The Benefits and Responsibilities of Assurance - 1 John 3:19-24

Introduction

John is continuing his arguments for sinless and holiness in the life of the Christian.

We have seen so far in chapter 3 that John has made 5 arguments.

Argument #1: The Christian is holy because they are a child of God.

Argument #2: The Christian is holy because they anticipate the beatific vision of the pure Christ.

Argument #3: The Christian is holy because they abide in Jesus, who mortified and put to death sin.

Argument #4: The Christian is holy because they are a little snake-crusher.

Argument #5: The Christian is holy because we have experienced the ultimate in sacrificial love.

John will now make a 6th argument for holiness, and one that is equally as compelling as the prior 5. His 6th argument, fleshed out in verses 19 through 24, is this:

Argument #6: The Christian is holy because their holiness is sign of their assurance.

John calls his readers and us to a clear apprehension of our own holiness so that we might be assured of the genuineness of our faith.

Let’s dig in:

The Ground of Assurance

John turns the corner by adding a kind of appendix onto verse 18. He says “by this we will know that we are of the truth.”

What is “this?” In other words, what is this method by which we are assured that we are of the truth? The “this” here seems to be pointing back to the love exercised back in vs 18. If you love the brethren in deed and in truth, this is how you know that you are of the truth. In other words, your love for the brethren is an indicator that the seed of truth, the seed of God Himself, is within you and is alive and vital and vigorous and energetic.

In this statement we hear echoes of Christ himself in John 13:35

John 13:35 LSB

“By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Here, the assurance of our discipleship is for the watching world, but ion 1 John it is for each and every one of us as believers.

Likewise we hear echoes of Luke and Paul as they collaborate in Hebrews 6:10-11

Hebrews 6:10–11 LSB

For God is not unrighteous so as to forget your work and the love which you have shown toward His name, in having ministered and continuing to minister to the saints. And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope until the end,

Here again we see this notion that faithful service and ministry to the brethren is a direct buttress and support of our assurance.

Likewise we see this theme in the great confessional statement on assurance, chapter 18 of the Westminster Confession of Faith:

The Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible Chapter XVIII: Of the Assurance of Grace and Salvation

This infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long, and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of it: yet, being enabled by the Spirit to know the things which are freely given him of God, he may without extraordinary revelation, in the right use of ordinary means, attain thereunto.l

You hear in that statement many of the themes that John has put before us tonight. In particular, I want to point out this phrase “right use of ordinary means.” What the assembly meant by these ordinary means are those regular, observable signs of our inward state of grace. We’ll talk more about that in a minute, but certainly one of those ordinary means is the simple phileo love for the brethren, exercised in humble and self-sacrificial service of others.

John tells us that our love in verse 18 gives us two things in verse 19. What are those two things?

Knowledge and assurance.

First, we will know that we are of the truth, that we are a child of God, to us the terminology from verse 10, and that we are Christ’s disciples, to use the language of John 13:35

John speaks here of the intellectual knowledge of objective reality. If we consistently and faithfully exercise love for the brethren, we know by that reality that we are of the truth. It’s something we know up here in our heads. We understand it.

This is the first part of assurance for John. It’s an intellectual, factual understanding of the reality that we are in Christ, that we belong to him. But for the entire history of human existence post-fall, we’ve had some trouble discerning spiritual realities. So God has seen fit to accommodate the weakness of our mind and flesh, in the words of Calvin, by various and sundry signs and symbols that confirm to our outward senses the presence of the inward reality.

In this case, the inward reality is Christ’s love for us. The outward sign and symbol is our love for the brethren. Therefore, we can reflect upon our intentional acts of love for one another and recognize this glorious reality: I can’t do this apart from Christ. Therefore Christ must be abiding within me if I am able to love others like this. And so our assurance is built up.

Likewise, John says that this reflection not only gives knowledge to our minds but also assures our hearts. In other words, there is an emotionally calming effect to this reflection on our brotherly love. It fosters a settled inner confidence in the work of Christ on our behalf.

John really gets to the meat of this in verse 20, however. Why would we need to know that we are of the truth? Why would we need to assure our hearts before God?

Because our heart condemns us, according to verse 20.

That’s an odd thing, but then again, our hearts are odd things. Our hearts are deceitful above all things. We know that from Jeremiah. But I think that John is telling us here that the deception doesn’t go away once we get saved. It gets better for sure, and it changes, but it’s still there. Our unsaved heart deceives into thinking we’re a good enough person, that we’ve got this, that we have no need of salvation or of an alien righteousness to be right before God. Then we get saved, and our heart deceives us into thinking that our salvation is somehow in jeopardy, or that Christ may not be powerful enough and gracious enough to save us, or that somehow our sin might be so great that we would be thrust outside Christ’s ability to save us. Simply put, our unsaved hearts deceive into thinking we’re blessed when we’re condemned, and our saved hearts deceive us into thinking we’re condemned when we’re blessed.

