God's Love in Us

Introduction

<<PRAY>> <<1 John 2>>

Review:

Last week, heart of vv1-2 - “Jesus Christ the Righteous” - Our Righteous Advocate and our Righteous Atonement - our propitiatory sacrifice, God-given, to suffer in our place for the just wrath our sins deserve

He is still our Advocate & Atonement today, his scars the proof that your sins are paid for once and for all.

vv3-6 turns from the fact of salvation to how we can know that Jesus isn’t just the only Advocate and Atonement for sins, but that He is our Advocate and Atonement.

Connections to John 14-15:

love, commandments, abiding

Before we dive into the text, something important to keep in mind: We always bring our sin with us into God’s Word, and that sin often manifests as either legalism or licentiousness. Either we try to smuggle our good works into our salvation, or we try to excuse our sin and deny that God has called us to holiness. The Gospel always confronts both legalism and licentiousness, and today’s text demands that we keep the Gospel front-and-center so we don’t run off either side.

It helps to have the context fresh in our minds, so I’m going to read 1:5-2:6. Notice how John explicitly places Jesus Christ right at the center, as the propitiation for our sin and the One who perfects His love in us.

<<READ 1:5-2:6>>

With that context, let’s dive into verses 3-6 and answer the question

Q. Can we be sure that we belong to Jesus?

4 points:

I. A Key Diagnostic: Do we keep His commands? (v3)

<<READ v3>>

And the first thing we have to do with verse 3 is to make sure we know what John means when he uses the phrase “Keep his commandments.”

Last week, we said that Jesus is our righteous advocate and atonement. He is our eternal life. John hasn’t spent all this time showing us that we are sinners who can only be saved by the finished work of Jesus, only to turn around and lay legalism on us.

John does not say that keeping His commandments is how you get saved, or how you stay saved, or anything like that. He says that we know that we are saved - that we have come to know Jesus - if we keep His commandments. It’s a diagnostic. It tells you something that’s already there. You don’t go to the doctor and get a Covid test, and then if it comes back positive, blame the doctor. No, the test only told (with perhaps limited accuracy) what was already there.

John also is not saying that the level of your obedience gives you assurance on a sliding scale. That would be the ultimate Pharisee-maker. Jesus directly contradicts that idea of assurance in Luke 18:9-14 (turn there)

Parable - read v9

2 men, Pharisee, tax collector. Pharisee lauds his own righteousness before God; tax collector beat his breast - “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” - this one went down to his house justified before God

So John isn’t saying that the more you do, the more you can have assurance. The Pharisee thought he was saved because of his excellent record, but he wasn’t; the tax collector knew he was a sinner - his only hope was that the LORD would be merciful - and he was saved.

Trouble with the word “Keep” - we equate it with “obey” but the word is much, much more expansive than that.

“I keep my word” - doesn’t mean I obey my own word, but that I live it out

If we were doing baptisms & I said, “Keep my phone till I’m done,” I mean hold onto it and keep it safe. Guard, protect

End of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, “and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well.” In the early church, the saying rose up when they celebrated Communion, “Let us keep the feast.” To remember, preserve, observe, embrace, celebrate

This word “keep” can mean “obey,” but is much more than that - includes keeping hold of something, keeping watch, holding onto something without letting go.

Same word (protects):

1 John 5:18 ESV

18 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.

Assurance doesn’t come from a self-righteous self-evaluation, but through this key diagnostic: Do we keep Jesus’s commandments?

You might say, “Which commandments?” And throughout the rest of the letter, John will keep coming back to two specific callings: To believe in Jesus, and to love our brothers and sisters in Christ.

1 John 3:23 ESV

23 And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.

In the Gospels, Jesus says that the whole Old Testament Law could be summed up in love for the LORD and love for neighbor. And in next week’s text, verses 7-11,John is going to point us to the specific command that Jesus gives in John 13:34 - not just that we should love our neighbors as ourselves, but that we should love one another the way Jesus loves us.

So how do you use this diagnostic? We pair it up with a critical distinction:

II. A Critical Distinction: Do we reject His commands? (v4)

Verse 4 tells us that anyone claiming to know Jesus is a liar if he doesn’t keep Jesus’s commands. He’s devoid of the truth. This is like the person from chapter 1:6 who claims to be in fellowship with God while he walks in the darkness.

What’s the distinction that John is drawing?

