How to Know that We Know Him

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I was watching a program recently about World War II, and they were talking about the French resistance. And they were talking about how the resistance operatives, they would spy on the Nazis, and they would sabotage trains and bridges and things like that. And they would do this underground work.

But they didn’t always know each other. They were organized in little cells, so if some group was caught, it wouldn’t compromise everything. So when you don’t all know each other, you have to have some kind of code.

It’s always the preacher’s kid, right? You have to have some kind of code to verify who you are. And so they would use code phrases.

My goodness, this used to be Charlie. Oh, goodness. They would use code phrases to verify that they were who they said they were, that we really know the resistance, we really are speaking to people back in London, we know them, and so they would say things like, the eagle has landed, or the Russian bear hunts by night.

They would use code phrases. Or, if they wanted to go even a step further, they could say, if you want to know that we know the people back in London that were talking to the resistance leadership and all of this, then listen tonight when the BBC broadcasts at whatever time, and they will use this phrase. Because presumably the Nazis wouldn’t know what phrase the British were going to use on the radio that night when they said, by the way, here are our messages to our operatives.

And so they would use these random phrases. And then you know they knew people back in London. They were part of the resistance.

It’s important sometimes to have evidence that there is a connection with somebody. Years in ministry have made me a little bit cynical at times. I go from one extreme to the other on this.

We talk in the office about how I am naive when it comes to dealing with people, and I assume everybody’s telling me the truth, right? And then there are other times that I assume that’s not the case, that people will come by the office and they will want help. And you have to figure out if what they’re telling you is true, if there really is a connection.

There was a young man that came by recently and was talking to me about trying to get to rehab, which is an admirable goal. But he was trying to get to this rehab facility out of state and he was needing help getting there. And he said, you know, my grandpa has said he’ll pay for whatever it takes to get me down there and I’m trying to go to this place. And so immediately I’m thinking, okay, I need to call the grandfather and make sure this is true.

I need to call the rehab facility. I need to verify that these people know him and have heard of him. Now, fortunately, it didn’t go that far because Rick walked out to where we were and he knew somebody.

He said, go talk to them. And he was able to deal with it. But sometimes we need to know that there is a connection to that person.

We need to know that people really do know the people they say they know. In John’s day, as we’ve been talking, as we’ve been looking at the book of 1 John, in John’s day, there was a desperate need to know whether people really knew Jesus Christ when they spoke on his behalf, especially because the New Testament was just being finished. I mean, if he’s just writing 1 John, obviously they didn’t have the Bible in the form we have today.

We can go to God’s Word here. We can go to the New Testament in particular and say, okay, this person really is speaking the truth. They didn’t necessarily have that, at least not the New Testament.

And so it was a desperate need for them to know these people really do know Jesus. These people really do have a relationship with Jesus, to know whether they were real teachers or false teachers. Folks, we need to have the same understanding today because there are false teachers out there.

That’s why I tell you all the time, don’t just take my word for it. You go check in your Bible and make sure that what I’m telling you is correct. But we need to know whether the people we’re listening to actually know Jesus or not.

Sometimes we may wonder that about ourselves. How do I know that I know him? How do I know that there really is a relationship there.

I think we all have those moments, maybe late at night, where we’re thinking through things, we’re trying to shut our brains off for the day, and those questions pop in, and those doubts pop in. And it’s okay to have those doubts and questions as long as we can come to an answer on them. Well, the Scriptures give us an answer how we can know whether somebody knows Jesus or not.

Whether it’s us we’re concerned about or it’s the people we’re listening to. And so this morning, we’re going to be in 1 John 2. 1 John 2, if you can turn there in your Bibles, if you’re able to find it.

If you’re using your phone, there’s a link to the passage right in your bulletin, or it’ll be on the screen if you don’t have either one of those this morning. But 1 John 2 is going to tell us how we can know that a person knows Jesus. We’re going to start in verse 3.

