the east is from
the west and remembers them no more. That’s where our hope is. That’s how you can be assured. And you can trust that when you
look to him, that he has given you the hope of glory. See, the world tells you if you
want hope, you look within. You look to the power within.
You do you. You define yourself. you be authentic
to yourself, that the problems in your life are all out there,
they’re all environmental, they’re all in whatever, the things going
on in the world and the answer to those problems is to be found
within. But what Jesus says is no, no, no, the problem is right
in here, the problem that you have is right here, right here. And the answer to that problem
is Him, outside of you. And listen, No matter how hard
you’re struggling, and I wanna say this as a sidebar, people
who struggle are alive. People who don’t, you know what
dead people do? They don’t struggle. They don’t
fight anymore because they’re dead in their trespasses and
sins. Living people struggle. Living people fight. People who
have hope fight. They fight that sin, they fight
that depravity within them. And if you are someone here who
is struggling and who has questions, who has doubts, who’s wrestling
with all sorts of things, but you’re ultimately leaning in
and you’re trusting in and you’re looking to Jesus Christ, then
the hope that you can have is that you are in Him. And you
can rest in that, and you can be confident of that, and you
can actually objectively know that. But the question that you
have to ask yourself this morning is this, do you believe in Jesus?
Not a Jesus of your own imagination, not a golden corral, and I don’t
mean this in any crass way, but just where you just, like the
Golden Corral where you, and God forbid you should ever have
to go to that place, but if you do, you pick and choose the items
that you like, and you pass by those that you would prefer to
not eat, right? And no, all that Jesus reveals
himself to be, do you believe him? Do you believe
him as he’s revealed himself to be Do you trust Him apart
from anything that you can do to save yourself? That’s one
mark, and it is the most defining mark of salvation, that you believe
in Jesus Christ. And, you know, this has been
a bone of contention even within the church. for hundreds of years. Back in the late, back during
the, we’re coming up here on Reformation Sunday here, or Reformation
Day here in a few weeks, where we reflect upon the gospel that
was recovered and that had been lost and diminished by the church
in so many ways. where we remember that, and this
is back in the early and mid-1500s. Well, later in that century,
there was a Roman Catholic cardinal named Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. He was Pope Clement VIII’s personal
theologian. Do you have a personal theologian? Pope Clement VIII did, and it
was Robert Bellarmine, and he insisted that the greatest of
all Protestant heresies was not justification by grace
through faith in Christ. That wasn’t the greatest Protestant
heresy. He didn’t think that the greatest
Protestant heresy was that even scripture ought to be the sole
source of our authority as to what we’re to believe about God
and how we are to live in light of him. What he believed was
the greatest of all Protestant heresies was that a person can
be completely assured of his or her salvation. Isn’t that
something? The greatest of all heresies.
Now why would he say such a thing when it seems to be without question
that John is trying to say over and over and over again that
a person can actually be assured of salvation. He’s written this
whole letter that we might know that we have eternal life. Well it all has to do with the
fact that Cardinal Bellarmine and others like him denied the
total sufficiency of Christ to save his people from their sins.
He believed that Christ was sufficient to save, but not completely.
That we had to somehow meet him part of the way. And the question,
of course, is this. How much of the way do we have
to meet what Christ has failed to accomplish for us? Do we need
to go 2% of the way? Or 10% of the way? Or 18% of
the way? Or 50% of the way? Is Christ
doing most of the heavy lifting and we just need to give it a
little nudge? See, a Christ that isn’t sufficient
to save completely isn’t sufficient to save at all. And if Christ isn’t sufficient
to save completely, then you can never be assured of your
salvation. You can never be assured of that.
You’re always gonna have to ask yourself the question, how do
I know if I’ve been good enough? How do I know if I have accomplished
enough to save myself? And you’re never gonna arrive
at an answer to that question. You’re never going to be assured
that you’re in Christ if you keep going down into that bottomless
pit. And that is why a true understanding
of Jesus Christ and of the gospel is so undeniably vital. Because at the point where we
contribute A single thing to our salvation other than the
sin that made it necessary in the first place is the very point
at which we can no longer have any assurance. We trust completely in Jesus. We trust completely in them. Paul says in Galatians 2 that
if righteousness is through the law, then what did Christ die
for? Nothing. And that’s why it’s as important
as it is for us to look at the other two tests that John spells
out for us in this passage and in this letter, which are the
moral and the relational tests. We ultimately go back to Jesus
Christ and to him. And so there is a moral test
that we ought to explore as well, because that moral and that relational
test actually corroborate our faith in Jesus Christ. So we
say that we trust in Him. We trust in Him alone and for
salvation as He is offered in the gospel. But what’s the evidence
of that, right? We remember that James says that
faith without works is dead, that we have faith in Christ,
but what’s the evidence of that? How can you tell that it’s more
than just lip service? More than just something that
you give a nice, friendly nod to Jesus, but that there’s nothing
that gives evidence to it. James says there needs to be
evidence, and John is saying essentially the same thing. And
so, a Christian is gonna be someone who has an active conscious that’s
going to instill in him or her a desire to put sin to death,
and to walk in newness of life. Look with me, if you will, at
this passage in verses 20 and 21. John says this, for whenever
our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart and he
knows everything. Beloved, if our heart does not
condemn us, we have confidence before God and whatever we ask,
we receive from him. because we keep his commandments
and do what pleases him. John talks about this condemning
heart that a Christian has. And that seems like a paradox,
right, because the Apostle Paul says that there is therefore
now, in Romans 8, he says, there is therefore right now no condemnation
for those who are in Christ Jesus. But how often, even in the course
of the last day or two, has your heart condemned you? Has the
inner narrative within your soul been a condemning narrative? And John here is saying that
there’s a sign of assurance is that you actually feel guilty
about your sin, that you feel some sense of the fact that you
have caused not only harm to another person, not only harm
to yourself, but you’ve committed a treasonous act towards the
God who loved you and gave himself for you. That’s what sin is. You see the besetting sins of
your life. And oftentimes you look at them and you can’t seem
to let go of how maybe you’ve been hurt, or you can’t let go
of a grudge. You’re still holding on to that.