Raise your hand if you’ve had that experience. Your heart condemns you, tricks you, makes you question the truth of your salvation. I know I’ve been there. I know a lot of people who have been there. It should come as no surprise. Even Thomas, who saw everything that happened and was an eyewitness to all that Jesus accomplished, had trouble believing. How much more difficult for those of us living 2000 years later? Doubts are real. Sometimes assurance is fuzzy. The Westminster Confession describes it this way:

The Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible Chapter XVIII: Of the Assurance of Grace and Salvation

True believers may have the assurance of their salvation divers ways shaken, diminished, and intermitted; as, by negligence in preserving of it, by falling into some special sin, which woundeth the conscience and grieveth the Spirit; by some sudden or vehement temptation, by God’s withdrawing the light of His countenance, and suffering even such as fear Him to walk in darkness and to have no light

Certainly doubts are real. They can take hold. But John calls us to simply remember. Remember the new love that we have and the way that our lives have changed and our relationships with others have changed. Look backward and know that, when your heart condemns you, you can be confident and assured and know that the condemnation is a deceptive condemnation. It’s not based in reality. It’s a false accusation. John’s encouragement is this: get out of the weeds of an individual sin and look at the pattern of your life in Christ. If you can observe a pattern of Christ-like behavior, of love for others in deed and in truth, you can be confident and assured of your membership in the divine family, of your participation in the seed of the woman.

The Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible Chapter XVIII: Of the Assurance of Grace and Salvation

yet are they never so utterly destitute of that seed of God, and life of faith, that love of Christ and the brethren, that sincerity of heart, and conscience of duty, out of which, by the operation of the Spirit, this assurance may, in due time, be revived; and by the which, in the mean time, they are supported from utter despair

Listen closely to what the assembly says: you are never so destitute or so far away from the seed of God and the life of faith that love for the brethren will not produce, in a due time, a revival of your assurance, and likewise until such a time as your assurance is fully revived, that same love for the brethren supports you and keeps you from utter despair.

The application here for John is simple: if you’re struggling with assurance, get out there and love some brothers and sisters in deed and in truth. That is one of the stamps of authenticity on the life of a believer.

But the real kicker comes at the end of verse 20. We’ve seen the experiential ground of our assurance as we reflect on our own patterns of Christian love. But John know gives us a theological ground: God is greater than your heart and he knows all things. Our assurance is therefore grounded in the omniscience of God himself.

So what does God know and how does that relate to our assurance?

First, God knows Himself. That might sound simplistic or redundant, but among all the things God knows, He Himself is perhaps foremost. So what does He know about Himself? That He is love. That He is unchanging. That He does not waver despite the storms of life. I was struck just yesterday in my daily reading by the story of Jesus walking on the water. When I encounter Jesus’ miracles in the Scriptures, I always look for the underlying spiritual reality that the miracle is trying to demonstrate, and I think Jesus walking on the water is showing us this: when the winds of doubt blow through us, and the waves are crashing and tossing our boat to and fro, who is there standing resolute, unmoving, in the midst of the waves? Jesus is. Who reaches out His hand when we start sinking? Jesus does. Doubts will come. Fears will assail. You may find yourself awakened in a cold sweat, wondering if everything you hold dear is actually real. I’m speaking autobiographically now. In that moment, in that storm, Jesus reaches down like He reached down to Peter and takes hold of our hearts, because He is greater than our hearts. Our heart tells us we are condemned and Jesus tells us that we are His, for there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Secondly, God knows His eternal plan of redemption. He has mapped this all out. He knows His plan, and to make it more personal, He knows His plans for you! Jeremiah 29:11 is the most abused and overused verse in the Bible, but it certainly applies here. He knows the plans He has for you, plans for your hope and prosperity. And trust me, you will prosper. I can guarantee you right now that you will be more prosperous than Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland and Creflo Dollar’s wild imaginations could conjure. We will just likely have to wait until eternity. How wealthy will you be in heaven? You’ll have a driveway made of gold and a garage door made of pure pearl. Or something like that. The fact of the matter is this: God is fully in control of time and history and fully in control of your part and place in that story. He knows it. He’s working that plan right now. And that is a truth that salves the doubting and fearful heart.