Once you find it, if you would, stand with me if you’re able to without too much difficulty. Stand with me as we read together from God’s Word. Now starting in verse 3, and we’re going to read through verse 6 this morning.

It says, Now by this we know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He who says, I know him, and does not keep his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word, truly the love of God is perfected in him.

By this we know that we are in him. He who says he abides in him, ought himself also to walk just as he walked. And you may be seated.

So to understand this passage, and to understand the evidence that he points at and says, this is how you can know that a person knows Jesus Christ, whether, again, whether it’s you or somebody that you’re listening to their teachings, here’s how you can know that a person knows Jesus Christ. It’s essential that we understand the word know and what it means here. He’s talking about an experiential knowledge. He’s talking about the knowledge that comes from having spent time with somebody.

and experiencing them. I told you last week when we talked about love, that love is one of the most overworked words in the English language, because it has to carry a whole spectrum of meanings. No is another one of those words in English, where so many other languages have multiple words for something, and we just cram it all into one word.

Greek, evidently, has multiple words for knowledge. I studied French all through high school and college, and I can tell you French has two words for knowledge. If I’m going to say I know that two plus two is four, I would say je sais.

If I was going to say I know my wife, I would say je connais. There are two different words. This is a difference between knowing just plain cold facts and knowing a person.

And when we talk about experiential knowledge of a person, knowledge that comes with experience of being around them, we’re talking about a relationship with that person. So when he says, here’s how you know that you know Jesus Christ, talking about knowing him is talking about that relationship, knowing him in an experiential way. Again, we have to put aside the idea that we have in English that this means so many different things.

I know my wife. In many cases, I can tell you what she’s thinking just when she looks at me. Other times I have no idea.

Every once in a while she catches me by surprise. But I know my wife, I typically know how she’s going to react to something before it even is presented. All right?

I know my children, not as well as I know my wife, because my children are changing and growing every day. All right? I know Governor Stitt.

I met him once when he was running for office, and he came to speak in Kanawha, and I won’t tell you what I said to him afterwards. But I’ve met the man. I know who he is.

He probably wouldn’t be able to pick me out of a lineup. But there’s a difference between knowing and knowing. This is talking about knowing, as in having a relationship with somebody.

So that’s important for us to understand. So when he says, here’s the proof that somebody has a relationship with Jesus, it’s obedience. Obedience is how we prove that we have a relationship with Jesus, through our obedience.

He says, if they keep my commandments. However, something we need to understand here is that obedience to Jesus is important, but it is not what saves us. That is not what John is teaching here.

And I will admit to you, I have struggled for years to reconcile this verse with several others in Scripture that talk about it being the grace of God that saves us and how He saves us from our sins even though we are not perfect and never will be. I’ve had trouble reconciling it even with some things that John has written in this letter, where he says, if we sin, we have an advocate with the Father. And then he turns around and says, if you know him, you will keep his commandments.

And it’s very easy for us to read that and assume he’s saying, if you are a Christian, you will not sin ever. And if you sin ever, if you ever slip up on his commandments, if you don’t do it just right, then it’s proof you don’t know him. It would be really easy to look at that on the surface and say that he’s requiring total obedience, it’s proof we don’t have a relationship with him.

But I’m going to tell you this morning, that’s not what he’s saying. That’s not what he’s saying. John also wrote, and we’ve looked at this already in previous weeks, if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.

He said we were going to sin. And 1 John 2. 1, if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.

He is still there advocating on our behalf when we do sin, when we do mess up, when we do fall short of his commandments. And we’ve looked in previous weeks at how John wrote in chapter 3, whoever abides in him does not sin. Now he wrote that, as I explained to you before, to confront false teachers who thought that they could continue in a lifestyle of sin and justify it.

It’s one thing for me as a Christian to sin and immediately go, I messed up. God, why did I do that? And really hate what I just did.

That’s the normal reaction for a Christian. But these false teachers, what they were doing was they were saying, this is how I want to live and I love it and let’s just find a way to twist the scriptures to where it makes it look like God’s okay with it. Do you see the difference between those two?

