1 John 5:13-21—The Confidence and Character of God's Children
Notes
Transcript
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: 1 John 5:13-21
N:
Welcome
Welcome
Good morning! I’m Bill Connors, senior pastor here with Eastern Hills, and I’m blessed to be here this morning as the church gathers together to worship the Lord and to reflect on His Word as we finish up our look at the book of 1 John today. We’re also going to be taking the Lord’s Supper as a church family after the message. I love coming to the Table of the Lord together.
If you’re a first-time guest this morning, whether you’re in the room or online, we’d like to have the opportunity to drop you a note and thank you for joining with the church family at Eastern Hills today. If you wouldn’t mind, would you just shoot a quick text with just the word WELCOME to 505-339-2004? You’ll get a text back with a link to our digital communication card, where you can give us just a little more information so we can pray for you and drop you a quick card thanking you for being with Eastern Hills today. If you’re here in the building and you’d rather fill out a physical card, you’ll find those in the back of the pew in front of you. Just take a minute during the service to complete that, and you can drop it in the offering plates as you leave the sanctuary at the close of service, or you can bring it down here to me when service is over, so I can meet you and thank you personally for joining us today with a gift. Either way, thanks for being with Eastern Hills this morning.
I have a few quick announcements to share before we dive in to the Scriptures today:
Announcements
Announcements
Grad Sunday next week, reception immediately following Family Worship in the FLC. Plan to stay afterwards next Sunday to congratulate our grads and their families.
VBS Volunteers Needed see Joe or Liana or Randi, extra hands to assist, not to lead or teach. Background check will be necessary.
AAEO $18,307.85, goal surpassed! If you haven’t had a chance to give to this offering yet, today is the last day those gifts will count towards our goal.
Opening
Opening
The last portion of 1 John: the Letter of Life, Light, and Love that we have considered in its entirety in the past dozen weeks, at first read feels a little hodge-podge: as if John had said just about everything that he wanted to say, and now just gives a few disparate closing thoughts as he finishes up. However, we can see that there is a theme that runs through this final section of the letter. Let’s stand as able and read our focal passage this morning, 1 John 5:13-21:
13 I have written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. 14 This is the confidence we have before him: If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. 15 And if we know that he hears whatever we ask, we know that we have what we have asked of him. 16 If anyone sees a fellow believer committing a sin that doesn’t lead to death, he should ask, and God will give life to him—to those who commit sin that doesn’t lead to death. There is sin that leads to death. I am not saying he should pray about that. 17 All unrighteousness is sin, and there is sin that doesn’t lead to death. 18 We know that everyone who has been born of God does not sin, but the one who is born of God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him. 19 We know that we are of God, and the whole world is under the sway of the evil one. 20 And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know the true one. We are in the true one—that is, in his Son, Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. 21 Little children, guard yourselves from idols.
PRAYER (Northdale Baptist Church, Pastor Mike Hoy)
The theme that ties this part of the letter together, and actually makes its “hodge-podge” feel fit with the rest of the letter, is confidence. Confidence is the state of being certain about something. Confidence is a tricky thing: if we are confident in something unreliable or even completely false, we are going to be disappointed.
Yesterday, I saw a video online of a young man at the Lakers game on Friday night being challenged to make 10 points in 30 seconds in front of the crowd. Did anyone else see this video? He was asked before the clock started if he was ready. His response: “I was born ready.” Incredibly confident. When the clock started, instead of shooting baskets, he calmly put the basketball down in front of him, and then spent the next 29 seconds hyping up the crowd, while the commentator right next to him was telling him how much time he had left to make 10 points. With 1 second left, he took a single three point shot, which he missed. He was confident that he would succeed, that he was born ready for that moment, but hadn’t even understood the rules of the game. He was confidently wrong. He claimed to know, but didn’t. His confidence was misplaced.
Here in our focal passage, we read John speaking of the confidence that we have in Christ over and over again. He uses the word “know” seven times in this passage, but more than that, he speaks with boldness, confident in the truth of the Gospel and the work of God, because he knows that being confident in Jesus is never misplaced. Remember that this letter was originally written to believers, who were struggling because of some false teaching that had crept in and led some who were participating in the church to fall into error and apostasy.
John gives the church four things that we can be confident of—four things that we can know—because of what Christ has done.
1) We can know we have eternal life.
1) We can know we have eternal life.