Thirdly, God knows you. Just like the song says, you have a Father who formed your heart, and before time even began you were in his hands. He knows your name, he knows your every thought, he sees each tear that falls and hears you when you call. You can’t get much better than that. This is why the twin doctrines of election and foreknowledge are so precious. From eternity past he knows you and has written your name in the book of life in the indelible ink of his divine decrees. If God knows you like that, it’s a really simple jump of logic to God knowing when your heart is causing you to doubt your assurance of salvation.

So here’s the reality for John. Both by experiential reality and by theological reality, we can declare assurance of faith directly into the deception of our own hearts. When Satan tempts you to despair of your faith and doubts are lapping up around your neck, threatening to drown you and drag your lifeless body to the bottom of the ocean, remember this: your life of faithful love to your brothers and sisters bears witness to the love of Christ that has been poured out in your heart, and likewise remember this: God, his plan of redemption, and his intimate fatherly knowledge of you are greater than your heart. You have no need to dread or fear the deception and condemnation of your heart, for God Almighty is Lord and Master of it. What God has decreed, let no man nor heart nullify.

The Benefits of Assurance

We now turn our attention to the 4 benefits of assurance listed here by John.

When we are able to know and discern both God and ourselves rightly, and come to place of true assurance in our standing with him, a floodgate of good comes to us. These are what I’ve called the benefits of assurance, and John has sprinkled them throughout these verses. So we will break them out and look at them one by one.

A non-condemning heart

John says in verse 21 that if our heart does not condemn us. The implication of this statement is the heart-condemnation that we may and even do fall victim to from time to time can be, by reflecting on our track record of faithful love and by looking to God and all He is for us, overcome. Our hearts can be subjected to the truth, and will cease condemning us.

This is a great benefit, and indeed serves at the light of the end of the tunnel. Freedom from condemnation is the great gospel promise of Romans 8:1

Romans 8:1 LSB

Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Our sin and and our hearts and the devil himself can no longer condemn us if we are in Christ, for he reaches down through the waves, as our lungs fill with the water of doubt and lifts us up, for He is greater than our heart.

We stand blessed and favored by God, rather than condemned and under his wrath.

And so I urge you tonight, when your heart condemns you, you can be free of it. You can be free of the wracking of an oversensitive conscience. The greatness of God and the witness of your own testimony speak truth into the confusion of your soul and they declare to your weary heart a singular refrain: I am not my own, but belong body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins and delivered me from the tyranny of the devil, and he watches over me in such a way that not a hair falls from my head without his knowledge. And more than this, you have confidence that all things will work together for your good and glorification.

And according to John this non-condemning heart produces another benefit:

Confidence before God

Our track record of faithfulness and the greatness and knowledge of God removes heart-condemnation and in the same stroke produces confidence before God.

What is this confidence? Confidence before God in a general sense means that we are able to approach him without fear or trepidation. It is the opposite of how the high priest would have approached the presence of God in the Holy of Holies. In the Old Covenant, the priests would tie a rope around themselves and hang bells on their fringe so that they could be retrieved if they died as a result of failure to comply with God’s law. However, we have a true and better high priest who has not only passed through the holy of holies but passed through the heavens, and because of his work on our behalf and the fact that his spirit dwells within us, we can now approach God with boldness, resting on Christ’s merits and not our own.

An assured believer is a confident believer. And according to John, that confidence directly supports another aspect of our Christian life in verse 22:

Vital prayer

What does the text say?

Whatever we ask we receive from him.

Our assurance bolsters our confidence and our confidence bolsters our prayer life.

I would wager that the reason some of our prayer lives are tepid, lukewarm, and anemic is precisely this: that we not confident in God, confident in Christ, and confident that our prayers will even be heard. We might boil it down to this simple phrase: we have no communion because we have no confidence.

A confident and vital assurance leads us to confident and vital prayer. John doesn’t just say this because he thought of it. This is a critical element of Jesus’ own teaching:

John 9:31 LSB

“We know that God does not listen to sinners; but if anyone is God-fearing and does His will, He listens to him.

John 14:13 LSB

“Whatever you ask in My name, this will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.

John 15:7 LSB

“If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

John 16:23–24 LSB

“And on that day you will not question Me about anything. Truly, truly, I say to you, if you ask the Father for anything in My name, He will give it to you. “Until now you have asked for nothing in My name; ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be made complete.

Now it’s important to understand the context of Jesus’ statements here. Jesus isn’t just saying “ask for whatever you want, and you’ll get it.” This is where we get the horrific name-it-and-claim-it prosperity teaching from guys like Kenneth Copeland and Joel Osteen. “Just ask and you will receive!” And then if you don’t get your jet or your Rolls Royce or your McMansion, it’s because you don’t have enough faith or the right faith. Terrible theology and terrible exegesis.