You awake this morning? Okay. Here he’s talking about a habitual lack of concern for the commands of God.

And he said, if that’s the way you go through life every day, just not caring about what God said, about what Jesus commanded. If you can go through every day just living however you want and not caring about what Jesus said, then that is evidence right there that you don’t really know Him. So clearly, obedience is important as a sign that we do know Him.

It’s important evidence of the fact that we do have that relationship, but obedience, we’ve got to be careful because obedience is not how we get that relationship to begin with. If you fall into the trap of thinking that I’ve got to be just good enough so that God will love me. I’ve got to perform just so well in order to have a relationship with God.

If you fall into the trap of thinking that way, you will wear yourself out trying to do good, moral, religious things and miss the idea of a relationship with God. And you will do good, moral, and religious things all the way to eternal separation from God in hell. Because that’s not what gets us the relationship.

Go back to where I said in 1 John chapter 2 that he wrote, if anyone sins, we have advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, look at the very next verse, and he says, and he himself is the propitiation for our sins. That word propitiation means offering, payment. He himself, Jesus, is the payment for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole world.

So what did he mean by this? Because if we’re not careful, it looks like John’s saying two different things. It looks like John could be saying, perfect obedience, that’s how you prove it.

And on the other hand, John’s saying, you can’t be perfectly obedient. It’s not going to happen. To reconcile this, to understand what he’s telling us, we have to know what was going on at the time.

John was warning against the influence of false teachers who thought that they could know Jesus, that they could have that relationship with Jesus while completely ignoring him. There were false teachers who thought they could know Jesus while ignoring him, and they were teaching people that also. By the way, we see that a lot going on today.

There are far too many trendy churches, some in our own denomination, that say, it’s all right. You can love Jesus and you just go on and live however you want and it doesn’t matter. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and say, I understand where you’re coming from.

We have a relationship with Him through God’s grace. It’s not dependent on our performance, but we should be teaching people still that our desires should change once we belong to Him. That I should want to please Him.

If I as a Christian go on sinning and it doesn’t bother me, that’s a bad sign. And so he was writing about these people. There was a group of people at that time called the Gnostics.

And I won’t get into all their theology this morning, but they were all about secret knowledge. That was their big thing. They were all about experiential knowledge that could connect them to God.

As a matter of fact, the word that John uses all throughout this passage for knowledge is gnosko, which is related to the word gnosis, which is where they got their name Gnostics. So as a matter of fact, when he says they don’t know God, he’s playing on their own name and saying they don’t know as much about God as they pretend to. But their idea was that they could get to God through these mystical experiences and just trying to reason things out.

And they could, through their own philosophy and through their own experience and through whatever means they wanted, they could get to God and they could know all about Him. They were more focused on what they felt and what they wanted and what they thought and what they could reason out than they were with what God said. That’s the bottom line.

That’s the thing you need to know about the Gnostics. They thought they had found another way to God while ignoring what He said. They weren’t concerned with what God had openly revealed about Himself and His will.

They wanted to find a secret back door. They believed they could find their own way to God. And as I said a moment ago, modern-day Gnostics will ignore God’s Word.

They’ll elevate human reason and experience even when those things conflict with God’s Word. There’s nothing wrong with learning from our reason. There’s nothing wrong with using our reason and learning from our experiences.

Those are good things. God gave us those for a reason. That’s how we learn is through experience.

You’re a little kid. You go near the oven. Mama says, don’t, it’s hot.

And you don’t believe her. You touch the oven and you learn it’s hot. And hopefully you don’t do that again because you’ve learned by experience, right?

It’s one of the things God put in us to keep us alive, right? There’s nothing wrong with reason and experience. But when what we think our reason and experience tell us conflict with what God’s Word says, somebody’s wrong and it’s not God.