You have anger against someone who did wrong to you. it festers up and when it does,
you know you shouldn’t feel that way and you know you shouldn’t
think like that, but you’re not a robot with just a switch where
you can just click that off, right? where someone can just
say to you, well, we’ll stop doing that. And then you just
go, okay, it never occurred to me that I shouldn’t hold a grudge
anymore. I think I’ll just stop doing that. And then it just
vanishes forever. That’s not the way that it works. And so
you deal with these issues going on in your heart and these actual
sins that you commit. And you ask this question, how
do I know that I know? How do I know that I’m actually
saved? How do I know that all this stuff that I say I believe
about Jesus isn’t just a bunch of nonsense when I see my own
life not measuring up to how it ought to be? God’s word causes
you to face that question, doesn’t it? There are plenty of people
who have full assurance that they’re in good standing with
God but have nothing to fear. when it comes to that, that they
just assure, they have assurance that everything will work out
fine for them despite the fact that they’re walking in darkness.
And perhaps you may have had an experience where you had some
positive feelings towards Christianity or Jesus or the gospel and you
feel as if you’re in right standing with God. And maybe that’s where you’re
at this morning, but in your life, there’s not a real pursuit of
holiness. There’s not really any concept
of what it means to walk by faith and not by sight, what it means
to repent of your sins. There’s no longing for salvation
of those who’ve yet to come to belief. Maybe perhaps you have
no real love for the scriptures. There’s a whole host of people
in the world, and maybe even in the church, maybe even here
this morning, whose lives look like that, and yet they’re convinced,
beyond any shadow of a doubt, that they have the saving grace
of God upon them, because once saved, always saved, right? Well,
here’s the deal. Once saved, always saved. Does
not mean that you made a decision at one point in your life, somewhere
in the channels of your personal history to believe in Jesus,
and then after that, you just go out and live as you please.
Jesus is not your fire insurance policy. He’s Lord. And that’s exactly what Paul
speaks about in Romans chapter six. One of the reasons why Cardinal
Bellarmine had such an objection to the assurance of salvation
was because he thought that if we, that if grace, if salvation
was by grace alone, apart from any works of the law, then what
it would do is lead to godless living. it would lead us to just
look at Jesus’s fire insurance and then we just can go out and
live however we please. And that very objection is anticipated
by the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter six, isn’t it? Because
if you look in Romans chapter six, you see that Paul says that
if Christ by his grace has freed us from the condemnation of sin,
then how is it that we can say that we’ve actually received
that grace, received that love, if we go right back into the
slavery of sin again? If we go right back into walking
in darkness? It’s impossible to serve both
sin and Christ. And so the evidence of God’s
redeeming love in your life and in my life is that there’s some
tangible manifestation of Christ’s holiness coming out of us. We are known by our fruit. And just as a sidebar comment,
I’ll say this. John draws this connection between
our obedience, our personal holiness, and walk in newness of life.
He draws this connection between that and the confidence that
we can have before him in prayer. I don’t know if you noticed that,
but when our lives begin to take the shape of Jesus Christ, begin
to reflect him in his character and in his glory, our lives become
aligned with his will. And so when we pray, we begin
to pray in ways that reflect that, that are in line with his
will. We don’t simply go on praying
for our own prosperity. our own personal comfort, greater
accumulation of whatever is going to make us happy. No, we ultimately
pray thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven with a sincerity
of heart, just as we prayed in the Lord’s Prayer this morning. We pray in ways that begin to
conform to his will and we trust that he’s faithful to answer
that kind of prayer for your good and for my good, for our
good, for His glory. God doesn’t answer our prayers
just because we’re obedient, but our obedience causes us to
pray in ways that conform to His will. And so that’s the spiritual
test and the moral test. John says here in verse 24 that
whoever keeps His commandments, abides in God, and God in Him. So that’s the test of holiness.