There are six statements in 1 John that speak to why John wrote this letter. The first five were 1:4; 2:1; 2:12-13; 2:21; and 2:26. John said that he was writing so his joy would be complete, so that the faithful believers might not fall into sin, because he believes that these who remain in the church are truly saved, to affirm and confirm their trust in the truth, and to address false teachers who were trying to deceive the faithful. The final one, which we find in 5:13, brings them all together in a way:
13 I have written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.
John launches into his concluding words of this letter by returning to the first person singular of “I”, which he hasn’t done since 2:26. Since this church was dealing with people denying the truth of the Gospel, denying the necessity of the atonement, denying the reality of the incarnation, and by doing so proving that they had never really believed the Gospel, perhaps John anticipated that their confidence had been shaken.
John Piper combined and summarized all of these reasons for writing in his sermon, “Everyone Who Has Been Born of God:”
“I am writing because you are true believers, but there are deceivers in your midst, and I want you to be rock-solid confident in your present possession of eternal life as regenerate children of God, so that you are not drawn away after sin. And if this letter has that effect my joy will be complete.”
— John Piper, “Everyone Who Has Been Born of God”
Throughout this epistle, John has given evidence after evidence of the reality of their conversion, belief, and salvation. He wanted them to have a deep, abiding confidence in their spiritual state because of how the Spirit of God was working in them so that they remained true to the message of the Gospel, they displayed that steadfastness through obedience to God’s Word, and through the continuing evidence of their love for one another. He’s not writing to turn the apostates back, but to strengthen the faithful in their hope— not only that they would live with God forever through faith in Christ, but that they had that eternal, abundant life within them at that very moment.
14 We know that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers and sisters. The one who does not love remains in death.
24 The one who keeps his commands remains in him, and he in him. And the way we know that he remains in us is from the Spirit he has given us.
The question that we must ask ourselves today is this: “Do I know that I have eternal life?” Examine your heart and mind. Have you believed in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of God? Have you trusted in what He has done to take away your sins: that He willingly died on the cross in your place and mine to pay the penalty that we owed for our rebellion? Have you believed that Jesus overcame the grave, rising again to eternal life? Have you surrendered your life to His lordship in faith, dying to yourself so that you might live forever with Him as well?
This is the confidence that John was talking about: knowing that you have eternal life. That life is only found in Jesus.
12 The one who has the Son has life. The one who does not have the Son of God does not have life.
If you have never surrendered to Jesus in faith, giving up going your own way, turning away from your sin and believing in what Jesus has done on the cross to save you, then you are spiritually dead. But Jesus died so that you can have eternal life, as John wrote about. Trust Jesus right now, where you are, confessing your need for Him because of your sins, believing that He is the Son of God who died so you could be forgiven and rose so that you could live forever with Him. Don’t wait until later. Surrender to Jesus right now.
Once we are saved by Jesus, we have other things that we can be confident in—other things that we can know.
2) We can know our prayers are heard and answered.
2) We can know our prayers are heard and answered.
Prayer is, in many ways, the oxygen of the Christian faith. Because of what Jesus has done, Christians have the blessing of being able to approach God the Father directly and intimately—to come right into His presence through prayer. And in this letter, John explains that the believer has the assurance of God’s answer to the prayers that we pray. In the next four verses of his conclusion, John addresses two different types of prayer: Supplication and Intercession.
A) Supplication
A) Supplication
The prayer of supplication is when we pray that God would “supply” us with the things that we need or desire. John addresses this type of prayer twice in this letter. In our focal passage, he does so in verses 14-15:
14 This is the confidence we have before him: If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. 15 And if we know that he hears whatever we ask, we know that we have what we have asked of him.
John had previously spoken about prayer back in chapter 3, also speaking of the confidence that we have in approaching God in prayer:
21 Dear friends, if our hearts don’t condemn us, we have confidence before God 22 and receive whatever we ask from him because we keep his commands and do what is pleasing in his sight.
The confidence that John says we can be assured of in prayer then flows from three things: that we keep God’s commands, that we do the things that please Him, and that we ask according to His will.
Please hear me that this doesn’t mean that we can treat God like a cosmic vending machine, where we put in the coins of following the law and doing good works in order to obligate God to answer us, as if we could manipulate Him into fulfilling our selfish and sinful desires. James addressed this in chapter 4 of his letter:
2 You desire and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and wage war. You do not have because you do not ask. 3 You ask and don’t receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.
No, what John is saying is that if we really are in Christ, then we will have confidence when we pray because we have seen the evidence of our obedience, and so we know that our heart’s desires have been shifted away from our own wills to God’s will. And since that’s the case, then we know that when we pray, all we want is what God wants. And if all we want is what God wants, then we can confidently know that God wants to give us what we pray for.
