Before we turn to God’s Word, if I’m looking at the calendar right, I believe this would have been Grant’s last time to assist in worship for us tonight before he and Anne Michael head to Texas A&M where he will be the director of RUF, Reformed University Fellowship, there, and soon to be the pastor, campus pastor. So it’s a privilege to lead worship with Grant tonight and I know you’ll want to give him thanks and wish him well as you leave tonight as he’ll be in the back of the sanctuary. Personally, I am grateful and thankful to him in his ministry here to the youth, having three children in youth ministry with Grant here. And so thanks, Grant, for your ministry. Anne Michael as well. We love y’all and know all would want to say the same as well, and be praying for y’all.
So with that, let’s look to 1 John, 1 John 5; page 1023 in the pew Bibles. Maybe six or seven years ago at Back to School Night, the teacher put an image of a painting up on the screen and she asked the parents to describe what they were looking at. As you would expect, she didn’t get a whole lot of participation, a whole lot of feedback, but someone said something about how it was a man sitting and writing at a desk. And then she said, “What else?” Awkward silence. And then someone else said something about the lighting or maybe something about a map or a skull that was on the desk. “And what else?” And there was another detail or two that was mentioned. “What else?” She did it maybe four or five times. It was an exercise that she had done with the students to get them to be more descriptive in their writing, to look at the painting again and again and again and in more and more detail.
Well 1 John is like that in many ways. You could say that the three main themes of this little book are life, light and love. And it’s like John is presenting these things to us and then he’s asking, “What else? What else can be said about light, life and love in Christ Jesus?” John is making us look deeper and deeper and deeper into the beauty of Christ. Deeper and deeper and deeper into the beauty of the Gospel. There have been times that I have asked myself, as I’ve opened up the Scripture and prepared for the sermon each week, that I’ve asked myself, “What more can I say about loving one another? What else can be said about being obedient to God?” But like most of us know who have been following Christ for some time, who have spent years of studying His Word, we know it is inexhaustible and we go deeper and deeper and deeper. “What else? What else? What else?” And there’s always something more for us to see.
Let’s look again at 1 John this evening, chapter 5. I want us to look for three things in the closing verses of this book, and they are actually linked together. I want us to see first, faith leading to assurance. Faith leading to assurance. And then, assurance leading to prayer. And then finally, prayer leading to obedience. Those will be our three points for tonight. Before we read God’s Word, let’s pray and ask His help. Let’s pray.
Father, as we have just been reminded in the catechism to the children, our struggle, our challenges in prayer. And our challenges, our struggle to hear Your Word and to respond, to submit ourselves to it. And we give You thanks for the intercession of Jesus. We give You thanks for Your generosity, for the abundance of Your grace and pouring out Your Spirit. And so we pray for help tonight. We ask for Your blessing. We pray that You would help us to understand what You would have to speak to us tonight. And some things that are hard to understand, we pray for understanding, for light, for guidance, that we would grow in our love for You, our love for one another, and walk in faithfulness. And we pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
First John chapter 5, starting in 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. 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.
If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask, and God will give him life—to those who commit sins that do not lead to death. There is sin that leads to death; I do not say that one should pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that does not lead to death.
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.
We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.
And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols.”
The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God endures forever.
First, faith leading to assurance. The question is, “How do you know?” How do you know you are saved? How do you know that you have eternal life? Maybe a more basic question would be, “Can you know? Is it possible to have an assurance of faith?” Well to that second question, I think the answer is a simple, “Yes. Yes, it is possible to have assurance.” Just look at what John writes in verse 13. He says, “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.” And I think there is a link here. We see a link with what John writes also in His gospel, in the gospel of John. Right? At the end, in chapter 20 verses 30 and 31, John says that these signs of Jesus are written, “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, and that by believing, you may have life in His name.” You see, in the Gospel, it is good news leading to faith. And now here in 1 John, at the end we find him saying that it is faith leading to assurance.
And yes, very clearly it is possible, it is possible to know that you have eternal life. But how? How do you know? Well that’s a much more difficult question, isn’t it? And just like John says, that is exactly what he has been trying to get across in what he has written throughout this little book. That Jesus – he’s holding up to us Jesus – Jesus is the one who is “faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Jesus is our Advocate. He is our propitiation. He is the one who laid down His life for us. And He has given us the Spirit “so that we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” We can know that it is He who overcomes the world. You see, it’s the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. And “whoever has the Son has life.” Jesus does it. Jesus is the way. He is our confidence.
