*Note: The sermon recorder didn’t work this Sunday. An approximate manuscript of the sermon is provided below.
Have you ever sat through a sermon or lesson, or listened to a talk, and at the end you wonder, “What was that even about?” It’s always nice when a biblical author tells us his purpose. It is clear that biblical books and passages have unified purposes and themes; but John in particular has a tendency to directly tell us why he writes. In his Gospel (the Gospel of John), he famously gives his purpose statement in John 20:31, “[B]ut these are written so that you may believe that Jesus iss the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” When you read the Gospel of John, this is the main thing John wants you to take away who Jesus is (the Christ, the Son of God), he wants you to do something with that knowledge (believe), and he desires the ultimate outcome of that belief in Jesus (that you may have life in his name).
John does something similar as he closes out the letter of 1 John—he tells us exactly why he has written. Throughout this letter, he has given us a number of these purpose statements (especially in chapter 2), but now he closes out the letter with a final purpose statement. Verse 13, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.” Do you notice how similar this is to the purpose of the Gospel of John? The Gospel’s purpose is that you might know Jesus, believe in Jesus, and therefore have life. The letter’s purpose is that we who know Jesus, believe in Jesus, and have life in Jesus might KNOW that we have life—eternal life.
As I’ve said a number of times through this series (and it bears repeating as we bring the series to a close), 1 John was written for the purpose of assurance; that we might KNOW. One of the biggest takeaways I hope you have from these four months in 1 John is the encouragement that you really can have assurance! When we have faith in Jesus Christ, the true Jesus Christ, and we see that faith bearing fruit in humility, repentance, obedience, and love, we can know that we belong to Jesus and have life in him.
But all along as John has been showing us the source of assurance, he’s also shown us the sobering reality that there are some who have a false assurance. There are some who claim to be Christians while proving themselves not to be by their denial of the biblical Jesus, their prideful declarations that they aren’t sinners in need of saving grace, by their refusal to obey God, and by their lack of love for God and his people. And so, notice in verse 13 that John directs this purpose of assurance to a specific group of people, “you who believe in the name of the Son of God.” It is ultimately those who believe in Jesus, who humbly and dependently receive him, who can receive this confident assurance. The question of assurance boils down to this in the end—do you have Jesus? As John wrote in our passage last week in verse 12, “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” Do you have Jesus?
If you have Jesus by faith, you can have assurance. Throughout the passage today, John ends this letter by hitting again and again the beautiful note of assurance, which we see this in the repetition of the word “know.” Here’s the outline for this passage: We who believe in Jesus can know… (and I’ll show us here five things we can know).
That we have eternal life
First, we who believe in Jesus can know that we have eternal life. We’ve already looked at this one a bit as it is right in that purpose statement of verse 13 as is the first thing in this passage that we are told we can know. When we think of assurance of eternal life, we might think its something we can really only know when we get there. And yes, there is a kind of assurance I think that we will have when Christ returns and makes all things new that exceeds anything we know in this life, if even for the fact that we will finally be free from our frailties and the imperfections that remain in us and our faith. But John specifically wants us to know, and know even NOW, that we HAVE (not just will one day have) eternal life! Eternal life has already begun for those who have believed in Jesus Christ! We, who were once dead in sin, have already been given new life that can never and will never be taken from us! The future, eschatological reality has already broken into our present reality. Think of this often, believer, especially in the trials of life and when the reality of death is most acute—eternal life is your present possession!
And as John has shown us through this letter, we can have assurance that we have eternal life when that new life begins to spring forth from us in these different ways. Or you can say, you can tell something is alive because it is living. None of the good things John has encouraged in this letter cause that life, but they are evidence of life. Life looks like humble confession, love for God and his people, reception of the truth about Christ, and so many other things. These are signs of life. But again, ultimately, this assurance comes through faith, through receiving Jesus and resting in him.
That God hears and answers us
Second, we who believe in Jesus can know that God hears and answers us. Verses 14-15, “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.” Here I want to give you two encouragements in prayer from these verses. Frist, pray confidently.
He says, “This is the confidence we have toward him.” When we have assurance of eternal life in Christ, one of the great effects is confidence in prayer. When we come to God in prayer through Jesus Christ, we are not sending off thoughts and words into the vast abyss hoping that some great being out there might happen to hear us. Prayer is not writing a message in a bottle and setting it adrift at sea hoping it will be washed up on some far off shore and be found. Prayer is more like a child coming to a father directly, a good father, knowing that father will listen to them, delights to hear their requests, and desires good for them.
When we approach God the Father through Jesus Christ the Son, we can (to use the language of Hebrews 4) “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” Is there any greater privilege than to have this sort of confidence in the presence of God and to have the ear of the almighty God turned in our direction? Twice John asserts that “he hears us!” and he even goes so far as to say that “we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him!” God hears us, God is both able and ready to help us, and when we ask according to his will, he delights to answer prayer! Pray confidently!
And second, pray submissively. Notice that John adds an important qualifier, “if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.” To pray “according to God’s will” is to pray submissively. It means that we pray for things that God desires instead of merely things we desire. As an extreme example, we could say that someone who prays to ask for God’s help to be successful robbing a bank can’t have confidence that God will hear and answer that prayer! But I doubt any of us have done that before. An ordinary, not extreme, application is to go to God’s word and pray for things that are in accordance with God’s commandments, God’s purposes, and God’s promises. To put it even more simply, if you want to pray God’s will, pray God’s word!
If you’ve ever struggled to know what to pray, one of the biggest helps I can give you is to read God’s word and then pray it back to God! And if you want particularly applicable language for prayer in times of joy, sorrow, need, abundance, or other circumstances, go to the Psalms and pray the language of the Psalms back to God! Hopefully our summer sermon series in the Psalms will be help!