When what I think is in conflict with what God says, I’m saying this about Jared, when what I think and feel is in conflict with what God says, I’m the one that’s wrong. And so this Gnosticism, it led them to believe, among other things, that Jesus was a created spirit being, that he wasn’t God the Son, that he didn’t come in human flesh. There’s a problem with that because if he didn’t come in human flesh, he couldn’t die on the cross for our sins, he couldn’t shed his blood, and nobody’s saved at that point.

There is no salvation, there’s no hope. That’s why the Gnostics thought they had to come up with their own way. And John, who walked with Jesus, if anybody alive at the time this was written had experiential knowledge of Jesus, It was John, because he walked with Jesus in the flesh for three years.

John wrote about them and explained that they didn’t know Jesus like they thought they did, which was evident from the fact that they couldn’t care less what he had said. Now, if you wonder, how do we know this is about the Gnostics? If you read all through 1 John, that’s what he’s talking about.

That’s why you get to, I believe, chapter 4. And he says, if anyone claims that Jesus didn’t come in the flesh, he’s a false teacher. Because it was this idea that Jesus, because He was perfect, could only come in spirit form, not as flesh.

This whole letter is about the Gnostics and what they were teaching people that was wrong. And they, because they thought they had to find another way to God, they couldn’t care less about what Jesus had actually said. And the point that He was making to them when He said, if you know Him, you’ll keep His commandments.

The point there is relevant to us as well, Because we also cannot pretend we’re devoted to Jesus while ignoring everything that He said to us. It’s true of us. We cannot claim that we are devoted to Jesus while ignoring everything that He said to us.

If I told my wife all the time, I love you, I love you, I love you, and never listened to a word she said, would she think I loved her? No. Thank you.

Somebody’s awake. I figured it would either be Jimmy Ann or my wife who would chime in on that one. No.

We tell our kids, we love you no matter what you do, but when you act like you don’t care a thing about what we’ve told you to do, it makes us feel like you don’t love us. We talk about how important it is to demonstrate love, how important it is to demonstrate the relationship. We tell them we demonstrate our love for you by the way we take care of you.

And I use the example with them. If I were to say all day, I love you, I love you, I love you, and I was always beating on you and screaming at you. Would you think I loved you?

No. We demonstrate our love for him. We demonstrate our concern for him.

We demonstrate that relationship by demonstrating that he’s important to us, by being concerned with what he said. He says, he who says I know him and does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. So once you realize that he’s writing about the Gnostics.

Once you realize he’s writing about these people who said, you can know Jesus, but you don’t have to listen to what he said. When you realize he’s talking about that group of people, this idea of keeping his commandments is no longer one about being perfect or having to perform to a certain level so that he’ll love you. It’s a matter of the condition of the heart and whether or not we are concerned at all with what Jesus has told us.

This doesn’t mean that one has to be perfectly obedient to be a Christian, but if we truly know and love Jesus, we will want to be obedient. And therein lies the difference. There were a lot of upstanding people among the Gnostics who had zero interest in what Jesus said.

They didn’t know him. But you know what? There were and there still are people who struggle with sin.

And that’s the key, is the struggle. The people who struggle with sin, who really do have a relationship with Jesus, and that’s why they struggle. Because we have this sin nature.

We have this sin nature within us that is in rebellion against God. And because of that, I don’t believe we ever get to the point as Christians where we don’t sin at all. I don’t think that’s what John taught either when he kept talking about what would happen if we did sin.

But as Christians, that sin ought to bother us. I routinely have these conversations with God where I am so frustrated with how I think and act and speak sometimes. I love the Lord.

I’ve been walking with Him for 30 years. I should have it figured out by now, right? I should have my behavior under control.

And yet there are still thoughts and actions and attitudes that are still there that I hate. And that’s the problem. The Gnostics didn’t hate it.

They didn’t care. When he’s talking about obedience to his commandments, he’s talking about the condition of our hearts and a willingness to be taught and to be led by what Jesus said to us. And we will grow as God’s love works in us so that we’ll be able to walk more and more consistently with his example.

Will we ever be perfect? No. But we’ll be more and more consistent with his example.