How do you know? You know because you believe in Jesus. You know because you know Him and trust in Him. You abide in Him. And the Spirit changes you. The Spirit changes your affection. The Spirit changes your desires, changes your relationships, your behavior, your character. You see, it is the work of God in you. That’s what the Westminster divines recognized when they were writing and teaching about assurance as well. When the Westminster Assembly gathered to write the confession and the catechisms, when they went to teach what the Bible has to say about assurance, it should not surprise you that they referred multiple times to this book of 1 John. And in the Larger Catechism, number 80 asks, “Can true believers be infallibly assured that they are in the estate of grace and that they shall persevere therein unto salvation?” Here is the answer. Larger Catechism number 80, “Such as truly believe in Christ and endeavor to walk in all good conscience before Him, may by faith, grounded upon God’s promises, by the Spirit, enabling them to discern in themselves those graces to which the promises of life are made, and bearing witness with their spirits that they are children of God, they may be infallibly assured that they are in the estate of grace and shall persevere therein unto salvation.”
Now here’s what I want us to see. That is a lot of words, but what I want us to see from that answer is that the focus primarily, mainly is on what Christ has done. The focus primarily is on what God has promised. The focus is taking us to what the Spirit enables us to do. That’s just like what we find in verse 13 of chapter 5. “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.” The secret of assurance is a focus not on our faith but on the object of our faith. It’s a focus on Jesus, on what He has done from start to finish. You see, believers can know that they have eternal life because of what Jesus has done for you. Believers can know that you have eternal life because of what Jesus continues to do in you and through you, by the work of the Holy Spirit.
Louis Berkhof, in his little book, The Assurance of Faith, he writes that the first thing in the foundation of assurance are the promises of God. He says that it was actually one of the great mistakes of the piotism of the 16th and 17th centuries, that the basis of assurance was oftentimes sought too much in the subjective experience of the believers. And they were concerned about the welfare of their soul, and they turned their attention on themselves rather than to the Word of God. He says they oftentimes spent their lives in an estate of morbid introspection and that this method, it did not promote the assurance of faith that fills the heart with joy, with heavenly joy, but rather engendered doubt in them and uncertainty. And it “caused the soul to grope about,” this is what he says, “in a labyrinth of anxious questionings.” I wonder if you have ever found yourself in that sort of condition?
And Berkhof tells the story from Archibald Alexander about a man with the initials R.C. And he said, “R.C. said, ‘I had spent much time in reading accounts of Christian experience, such as Owen on spiritual mindedness, Edwards on the affections, Guthrie’s trial of saving interest in Christ, Newton’s letters, and so on.” He had read these books. He said he had also talked to experienced and old believers as well as those of his own age. He says, “But all these, having as it seemed to me very little facilitated my progress and the evils of my heart seeming rather to increase” – here’s what he resolved to do – “I resolved to lay aside all books except the Bible and to devote my whole time to prayer and reading until I experienced a favorable change.” And it was with that, that R.C. was led into light. Now that’s not saying that Bible reading and prayer are all that there is to the Christian life or all that there is to assurance even, because John has plenty to say. As we have seen and as we will see even in these verses, he has plenty to say about living a life of obedience, a life of piety. But what is most important? The most important part of assurance is a focus on what God has promised, on what God has done for us in Christ. And it’s there that we find assurance. It’s there that we find the assurance that we are looking for, that we find a confidence, a boldness in the Christian life.
A few years ago we went to a cross country banquet for our son at the governor’s mansion. And the whole family went. And we have a few pictures from that night of some of the younger siblings, some of the elementary aged siblings there, hanging out around a very official looking conference table. There is another one where they are at a desk and the desk has this pen in place. It looks like it is ready to sign some official government documents. In fact, on the desk in the picture you can see the MDOT annual budget review that is sitting there. There are some papers that are there that have the state seal from the state of Mississippi. And one of the boys in the picture, maybe a fourth grader, he’s putting bunny ears on his friend, and they’re smiling; they’ve having a good time! But why were they there? Why were they at the governor’s conference table? And why were they at the governor’s desk, and so confidently? Well it’s because they were classmates with the governor’s daughter. And in each picture she was there. She was at the head of the conference table. She was sitting in the chair at the desk. She’s the one who gave them access. She’s the one who gave them confidence to go into the office of the governor.