Another great option is to go to the Lord’s Prayer! We pray it every Sunday together not just because of a neat tradition, but because Jesus gave us this prayer to instruct us in how to pray. A great practice in prayer is to do what I did in the pastoral prayer today and simply pray through the sections of the Lord’s Prayer, expanding on each petition as you have needs.
But to get back to praying submissively, another way we do this is to submit to God’s will in how he chooses to answer your prayer! It is to pray saying, “Father, this is what I desire, but help me to delight in your will if you think it is best to say ‘no’ or to answer my prayer in a way I didn’t expect.”
To pray submissively, “Your will be done,” is not to lack faith but to have great faith because, in faith, you entrust yourself to the wisdom of God in any and every circumstance. It is a prayer of humble dependance, which is of the essence of faith. It is the faith that say, “Your will is always good and right even if it’s not what I think I need.” It is the faith that says, “Your glory and your plan are more significant than my comfort.” It is the faith that says, “I know that you know what is most conducive to my eternal joy.” When we pray this way, our controlling request is, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
John then gives an example of this kind of prayer in verses 16-17. He starts, “If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask, and God will give him life.” And he makes this distinction between those sins which do not lead to death and those sins which do lead to death. He’s not talking about what some call “mortal” and “venial” sins here. The bible makes it clear that all sin deserves death, “The wages of sin is death.” But, as John has already shown us, some sinners receive eternal life! The difference isn’t between one category of sin and another as much as it is a category between Christians who, though they sin, confess that sin to God and he is faithful and just to forgive them and (on the other hand) those who, as John has emphasized throughout this book, utterly reject Jesus. Now John doesn’t say to NOT pray for people who have rejected the faith completely, but he does want us to know that we shouldn’t have confidence that God will answer those prayer. But for fellow Christians, when we see them wandering into sin or struggling with sin, we do have confidence that when we pray for them, that God will restore them!
When you see a fellow brother or sister struggling with sin, do you pray for them? Do you, in love, bring them before God in prayer, pleading for God to help them? Or do you bring them before others in gossip or simply hold them in your heart in judgment? We’ve talked a lot about loving fellow Christians in 1 John. Praying for one another is one of the best ways to love one another!
That God perfects and protects us
I spent a lot more time on that point than I will on any other because John spends more time on it than any other in this passage. Through the final four verse of this letter, John rattles off in quick succession a number of these “we know” statements. Our third point then from verse 18, we who believe in Jesus can know that God perfects and protects us. “We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.” John isn’t saying that believers will never sin again. He says, “KEEP ON sinning.” He’s saying that one of the results of our salvation is that we’re not only delivered from the penalty of sin (praise God), but also more and more from the power of sin. You cannot remain unchanged.
And part of the reason for this is the protection of Jesus! “Everyone who has been born of God (plural – us) does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God (singular – Jesus) protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.” Jesus, the one who came to conquer the devil protects us! He is able to deliver us when we are tempted because he is the one who conquered the devil’s temptations for us! We can be confident that Jesus will keep us to the end whatever spiritual forces come against us!
That we belong to God
And he continues to the next point in verse 19: We who believe in Jesus can know that we belong to God. Though the whole world lies under Satan’s power, we can know that we belong to God! We are his possession! In the whole world, he says to his people, “You are mine!” Which of course, is exactly why he perfects and protects us. And as a note, if the second half of verse 19 is a source of discouragement or anxiety for you living in a world which lies under the power of the evil one, live in the reality of the first half of the verse, that you belong to God!
The True God
And then this leads into our final point: We who believe in Jesus can know the true God. Notice that this final object of knowledge is not just a fact or proposition, but a person. Up to this point “we know that,” we know something. The final use of “know” in verse 20 is different, “…so that we may know him.” We know someone. Who is the someone we know? The true God (and the use of “true” here means something like “real” – the “real God” as opposed to false gods).
This knowledge of God in these final two verses is wrapped up in Jesus Christ in a number of amazing ways. Jesus, the Son of God reveals to us the true God. “And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true.” As Hebrews 1 tells us, “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son… the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.” God has most clearly revealed himself to us in Jesus to the point that Jesus himself said in John 14, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
Jesus reveals to us the true God, and Jesus also unites us to the true God. “And we are IN HIM who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ.” This language is very similar to the language of “abiding” that we’ve seen through this book. It speaks of our close fellowship and communion with God. But the way of being “In God” is through being “In Christ.” Jesus gives us knowledge of God and even more wonderfully brings us into fellowship with God!
How, because Jesus is the true God! “He is the true God and eternal life.” This phrase in verse 20 could refer to God the Father, but the most natural connection for the word “he” is the person just named in the immediately preceding words, “Jesus Christ.” If this is the case, this is one of the clearest statements of the divinity of Jesus anywhere in the Bible, which would fit exceedingly well also with John’s point about the importance of Jesus’ identity throughout this book. Jesus, the Son, who unites us to the Father who is the true God, is also himself the true God!
There is one way to the Father! One way to knowledge of God! One way of fellowship with the true God! One way to have life and life eternal! Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who took on flesh to life and die in our place deliver us from our sins and reconcile us to God!
All of which leads naturally to the final short verse and John’s closing charge, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” Here, John isn’t probably thinking so much of physical statues and idols as his is of false notions of God and of Jesus. To confess a Jesus other than the true Jesus who is the true God is to confess and idol. And idols, as the Bible tells us again and again are dead and powerless. This is a fitting conclusion to the book. Brothers and sisters, guard yourselves against idolatry! Confess the true Jesus Christ and have life and assurance in him! Let nothing else take his place and give no other person or thing in your heart the throne that belongs to him alone! Take hold of Jesus, believe, live, and know.