But then finally, there’s the relational test. And we see it
in verse 23. In verse 23, John writes this,
and this is His commandment, that we believe in the name of
His Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another, just as He has commanded
us. Does that ring a bell? The golden
rule? that we are to love God, but
that we’re also to love one another. In other words, our trust in
Christ, our looking to Christ, our resting in Christ, our hope
in Christ is going to not just have this vertical upward direction
towards Him, but it’s going to manifest itself horizontally
in our relationships with one another. How do you know that you know
him? Well, you believe in Jesus. He’s shown himself to be in the
scriptures and your life begins to shape by, begin to be shaped
by his will. And your love for God’s people
becomes obvious. The great theologian Matthew
Henry said that when we take God for our God, we take his
people for our people. Which sounds really nice, doesn’t
it? But then you actually have to do life with those people.
And sometimes those people are, at best, a nuisance, and at worst,
just downright jacked up. And you have to do life with
them. You have to love them. You have
to sacrifice for them. You have to seek their good,
sometimes at great personal cost. I wonder if you know anyone else
in the Bible who’s done that. Maybe for you. Maybe whose name
starts with a J. How can a person possibly be
assured that they know God and that they have his redeeming
love upon them if they don’t love God’s people? If they don’t
love one another, the brothers and sisters in Christ, the people
for whom Christ died, the very people for whom Jesus laid down
his own life. You know, that’s one of the fascinating
things about marriage, because when you get married, you don’t
just marry the individual in isolation right you marry into
a whole family and Some of you were chuckling because you’re
like, you know, I sure did I didn’t realize what I was getting myself
into back in the day I’ve been dealing with this forever. And
and the thing is you marry into a whole family There are movies
and books about this in laws aunts uncles cousins all of these
people are that you marry into, and you can’t say that you love
your spouse, but you refuse to have anything to do with his
or her mom or dad or brother or sister or family or anything
of the sort, that you refuse to to go be with them on holidays
or invite them into your home or have any contact with them. They love their family. Your
wife loves her family, your husband loves his family, but you don’t
love them and you won’t have anything to do with them. You
can’t say that you truly love your spouse if you don’t love
the people that they love. And you can’t love God. You can’t
say that you love God. and fail to love God’s people? Do you believe in Jesus? Is the
moral quality of your life however imperfectly reflective of him?
Do you love God’s people? Let me just wrap it up with this
before I finish. One thing that this passage does
is remind me that God assures us He grants us that assurance
that we are His children when His Spirit testifies with our
spirit that that’s the case. In other words, God assures me
and He can assure you that you are His, that you belong to Him,
that you are under His grace, that you are indeed His child
when when he takes the promises of the gospel and persuades you
and enables you to believe them. That’s the spirit doing his work
within your heart to trust in who Jesus is and what he’s done. But here’s the second thing.
It’s also important to remember that someone can truly be a follower
of Christ. and just completely fall off
the rails for a season of life. Completely. It’s not as if Cardinal
Bellarmine’s fears that people would just take for granted the
grace of Christ and live however they please. It’s not as if his
fears were completely irrational. There was a reason for that. And it makes me think of the
prodigal son whenever I go there. You’ll remember that In that
story, the younger brother squandered all of his inheritance on all
sorts of absolutely disastrous and grossly immoral purposes.
He went to the far country. He rejected all of the grace
that his father had given to him. He just decided to live
as he pleased and he And he fell into a dark, dark place. Yet he never, ever ceased to
be his father’s son. He grieved his father deeply,
no doubt. And our sins do grieve our father. And yes, that prodigal son suffered
the consequences of his actions, severe consequences. And he had
to deal with that on some level for the rest of his life. But
you know what never changed? His status as the father’s son. And the father, though grieved
and saddened and perhaps even angered by his son’s wickedness,
never ever stopped loving his son. He never stopped. And that’s why that story is
so beautiful. That’s why we love it so much
because we know that on some level, we’re all prodigals, right? I mean, be an honest person,
okay? Don’t lie to yourself. On some
level, we’re all prodigals. And yet, in Christ, our status
never changes. That is when we sing the marvelous
grace of our loving Lord. And we sing grace that is greater
than all of our sins. That’s what we’re talking about,
friends. That’s what we’re talking about right there. We’re talking
about this God whose grace is greater than our sins. And when
we realize that all that we deserve, that
you deserve, is the absolute, unmitigated wrath of the Father
for the tiniest, most insignificant in your mind sin. And yet you
don’t get what you deserve, but instead you get what you don’t
deserve, which is mercy and grace and steadfast love that endures
forever. How can that not compel you to
live all of your life for his glory? and pursue the good and the love
of your neighbor. Let’s consider that now as we
go to hymn and prayer. O Lord our God, we are so grateful
for your abundant mercy to us, for the love that will never
let us go, And so we pray that in response,
that we would be all the more diligent to conform our calling
and election. And to remember that if we practice
these qualities, we will never fail. And to remember that nothing
in all creation shall be able to separate us from the love
of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. It’s in the name of
him. We pray, amen.