934 1 Jn.5.14-21 Confidence in Approaching God
Notes
Transcript
The story is told of a young girl who said, “Lord, I am not going to pray for myself today; I am going to pray for others.” At the end of her prayer she added, “And give my mother a handsome son-in-law!”
“Prayer pulls the rope down below and the great bell rings above in the ears of God. Some scarcely stir the bell, for they pray so languidly; others give only an occasional jerk at the rope. But he who communicates with heaven is the man who grasps the rope boldly and pulls continuously with all his might” (C. H. Spurgeon).
1. He Hears Us and Grants Our Requests
1. He Hears Us and Grants Our Requests
14 This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.
Q. What makes prayer significant?
I’ve tried to drill down to what prayer is all about - what makes it special?
a. Recognition of a relationship
a. Recognition of a relationship
To pray to God who is unseen, it should be realised that a relationship, as such exists - although, not always
There are people who are thoroughly pagan, but have a knowledge of God as Paul points out
“For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks” - you do have people, when in a real jam, cry out to God until they are clear of their troubles & then they forget Him
Like those throw away lines the TV news presenters & politicians throw out when they want to send their sympathies out to families who have lost loved ones & they say, we send them our prayers & best wishes & you just know that that person is the last one to pray
So there are those who may talk about prayer & pray for various reasons but not have a relationship with God
Yet, what characterisers prayer or how prayer is meant to be - has to do with the relationship you have with your Creator - in prayer you reveal that living relationship with your God
b. Expression of Dependency
b. Expression of Dependency
Most of us are fiercely independent when we are healthy & well
However, when we get old & frail or unwell, we realise, “Oh my gosh, I’m not able to control my destiny like I thought”
Our prayers say to God that we have, at least, the wisdom to know that we cannot make it without Him
Even though, we may be healthy atm, we pray because we know that our life really hangs by a thread & can be gone at any moment
Prayer is our way of saying: “Lord, we need you every day of our lives”
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Often Christians are caught between a rock & a hard place in respect to prayer
Q. Why does God answer some prayers and not others?
Well, on this front you’d have to say that the caveat here is that God answers according to His will
Ask anything is defined by “according to His will”
This may exclude the likes of a motor boat or a mansion
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It’s according to His will & purpose, not ours
This may even apply to healing - some people are not rescued from their illness no matter how much prayer goes into it
Take Job for instance - most godly man in the land & yet God permitted that he lose everything, even his health
The apostle Paul pleaded with the Lord to remove what he called “a thorn in the flesh” - that has been interpreted as, possibly, a disease, sickness, a weakness in his eyes & even a false prophet giving him trouble - but the Lord responds with - “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness”
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God doesn’t answer every prayer; however, John notes here two very important criteria to ensure that we have our prayers answered
1. Ask according to His will
2. Knowing the Son of God, not just the son of Joseph
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To ask according to His will means asking according to what God would want - it’s all about wants, you see
Q. Do you want what God wants? Your prayers will be answered if you ask along those lines
Q. What does God want?
He wants you to love one another
He wants all people to hear of Christ & become Christian
He wants us obeying His commandments
He wants us “to not love the world nor the things of the world”
This is the way to make sure that He hears us
16 Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much.
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The second aspect has to do with knowing the Son of God
1. Ask according to His will
2. Knowing the Son of God, not Just the son of Joseph
Knowing Jesus as the Christ of God - that He came from God & was made flesh
John says that this is the confidence we can have that He hears us
It’s about reflecting reality of who God is & what God has accomplished
Q. How can you answer the prayers of those who don’t know you? Who make you out as something you’re not?
This is the essence of idolatry - as Paul says in Romans
22 Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.
They exchanged the glory of God for a corrupted image of man & other creatures
Making God into our image - of our imagination
Of course, the gnosticising cults could not & would not accept that Jesus came from God - they could not & would not accept that God would suffer
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Unless we present our requests to the true God, as revealed in the Son of God, prayers will fall on deaf ears
On the other hand, when we accept the truth of God, God’s ears are attentive to our requests
In this respect, we can have great confidence that our God will answer our prayers - prayers according to His will
Martin Luther said: “Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance. Prayer is laying hold of God’s willingness.”
2. Sins Leading To, & Not To, Death
2. Sins Leading To, & Not To, Death
The gnosticising cults have separated themselves from the Christian church & are causing the true church great turmoil
This is not unlike the warning Paul gave to the Ephesian Elders of Ephesus...