We find that in assurance too. And when we find an assurance of faith, a confidence of our salvation, then we have a boldness. There is a boldness to approach the throne of grace. There is a confidence to go to God in prayer. And so we’ve seen faith leading to assurance. The second thing is assurance leading to prayer. Look at verse 14. “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.” You see, prayer is an expression of our confidence before God. We could even say that prayer is an expression of our love for God, of our understanding of His love for us and our love for Him. Prayer is the language of love to God and for our brothers and sisters in Christ. Think about what we have found all throughout this little book of 1 John, and how many times John addresses his readers as “little children” or “beloved.” He loves them. They are family to him. He has this sincere concern. There is an urgency in his message to them as he writes these things to them. Well don’t you think, don’t you think that if they needed something from John, if they asked John for his help, that he would be ready and eager to respond to them with something for their good?
Well it’s in the same way that God has so loved us. God so loved us that He sent His Son for us. God so loved us that He would call us His children, then don’t you think that He will hear us when we pray? Don’t you think that He will be ready to help us when we call out to Him according to His will? Verse 15 says, “If we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of Him.”
I was talking to a friend a few days ago. He mentioned Moses’ prayer in Exodus 32 after the golden calf. And he’s interceding for the forgiveness of the people. And Moses basically asked that God would blot out his name from God’s book for the sake of the people. And there is some similarity there with what Paul writes in Romans chapter 9. He says, “I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers.” I’m not sure I could do that. I don’t think I could pray like that. But what you see is that that kind of prayer, that kind of boldness in prayer, it comes from knowing how secure someone is in the love of God. That kind of prayer, it comes from knowing what Jesus prayed. “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani”- “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” and knowing that Jesus did that for you. That Jesus was cursed. Jesus was condemned so that we might never be. That’s assurance. That’s the love of God for you and a love leading us to love God and to respond to Him and to call out to Him in prayer. It’s a prayer that, like Stott says, “It’s not a convenient device for imposing our will on God. No, it is the prescribed way for us to subordinate our will to His. It’s a way for us to say, “Not My will, not My will but Thy will be done.” It’s prayer that is an expression of love to God that comes out of a heart that loves the Lord.
But it’s also a prayer that is an expression of love for others. Frank Boreham tells a story of what he imagined Corinth might have been like when the apostle Paul was writing to them. Some of the people needed to be reconciled to God, and in his imagination, Boreham thought about what might have been some of the people in the congregation there – people like Claudius, say. He says, “Claudius was wealthy. He was a member of the church, but not happy about it.” Here’s how Boreham puts it. He says, “The life that Claudius had set before himself in the early days of his spiritual experience seemed to him later on like a dream. That is to say, it seemed to him like a dream when he thought about it, but he did not think about it more often than he could help.” There was Polonius and Phoebe. Instead of being wealthy, Pelonius and Phoebe were poor and they had suffered one trial after another – illness, conflict, the loss of a child. They were brokenhearted and they had consigned themselves to give up going to the assembly of the believers in Corinth. And then there was Julia, and Julia was a widow with her son, Amplius. She had big dreams for Amplius. She had dreams that he would have a place among the city gates, that he would have a name among the respected, but what he decided, what he resolved himself, was to become a missionary like Paul and to face the same kind of sufferings that Paul had faced.” And Boreham says, “A little bit of Julia died that day and she began to fight against God.” And Boreham says that all of them – Claudius and Polonius and Phoebe and Julia – they needed to be reconciled to God.
We know people like that, don’t we? You think of people in our own experiences that have similar, have had similar spiritual experiences. Maybe you are experiencing something to that effect even now – a need to be reconciled to God. But you know what else? There is a need for the brothers and sisters in Christ to be praying for people like this. That’s a love for the saints. That’s bearing one another’s burdens and going to God in prayer. What does James say? James says that, “The prayer of a righteous person availeth much.” He says that, “If anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.” And John says here in 1 John “Pray for them.” Pray for those who are wandering. Pray for the brother who has committed a sin not leading to death.
But when should you not pray? When should you stop praying for someone? I don’t know. I don’t know when someone has committed a sin that leads to death. There is sin that leads to death, John says in verse 16, and John says not to pray for that. But I’m not exactly sure what that means. It could be someone who claims the name of Christ for his own benefit and then who lies and cheats and uses Christ for personal gain while bringing reproach on the name of Christ in doing so. It could be that. It could be when someone has seemed to embrace Christ and then turned against Him in active antagonism, against Him and His people. It could be what John has written about earlier, that “those who went out from us but were not of us.” They were those who were “of the spirit of the antichrist.” The book of Hebrews says that, “It is impossible for those who once enlightened and have fallen away to be restored again to repentance.” Packer says that if you are worried if that’s talking about you then it’s probably not talking about you, because it’s talking about an unrepentant sin in straying away from God. But this is a hard word, isn’t it, that we come to here at the end of 1 John. And here’s the thing. It should put us on our knees. It should put us on our knees for sinning and straying brothers and sisters in Christ. And even ready to separate from those who are deceivers and frauds, as we will see in a couple of weeks from 2 John.