John Stott said it like this:
“Prayer is not a convenient device for imposing our will upon God, or for bending his will to ours, but the prescribed way of subordinating our will to his. It is by prayer that we seek God’s will, embrace it and align ourselves with it. Every true prayer is a variation on the theme ‘your will be done’.”
—John Stott, The Letters of John
This confidence in prayer even extends into the area of intercession:
B) Intercession
B) Intercession
Intercessory prayer is when we pray on behalf of someone else. John says that we can even have confidence in this type of prayer because of our faith in Jesus, however, there is something in the next couple of verses that is notoriously difficult to interpret. John writes:
16 If anyone sees a fellow believer committing a sin that doesn’t lead to death, he should ask, and God will give life to him—to those who commit sin that doesn’t lead to death. There is sin that leads to death. I am not saying he should pray about that. 17 All unrighteousness is sin, and there is sin that doesn’t lead to death.
So what is the “sin that leads to death?” Is John here talking about physical death, or something else? The best way to interpret this passage is by seeing that there are two people in view, and the death John is writing about is spiritual. We’ll address this verse as it is written. First, the “fellow believer committing a sin that doesn’t lead to death.”
The best way to interpret this is that this person is truly a fellow believer. And we’ve already seen in this letter (and we will see in just a moment) that the one who follows Christ will not live habitually in a constant state of sin. We all still stumble in many ways (as James said in James 3:2), but the believer cannot be overcome by sin to the point of dying spiritually again. So instead of talking about them to others, we should talk to God when we see our brother or sister in sin—that God would correct them of their wandering and restore them to walking the path of life as they should. This doesn’t mean that they are or ever could die spiritually, or that they can lose their salvation: those things are secure.
And because we know that we are praying in accordance with God’s will, we can know that God hears us and is already at work to bring the necessary correction to our brother or sister who is struggling, according to verses 14-15.
Then John says that there is a prayer that leads to spiritual death. Given the context of what John has written to this point in the letter, the only candidate for this sin would be a total rejection of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We’ve already seen that the person who rejects the Gospel had never really believed it in the first place:
19 They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. However, they went out so that it might be made clear that none of them belongs to us.
Many times in this letter, John has contrasted life and death. The believer has life. The unbeliever has death. Unbelief is the sin that leads to death. So why does John say, “I am not saying he should pray about that?” He doesn’t say NOT to pray about it. He’s just saying that the person who vehemently, willfully, resolutely rejects the Gospel has likely made an eternal decision. Certainly we CAN pray for them, but we do so in the knowledge that their repentance is unlikely, because God will not force them to believe unto salvation.
Finally, rather than allowing some to misinterpret what he has written to say that John is claiming that there are some sins that aren’t quite as “sinful” as others, John says that all unrighteousness is sin, but not all sin brings spiritual death. The believer can stumble into sin, but can never die spiritually again, because the sacrifice of Jesus has already covered his sin completely. That’s the difference between the two. The believer has eternal life. The unbeliever has nothing but death.
This leads us into John’s next point of confidence for the believer:
3) We can know that we belong to God.
3) We can know that we belong to God.
Since the sin that leads to death is this willful, obstinate rejection of the Gospel, then the evidence that someone is a believer is found in the fact of their softness to obedience to Christ, their tenderness toward repentance, and their rejection of living in habitual sin. But even this evidence isn’t just a display of his genuine love for God, but is also of the fact that Jesus is at work in his life.
18 We know that everyone who has been born of God does not sin, but the one who is born of God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him. 19 We know that we are of God, and the whole world is under the sway of the evil one.
Part of the confidence we have is found in the fact that we actually want to not sin. If we are born again, adopted into God’s family through faith in Jesus, then belong to a different kingdom altogether, with a different allegiance to a different ruler. “The whole world is under the sway of the evil one,” but if we have been born of God, then we are kept safe and protected by the one who was first born of God, the Lord Jesus Christ:
12 While I was with them, I was protecting them by your name that you have given me. I guarded them and not one of them is lost, except the son of destruction, so that the Scripture may be fulfilled.
5 You are being guarded by God’s power through faith for a salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.
We can be confident that while the enemy, the devil, would like nothing more than to defeat us, he can only distract us. He cannot destroy us. He can only work to discourage us. We are safe in the protection of our spiritual big brother Jesus, and the devil cannot harm us in any ultimate way because:
1 John 3:8b CSB
8b The Son of God was revealed for this purpose: to destroy the devil’s works.