29 “I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; 30 and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them.
These gnosticising cults have arisen from the church
Q. How do you then approach people who speak of Jesus and come from among the church but are speaking crooked things?
This section of reading has caused quite a bit of angst among Christians
We have always thought that we should be praying for any & every erring brother/sister in Christ
16 If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask and God will for him give life to those who commit sin not leading to death. There is a sin leading to death; I do not say that he should make request for this. 17 All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin not leading to death.
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What we find in today’s reading is that there are some people that we need not be praying for
John’s point, I think, comes off his statement earlier on that we can know & have confidence that we have the requests asked of by God if we ask according to His will
But what confidence can you have if a so-called Christian has purposefully & deliberately chosen to misrepresent God in what He has done in respect to the most important event in human history - the salvation of man
Q. What possible confidence can you have when this person is a savage wolf that doesn’t spare the flock because he teaches destructive heresy’s that are contrary to the truth - contrary to what God has done and destructive to someone’s salvation?
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Q. How do we determine the difference?
Q. Which sins lead to death - as in eternal death? Which sin does not lead to eternal death?
We need to look at what John is saying in this Epistle to work out what he means
Firstly, it can’t be sinlessness that is the difference since he has already told us that the person who claims to be sinless is a liar & the truth is not in him
9 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us.
Therefore, it cannot be sins that we repent of and ask forgiveness for
It seems something more specific is intended here
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He says in the next verse of our reading today that...
18 We know that no one who is born of God sins; but He who was born of God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him.
I think in the context of what he says, he is saying that no one who is born of God can continue to sin & not repent of it
You cannot claim that you are sinless because only the spiritual is important & what you do in the flesh matters naught
These people who believed this routinely sinned in the flesh, but it didn’t matter to them because they only thought that the spiritual things were relevant - so they cared little for repentance in the flesh
Loving your brother & making sure he was not in material want was unimportant to them too, since only ones spiritual life was important - crazy stuff
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Everyone sins, but if there is no repentance or turning from that sin, then how can the seed of God abide in him
9 No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. 10 By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother.
So we’re starting to crystallise the difference here
Furthermore, walking in sin is tantamount to walking in darkness
5 This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. 6 If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth;
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Years ago, in the 1980’s there was a big debate raging within the Evangelical church, mostly in the USA, over what was called the “Lordship Salvation Controversy”
John McArthur Jr. was in the thick of it, bringing out teaching that Jesus must be Lord of your life, in order for a person to be saved
The lordship of Christ is clearly at the heart of true saving faith. Nevertheless, many influential voices in contemporary evangelicalism are preaching with great fervor that we should not tell unbelievers they must yield to Christ as Lord. His lordship has nothing to do with the gospel, they claim. They make the preposterous allegation that calling the unsaved to surrender to Christ is tantamount to preaching salvation by works.
— John McArthur Jr., The Gospel according to Jesus
In other words, he rightly says that obedience was not an option for the believer, but a necessity
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Now you may think, “what was so controversial about that”?
Well, in some reformed segments of the church, the notion of believing was not necessarily tied to obedience to Jesus’ lordship
We have here a different set of circumstances in the time of the apostle John, but the outcome is the same - a group of people who believe that only the spiritual mattered & that they can sin all they like in the flesh because it is not really sin because it is the stuff of flesh
So they were not obeying the commandments of God
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It goes further, as it seems to me, that the ones who are committing sins leading to death are the ones whom he labels antichrists
By their wilful denial of the incarnation of Jesus - that is, the denial that Jesus has come in the flesh from God - they have shown themselves to be self-willed & only prepared to believe what is in-keeping with the world’s understanding of God
They are worldly-minded & not kingdom minded & so believe the world over God
“It is plain that the author is most concerned about the sins which are incompatible with being a child of God, and these are summed up in denial that Jesus is the Son of God, refusal to obey God's commands, love of the world, and hatred of one's brothers. Such sins are characteristic of the person who belongs to the sphere of darkness rather than the sphere of light.” — I. H. Marshall
But we are encouraged to pray for one another - for the believer who gets caught up in sin because by the church community praying… “he shall ask and God will for him give life to those who commit sin not leading to death”
The health of the church is the responsibility of every member of the fellowship
3. Jesus Keeps Us from the Evil One
3. Jesus Keeps Us from the Evil One
Q. If we sin, can we claim that the devil made me do it?
That can be nice & convenient can’t it!