God isn’t Aladdin’s genie. God isn’t Santa Claus. What John is getting at here is connected to the second part of the verse, which we’ll discuss in more depth in a moment. Our asking and receiving is connected directly to our keeping of His commandments and doing the things that are pleasing in his sight. If you examine the context of the other passages from John, you’ll find that pattern there as well.

So John is saying that doing what is pleasing to God goes hand in hand with the vitality and effectiveness of our prayers. Essentially what that means is that we are to pray for that which is pleasing to God, and when we do so, we are assured of a positive answer. This is why we pray in accordance with the will of God.

But the fact of the matter remains: a confident and assured Christian can offer confident and assured prayers, knowing that, because of that confidence and assurance, we are close to the heart of God, and knowing likewise that God delights to answer prayers. We need look no further than the 38 occurences of that promise in the book of Psalms alone to know that God delights to answer His children when they call upon.

This is a great blessing and benefit of assurance.

We will now jump over some of the responsibilities of assurance, and return to them later, and our final blessing of assurance.

The indwelling of the Triune God

The last phrase of verses 24 tells us what?

That God abides in us, and that the Spirit whom he gave us confirms the reality to us.

This is the doctrine of indwelling, and is perhaps the greatest blessing of the assured and confident Christian.

John Stott says that this mutual abiding is derived from the imagery of the vine and the branches from John 15, and is demonstrated now to be brokered or administered by the Holy Spirit. We might say that the Holy Spirit is the adhesive that attaches the branches to the vine.

This is a truth that borders on the incomprehensible. Octavius Winslow said this about it:

Reformed Systematic Theology, Volume 3: Spirit and Salvation The Indwelling of the Holy Spirit

The bare thought that the ‘high and lofty One, inhabiting eternity, whose name is Holy’ [cf. Isa. 57:15], should dwell with man, yes, in him … seems almost too illimitable and glorious for a poor finite mind to grasp.

Reformed Systematic Theology, Volume 3: Spirit and Salvation The Promise of the Spirit’s Indwelling

Therefore, the indwelling of the Spirit means that God has given himself to his people, for the Holy Spirit is God. Athanasius said, “It is through the Spirit that we are all said to be partakers of God [citing 1 Cor. 3:16–17].… If the Holy Spirit were a creature, we should have no participation of God in him.” Augustine said, “The Holy Spirit is the gift of God, the gift being Himself indeed equal to the Giver.” This divine self-giving is crucial for experiential communion with God. Wilhelmus à Brakel said that believers have a “desire which can only be satisfied with the Infinite One.… God Himself must be and is their portion, and they are united to God in Christ.… Thus the believer does not merely have the gifts of the Spirit, but he has the Spirit Himself.”12

So we see that John lays out four blessings of the assured believer.

And what’s truly amazing about these four blessings is that they form an infinite loop of assurance.

The less our hearts condemn us, the more assurance we have, and the more assurance we have, the less our hearts condemn us.

The more confidence we have before God, the more assurance we have, the the more assurance we have, the more confidence we have before God.

The more vital our prayer life is, the more assurance we have, and the more assurance we have, the more vital our prayer life becomes.

The greater our sense of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the more assurance we have, and the more assurance we have, the greater our sense of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

But the assured believer also has three responsibilities.

The Responsibilities of Assurance

Keep His Commandments

Our first responsibility comes in verse 22. What does the text say that we do?

We keep His commandment.

And what is the commandment, according to John in verse 23?

Believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another.

What’s interesting is, grammatically speaking, this is a single commandment. In other words, belief in Christ and love for one another are like conjoined twins, inseparable.

This is an important metatheme in 1 John, the inseparable nature of faith and love. This is John’s version of James’ famous statement: Faith without works is dead. For John, he would say faith without love is dead, and likewise love without faith is dead.

And so the responsibility of the assured believer is to continue to trust Christ more, and to continue to love others more.

How does one do this? How do we perpetuate belief in Christ? How do we grow in love?

Perpetuating and growing our belief in Christ, I think, is directly proportionate to our growth in knowledge of Him and of His Word. You cannot encounter Christ in the Scriptures for long and not be prompted to greater trust in Him. It has been said that our faith or trust or belief is only as strong as it’s object. I would argue that our faith is only as strong as our perception of it’s object. Christ does not change. Yet our faith is often weak, and we see here that it can grow and change inasmuch as it is a command to be obeyed. So for us to say that our faith is automatically as strong as Christ is not quite accurate. Rather, our faith is as strong as our sight of Him is clear. In other words, the more we know Him, the more we trust Him. So learn Christ. Study Him. Mine the Scriptures and build an appetite for that blessed sight of Him in the Scriptures. Let me give you an example of the joy that was brought to my heart as I caught a sight of Christ during my daily reading earlier this week.