We can be confident that we belong to God through faith in Jesus. And that also means that we can be confident that we know the truth.
4) We can know the Truth.
4) We can know the Truth.
John’s final point in this letter is to remind us of the confidence that we have in the fact that we know the only true God because we know Jesus, who is Himself the only true God:
20 And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know the true one. We are in the true one—that is, in his Son, Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.
Apart from the work of God the Son, Jesus Christ, we would not know the Father (the true one). Jesus makes it possible for us to have that intimate family relationship with God. Jesus said this in John 14:
6 Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
Jesus Himself said that He is the truth: the exact representation of the Father. Jesus came in the flesh so that we could have an understanding of what God is really like—especially the love that He has for us which He proved by giving His only Son so that we could be forgiven of our sins. And through our union with Christ by faith (including our dying to ourselves), we are found to be in the true one, as Paul agreed in Colossians 3:
3 For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
John then ends by making one more challenging comparison. He declares the truth about Jesus: that He is the true God and eternal life, something that he’s been saying since the beginning of the letter:
1 What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have observed and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—2 that life was revealed, and we have seen it and we testify and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us—
And while he says that Jesus is the true God and eternal life, he ends with one last command: that his “little children” should stay on their guard against false gods, fake gods, substitute gods:
21 Little children, guard yourselves from idols.
Idols can be formed out of just about anything. We make an idol when we decide or act as if something or someone other than God is god. Even when it’s a “good” thing, if it becomes a ruling thing, it’s become an idol thing.
Daniel Akin said it this way:
“It behooves the individual Christian to be on his guard against any such God-substitute, whether it be a political idea, or some fashionable cult, or merely the product of his own ‘wishful thinking.’”
—Daniel Akin, 1, 2, 3 John, New American Commentary
John would have us keep our guard up against idols by focusing our hope and confidence solely on the true God and eternal life, Jesus, not allowing anything or anyone to supplant Him on the throne of our lives.
Closing
Closing
And so we come to the close of our study of 1 John. We’ve seen throughout this letter the contrasts of life and death, light and darkness, and love and hate. We’ve considered who we are in Christ and whether or not our lives reflect the Gospel we claim to believe. And we’ve heard John’s challenge to us to love one another well in the church, because it shows the world who we belong to. We have confidence before God because of what Jesus has done and is doing in our lives.
If you were to have to stand before the judgment of God tonight, would you have this confidence? Would you know with certainty that you have been saved by His blood, shed on the cross for your forgiveness? You can. Surrender to Jesus in faith even right where you at this very moment. If this is you, we want to celebrate with you. Come and tell one of us. If you’re online, send me an email.
Church membership
Prayer
Offering
PRAYER
Observance of the Lord’s Supper
Observance of the Lord’s Supper
I would like to invite the ordained men who have been asked to serve the Supper this morning to come down, please.
AS THEY COME:
We will now take the Lord’s Supper together as a time of family remembrance of what Christ has done for us by His blood—reflecting on the confidence we hold that we have eternal life, that we have access to the Father in prayer, that we belong to God, and that we know the Truth, because of the work of Jesus.
If you don’t belong to God through faith in Christ, please do not take the Supper. This time of memorial and worship is an acknowledgment of what Christ has done for YOU by His blood. If you do not believe, the Supper isn’t for you. This is not to offend or exclude, but it is for the sanctity of the ordinance, and for your protection as well, according to Scripture. We love you, and I would be glad to explain this to you more fully following the service.
If you are a guest this morning, but you have already surrendered your life to Christ in faith, then you are a visiting family member, and we gladly welcome you to join with us in the Supper.
Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 11:
23 For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
So today, through taking these elements together, we are declaring as one family what Jesus has done for us by His blood. Scripture also instructs us to examine ourselves before taking the Supper. We have spoken of examining ourselves already this morning in our study of 1 John 5. But let’s take just a moment in silence to reflect on our relationship with God through Christ.
Reflect
Distribute the bread to the deacons.
Scripture says that Jesus gave thanks for the bread when He broke it. Have someone pray over the bread.
The Scripture records that Jesus said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.”
Distribute the cup to the deacons.
Have someone pray over the cup.
The Scripture records that Jesus said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
Send the deacons back. Pray.
Gideon’s Speaker
Gideon’s Speaker
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
Bible reading (Lam 1)
Pastor’s Study tonight: into Ephesians 3
Prayer Meeting
Teacher Appreciation Week this coming week for Kennedy Middle School, our Shine partner school.
Instructions for guests
Benediction
Benediction
13 Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
God bless each of you this day, church family. Go in peace.