But no, the devil can’t make a born of God Christian sin
He can sure make an unbeliever sin - but not a Christian
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This is a joyous section of this reading today
18 We know that no one who is born of God sins; but He who was born of God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him. 19 We know that we are of God, and that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.
Q. Who is it that lies under the power of the evil one?
The world - the world & its agenda are driven by the evil one
By the grace of God, there are Christians in the world & they are salt & light which helps stop the decay
Q. Am I saying that Christians are the only ones who do good in the world? No, not at all
However, we belong to the Kingdom & we belong to God
The life of the Lord is in us & we are the fragrance of God in the world
14 But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place. 15 For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; 16 to the one an aroma from death to death, to the other an aroma from life to life. And who is adequate for these things?
We give off a fragrance to the world - to believers, a beautiful, glorious scent; to unbelievers, the smell of a crematorium (My father did renovations on a still functioning crematorium & he would come home having a terrible smell on him & soot over his clothes)
The unbeliever lives in darkness & we radiate the kingdom rule of God to them - a rule that they reject & despise
God offends them because God is not like them & doesn’t endorse what they think & do
They want to be gods of the world themselves with no reference to the true God
Their distorted view of God is the only one they chose to believe
No wonder, John says that the power of evil one is upon the world, but for the Christian, he can’t touch us
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This does not mean that you cannot sin, it just means that the evil one does not have a hold on you
Why? Because the One begotten of Gcd - Jesus Christ - keeps you protected from him!
You belong to Christ & Jesus will not permit Satan to control you
Yes, however, in our weaknesses we do sin, but it is not the devil’s doing - he cannot touch you
4 You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world.
4. Rejecting Idolatrous Thinking
4. Rejecting Idolatrous Thinking
20 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. This is the true God and eternal life. 21 Little children, guard yourselves from idols.
Q. Tell me, what is an idol?
This seems to come out of the blue, does it not?
He hasn’t talked about idols or idolatry in the whole book, then why finish with - “Guard yourselves from idols”
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- A guard, or Sentinel is a watchman
Think of a watchman up in a tower looking for any army that may come upon a city (remember Lord of the Rings)
The sentinel keeps watch day & night & doesn’t fall asleep on his watch - he blows the horn when he sees approaching invaders
6 On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed watchmen; All day and all night they will never keep silent. You who remind the Lord, take no rest for yourselves;
Q. What do you suppose John means by “keeping watch for coming idols”
Can I suggest that he means something akin to - “keep watch against adopting worldly idolatry”
In other words, the world & it’s ways have skewed the understanding of God & what He has done in Christ
Under the influence of dualism, the world could not associate God with suffering or with the material universe
Under the world’s thinking, God could not have anything to do with Jesus suffering on a cross
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Remember the battle of Elijah against the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel?
The question that was being asked was: “Who is God”?
Was it Baal, or was it Yahweh?
That showdown was the biggest one-sided contest the world had ever seen
Yahweh was victorious against the so-called Baal that was really the figment of the world’s imagination
37 “Answer me, O Lord, answer me, that this people may know that You, O Lord, are God, and that You have turned their heart back again.” 38 Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering and the wood and the stones and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. 39 When all the people saw it, they fell on their faces; and they said, “The Lord, He is God; the Lord, He is God.”
Here is it - & it is not shocking - in fact, it is no different than what I spoke about last week with regard to Satan’s temptation of Eve
Man wants equality with God - this means that man, at every opportunity, will try, will attempt, to domesticate God
He will want to bring Him down to our level in order to try & control Him
The offence of God to the world is that He is unable to be controlled
He stands apart & against man’s self-determination
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Just look at the amount of times, John mentions “true” in v.20 - 3 times
The Son of God, not the son of Joseph, has come & given us discernment, understanding that we may know Him, the Father, who is true; and we are in Him who is true, that is in His Son, Jesus Christ
And what does he say about the Son of God?
This is the true God and eternal life
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This sums up the problem & it is not accepting the testimony of God - the testimony concerning His Son, Jesus
Idolatry will always want to impose man’s belief’s over God’s revelation
We must, under no circumstances, surrender the truth of God over worldly belief’s that suit the worldly narrative
In closing John’s 1st Epistle, he nails the problem succinctly - that it is idolatrous thinking that is robbing the true church of it’s eternal life
We must hold faithfully to the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, because only by this truth, can we know the true God & know the eternal life that He has given through His Son