It helps if we look in Proverbs 19:16. This is the only place in the Old Testament where the same words for “keep” and “commandment” occur together. Notice how it parallels what John says in verses 3-6.

Proverbs 19:16 ESV

16 Whoever keeps the commandment keeps his life; he who despises his ways will die.

If you’re a Christian, you know you’re a sinner saved by grace - your only hope is that Jesus is your propitiation - that He has paid your debts with His life. He perfectly kept the Law in its entirety with absolute obedience.

But you can know that you have come to know Him when you see the critical distinction - whoever knows Him keeps His commandments - embraces them, recognizes them as the voice of your savior; and here’s the critical distinction - whoever says “I know him” is a liar if he does the opposite. If he despises Jesus’s ways, if he rejects Jesus’s words, then he doesn’t know Jesus.

Jesus Himself taught the exact same distinction in John 10.

John 10:25–27 ESV

25 Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, 26 but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. 27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.

John has just given us a critical distinction that will carry through the rest of the letter: If you know Jesus, you’ll recognize His voice and His authority in His commands. The false Christians, the ones whom John will later label “anti-christs,” despised Jesus’s words, denied the Gospel, and rejected fellowship with believers.

When there are people going around with competing messages, everyone claiming to be right, the way to know that we have known Him, and they have not, is simple: Who keeps His commands? And who rejects them?

APPLY:

There’s both an individual and a group aspect to this. Notice in verse 3, he doesn’t say “By this I know,” he says, “By this we know that we have come to know him”. But in verse 5, he says “whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected.” Christianity is by nature both individual and corporate. No one is a Christian unless they have individually repented and believed in Jesus. But everyone who belongs to Jesus is called into fellowship with other believers.

That means that the key diagnostic and critical distinction applies to the individual: Do you keep or reject Jesus’s commands? Do you recognize His voice in Scripture, or do you despise and reject His words?

And this also applies to us as a GROUP. If a group claims to be a church, do they keep God’s commands, or despise them?

The Key Diagnostic and the Critical Distinction are given for our assurance and for our protection.

For the Christian who wonders how they can know they’re really saved, John says, “Jesus is our righteous advocate and atonement, and we know that we’ve come to know Jesus if we keep his commandments.”

And we know the liar when we see him, too. The liar claims to know Jesus, but rejects Jesus’s words.

Here’s how that protects you: Say you're looking for a way to grow in your faith, so you start listening to a podcast or a YouTube channel or something. It seems great, very spiritual, very helpful, but something just worries you about how they talk about Jesus. They tell you things you’ve never heard in the Bible, or they seem to minimize what Jesus says or commands to make it really palatable for a mass audience. You should ask the question: Am I sure these people keep Jesus’s words as the infallible words of the LORD? Or do they seem to just use the Bible as a starting point?

One of the reasons that we work slowly through continuous chunks of Scripture is because it’s God’s Word that is able to make you wise for salvation. A preacher’s job isn’t to tickle your ears or tell you something inspiring. A preacher’s job is to take you to the fountains of the waters of life and call you to drink.

The Key Diagnostic and the Critical Distinction will help you distinguish between the voice of Jesus and the seductive lies of Satan.

To make things absolutely clear - any church or teacher that refuses to let Jesus tell us who He is, and anyone who refuses to let Jesus tell us what to believe about Scripture, doesn’t believe that Jesus is the LORD. They don’t know Him, and they don’t know His voice. Do not listen to them.

Anyone who denies that God is eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; or denies that Jesus died as our substitute on the cross and rose physically on the third day; or denies that Jesus calls us to repent and follow Him in holiness; has denied the Gospel and does not know Jesus, no matter what they say.

I grew up in a denomination that played fast-and-loose with the Bible. They liked this part, so they taught it; they didn’t like this other part, so they said that part didn’t count as God’s Word. And as a result, even though they had the same 66 books in their Bibles that you and I have in ours, functionally, they had very little. The god that they ended up with wasn’t the God of Scripture, wasn’t the God who revealed himself to us; it was a little god that looked like modern humanity. An idol that they called Jesus. They did not keep His commands, they all but ripped them out of the book. Their profession of faith was a lie.

So we can see the difference between those who know Him and those who don’t: A true church cherishes and defends the Truth that Jesus has given us; a false church is embarrassed by it and rejects it. As Paul says in 1 Timothy 3:15, the Church of the living God is a pillar and buttress of the Truth.