One last thing, and this flows from a prayer for sinning saints. We have faith leading to assurance, assurance leading to prayer, finally, prayer leading to obedience. John seems to be going along quite well from one thought to another, and then he just stops. He wants us to pray for those who are sinning because the life of a Christian is to be one of obedience. Verse 18, “We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning.” Those who are of God and not of the world, they are watched over by God and they watch over themselves. And then John says somewhat abruptly, verse 21, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” And that’s it. Period. The end. There are no personal greetings. No benediction. No goodbyes. It reminds me a little bit about the way my grandmother used to end a phone call. She just hung up! Maybe it was something because we lived next door and she almost viewed it like a walkie-talkie or something and just end it with a “10-4”, click! Verse 21, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” Click. That’s it.
What’s an idol? Well, an idol, according to some definitions, is anything other than God that we look to for our hope and happiness, significance and security. An idol is anything that we come to rely on for some blessing or help or guidance in the place of whole-hearted reliance on the true and the living God. What do idolaters do? Think about the idolatry that we find described for us in the Bible. There is Israel and the golden calf. There are the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel. There is Paul commenting on the idols at the Acropolis in Athens. What do idolaters do? Idolaters seek to manipulate their gods to do what they want them to do – to bring about pleasure, to soothe a guilty conscience, to have some control over life’s outcomes. But it doesn’t work. And idolatry is death.
Why does John end with this warning? Why does he end this way? It’s because idolatry is simply sin against God. And it’s because idolatry, the idols, they go against everything that he has been trying to impress upon us, his readers, throughout this little book. Think about those three big themes in this little book – life, light and love. John says in chapter 1, “The life was made manifest.” “We proclaim to you the eternal life.” Verse 20 here says, “We are in Him who is true and His Son, Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.” He is preaching life, he is preaching eternal life. Anything else is a cheap substitute. Anything else is counterfeit. Anything else is death. Eternal life, true life is found only in a relationship with God through faith.
And when we think about what we talked about at the very beginning, an assurance of life, an assurance of life is found in keeping one’s self from idols. Think about it. Idolatry is a killer for assurance. I wonder if you struggle with assurance, I wonder if you struggle with making an idol of your career. Are you looking for your significance there, and when it doesn’t provide it, do you then doubt whether you’re actually measure up, whether you are good enough? If you struggle with assurance, I wonder if you struggle with making an idol of your family, of your children? Do you trust or do you worry? Do you take on a responsibility, do you bear a burden that you were never meant to bear and you’re so wrapped up in the right now rather than thinking of forever? If you struggle with assurance, I wonder if you struggle with making an idol of your performance? And as much as you do, as hard as you work, you can never make up for your past failures. As much as you do, surely it’s not enough to please God. And idols are like a cancer in the spiritual life. They are the opposite of light.
Second thing – life, then light. “Walk in the light,” John says. “Keep His commandments,” chapter 2 verse 4. “Everyone born of God does not keep on sinning.” Well what is the very first commandment? “You shall have no other gods before Me.” And what’s the second? “You shall not make for yourself any graven images.” Idolatry is sin. It’s disobedience to God. It is walking in darkness rather than in walking in the light. And John is calling us over and over again, “Walk in the light. Walk in obedience to God. Obey His commands.”
And then there’s love. “Beloved, let us love one another,” chapter 4 verse 7. A friend reminded me of a story about the apostle John that’s found in a commentary from the biblical scholar, Jerome. His commentary on the book of Galatians. Jerome was born around 340 AD. This is what he wrote in that commentary. He said, “The blessed John, the evangelist, lived in Ephesus until extreme old age. His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words. During individual gatherings, he usually said nothing but, ‘Little children, love one another.’ The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, ‘Teacher, why do you always say this?’ He replied with a line worthy of John, ‘Because it is the Lord’s commandment, and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.” Love one another.. Their unity, our unity is found in Christ and in Christ alone. In His love we can then love one another. Idols destroy that.
Life, light and love. It’s all throughout this little book. Light, life and love cannot coexist with idols. “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” Let’s pray.
Father, we bow before You and pray that You would expose to us our idols, the idols of our heart, those things that we put in Your place and we seek joy, satisfaction, life in some way other than from You. Help us to expose those things and to destroy, to pluck out, to cast them away, that we would be enabled to love You with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind, all of our strength, and to love one another as You have called us to do. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.