As I was reading, I encountered the story of a woman who was biologically unable to bear children, was suddenly able to conceive by the Spirit of God, gave birth to a son, and when the boy was born, the woman lifted up her voice in praise to God by saying “My soul exalts the Lord and my heart rejoices in God my Savior,” and later on the boy was found in the temple of God, and likewise the boy grew stature and in favor with God and men.

Who am I talking about?

You would think that I read Luke’s record of Jesus’ birth and upbringing, and you would be wrong. I read Samuel’s autobiographical account of his birth and upbringing.

Those parallels are intentional. Luke is portraying Jesus as a true and better Samuel. So by understanding Samuel’s role as both a prophet and a priest, we come to understand something of the priestly and prophetic work of Christ.

If our faith, belief, and trust is to increase, it must increase in proportion to our vital knowledge of the person and work of Christ.

Likewise, the second part of the command is to love one another. So how do we increase in that? Let me make an argument from verses 11-18. John positions the opposite of taking life as the giving of life. By this we have known love, that Jesus laid down his life for us. Likewise, we know that greater love has no man than this, that he would lay down his life for his friends. How do we give our life to our brothers and sisters? We may not have an opportunity to actually die for someone else, but we do have an opportunity to lay down our time and our talent and even our treasure for the sake of someone else. So for John, to love is to serve sacrificially.

So get off your phone, off your couch, and make a habit of getting out there with people from church. Find needs and meet them with your time, talent, and treasure, as God has given each of you a gift, use it in proportion to what he has given you. Are you retired? You probably have extra time to give. Are you a college student? You probably have some extra talent lying around. Are you a successful business person? You probably have some extra treasure lying around. To obey the command of Christ is to love one another, to love one another is to lay down your life, and to lay down your life is to offer it in sacrificial service to your brothers and sisters, even if you never have a chance to actually die for them.

Our next responsibility comes at the end of verse 22:

Do what is pleasing in His sight

Let’s look at a cross-reference to see what it means to do what is pleasing in God’s sight:

Hebrews 13:20–21 LSB

Now the God of peace, who brought up from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant, our Lord Jesus, equip you in every good thing to do His will, by doing in us what is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

Let’s make a few quick observations:

God equips us to do what is pleasing in His sight

Doing good things is pleasing in God’s sight

Doing God’s will is pleasing in God’s sight

God does what is pleasing in His sight in us.

God does in us what is pleasing in His sight through Jesus Christ

Doing what is pleasing in God’s sight results in the magnification of the glory of Christ

And if you want the detail version of doing what is pleasing in God’s sight, Romans 12-15 will give you all the guidance you need.

Finally, we see the third responsibility of the assured Christian: abiding in Him

Abide in Him

John reaches the climax of the argument in verse 24: the one who keeps his commandments and does what is pleasing in his sight abides in Him.

This should be pretty simple at this point. If you’re enjoying the blessing of assurance and exercising the responsibilities of assurance, you will abide in Christ by the power of the spirit.

What are we to do then? Remain. Persist. Keep on with Christ. He will remain and persist and keep on with us, and He has imbued us with his spirit, giving us the power to remain and persist and keep on with him.

The Christian life will get tough. That’s how it works. We are promised suffering in this life. Sometimes we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and our sight of Christ becomes dim. But the assured and confident Christian is the dogged Christian. The one who keeps on with Christ against all human logic. The one who persists until the end.

Christ’s power through Christ’s spirit will get us all the way home to Christ’s arms. That is the assurance of abiding.

Conclusion

Why are we holy? Why do we obey Christ’s commands and do what is pleasing to the Father? Why do we abide?

Because this holiness serves as the experiential ground of our assurance in Christ.

Do you want to be confident and assured before God that you are a child of the divine family? Look back on your life. Look back on the conscious choices you have made to pursue holiness. To pursue Christ-like character. To pursue faith. To pursue love. When your heart tempts you to despair, that pattern of life bears witness to the inward reality of the indwelling of Christ by the power of His Spirit.

Christ’s holiness, expressed in our pattern of life, assures us. Speaks the truth our deceptively condemning heart. Makes us confident before God. Vitalizes our prayers. Reminds us of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

So may we keep oHis commandments. Do what is pleasing in His sight. And abide in Him.