We keep His commandments because they are the words of eternal life. We keep His commandments by holding fast to what He has said, even when the world demands we abandon them.

But verses 5 and 6 continue the note of assurance with our third point:

III. A Christward Direction: Do we walk after Jesus? (vv5-6)

<<READ 5-6>>

Here, John introduces the theme of abiding, to which He will return throughout the letter. To know Jesus is to be saved by faith in Him; to abide in Him is to remain in Him, to dwell in Him right now. Once again, John’s pointing to the words of Jesus, especially in John 15, where Jesus tells his disciples that they should abide in Him like branches in a vine - if you remove branches from a vine, they dry up and die.

In other words, life in Christ is an ongoing relationship. He not only saves us; He preserves us. John says that if you claim you’re in that life-giving relationship, you ought to walk in the same way that Jesus walked.

As we already saw in John 10 - Jesus says “my sheep hear my voice and they follow me.”

Here again, we have a way to know that we have come to know Him: We follow Him.

APPLY:

Paul - Few years ago, a dear brother in Christ passed away after a lifelong illness called neurofibromatosis. He chose not to have children in case he passed his illness to them, even though he and his wife would have been the best parents you ever met.

When he went on a mission trip to poverty-stricken shanty towns in South Africa, he was so enchanted by the children he met that he came home and started raising money to buy shoes for the children, many of whom wore makeshift flip-flops fashioned from disposable water bottles they found in the landfills outside Cape Town.

He was on a mission trip when he suddenly lost vision in one eye. It was mere months later that he passed from a rapidly-growing brain tumor. He was in his 40s.

Paul was an amazing man, but he was a sinner. But Paul was also a saved sinner. He knew that even at the end of his life, he was still saved by grace only, by our righteous advocate and atonement, Jesus.

And because Paul was a saved sinner, he followed his savior to the end. Notice the order there: He was saved, so he followed.

Sometimes, he got off track, sometimes so far off track he had a hard time seeing the way. In those moments, the Good Shepherd lifted him up and carried him back to the fold.

John’s words in verse 6 are a call to you and me today, a call to a Christward Direction - if you claim to belong to Jesus, then follow Him. John says that by this we may know that we are in him.

Not with a Pharisee’s personal righteousness scorecard, but with the faith-fueled adoration of a forgiven sinner.

Like the man from whom Jesus cast out the Legion - the army of demons - the man begged to go with Jesus. Or the sinful woman who broke into the private dinner at Simon the Pharisee’s house and wept at Jesus’ feet. Or Peter, the fisherman who stumbled over his words and over his own sin day after day, but he kept following.

Saved sinners follow Jesus. They fail, they flounder, but they follow. Like Peter, they don’t follow out of their own strength or courage, but because they know that He alone has the words of eternal life. Where else could they go?

And because they follow Him, they find His footprints keep showing up in their lives. Any time they demonstrate that they abide in Him by word or deed, they find that He’s already been there, preparing the way in advance for them to walk in it.

And in this, they see a glimpse of a promise kept, the promise we see in verse 5, and our concluding point, which I’ve called:

IV. A Confident Decree: The love of God perfected (v5)

<<READ v5>>

“The love of God” is first God’s love for us, and second, our love for Him. Love is another key word that John has introduced, and will come up again and again, especially in chapter 4. John will insist that God’s love is the cause of our love for Him:

1 John 4:19 ESV

19 We love because he first loved us.

and

1 John 4:10 ESV

10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

And

1 John 4:12 ESV

12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

So when in 2:5 he says, “whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected,” it is God who perfects His love, and it is perfected, or brought to its intended goal, through our love for one another.

Paul says much the same thing in Romans 5, when he says that since we have been justified by faith - since we’ve been saved - God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

John’s Confident Decree - his proclamation of God’s promise - is that what Jesus has finished in the Cross, He now demonstrates in all who keep His word. Or, to put it another way, His perfect love will not fail to finish what He has started in you.

God’s love is steadfast love.

Philippians 1:6 ESV

6 And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

So, as we look at verses 1-6, with Jesus Christ the Righteous, our Advocate and Atonement front and center in our minds, look again at the diagnostic, the distinction, the direction, and the decree, and see His fingerprints all over it. Rejoice with confidence in his love.