That’s what it’s talking about in verses 5 and 6 here when it says, whoever keeps his word truly the love of God is perfected in him. God’s love grows to maturity. God’s love that was poured out on us works in us and comes to maturity, comes to fruition in us.

As we continue to keep his word, by this we know that we are in him. He who says he abides in him ought himself also to walk just as he walked. And I’ve seen where some commentators have compared this to the way that we start out as children, where we learn to be obedient because of consequence.

experiences we learn to be obedient because we’re afraid of what might happen or or not even afraid we’re just it’s more I guess it’s more fear-based I try to tell Charlie to do something he acts like he doesn’t even hear or know his name but I start I start saying do I need to get the paddle sometimes in public you can’t say you want to get the paddle so I say do we need to go have a conversation out at the truck and usually by that I do mean conversation because we’re going to talk before we go any further. We’re going to see if we can sort this out diplomatically before we go back to the military solution, right? But he will obey at four if he’s concerned enough about the consequences.

And it’s not always a spanking. Sometimes he’ll lose a toy. But he’s concerned about the consequences.

Now that sometimes happens with our older children too. We have to remind them that consequences exist, but at 10, my son far more often does what I ask him to because he loves me and because we have a relationship. That’s the picture I get as it talks about the love of God coming to maturity in us.

We start out being obedient to his word because we’re concerned about the consequences because we remember he is God and you don’t want God to have to take the belt off, but we grow to a point where the relationship is there that even though sometimes we fall short, more and more frequently we get to a place where we obey just because we love Him. And that’s the goal here. The Gnostics didn’t have any of that.

And so if you’re wondering about somebody you listen to who’s a teacher, are they really telling me the truth? Do they really know God? The answer is, do they keep His commandments?

So if you’re listening to somebody on TV or on the radio or on the internet that’s telling you, you don’t have to do what God says because of this, that, or the other reason, it’s probably not somebody you want to be listening to. If you as a believer are wondering, how do I know that the relationship is real? How do I know that the relationship is real when I mess up on a daily basis?

I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about me. How do I know that the relationship is real when I mess up on a daily basis obey Him. And the only reason I want to obey Him is because of the Holy Spirit He put in me.

That’s not how we naturally are. Naturally, we just sin and don’t care. So how can you know that the relationship is real?

It’s this desire to be obedient. It’s this concern for His commands. It’s the struggle against sin rather than the just giving in to sin and wallowing in it.

And none of this is how we have the relationship with Him, not how we get the relationship. It’s the evidence that we do have a relationship with Him. It’s the evidence that it’s real, is the desire to obey Him.

And so in closing this morning, what I want you to understand, what this passage calls us to understand is that indifference toward God’s Word is evidence that we don’t know Jesus as our Savior, but that we need to. If we’re in a place in life where we say, I really don’t care what God’s Word says, I just want to do what I want to do. If that’s the normal pattern of our lives is, I don’t care, John says that’s evidence we don’t actually know Jesus.

But it’s evidence that we need to because our sin separated us from God. God is holy. And I know some people look at it and say it’s so harsh for God to condemn us just because we do something He doesn’t like.

Because sin is anything that we say, think, do, or don’t do that displeases God. Just because He doesn’t like it, that’s so harsh to condemn us. The definition of right and wrong, of sin and righteousness, is rooted in who God is.

Honesty is right because God is a God of truth. Faithfulness is right because God is a God of fidelity. God can’t lie.

God can’t sin. So when we choose sin, what we’re really doing is telling God that we choose everything that He is not. It’s like looking at somebody and saying, I hate everything about who you are and want nothing to do with it.

Sin is rebellion against God. And so that sin separates us from a holy God. He can’t just ignore it and let it go.

That sin has to be punished. That sin has to be paid for. And again, the world looks at it and says, it’s so harsh that God can’t just let it go and he has to punish sin.

Listen, think about some of the most heinous crimes that you’ve heard of. And when these things have gone to trial, think about murder, child molestation, terrorism, and these things go to trial. How would we all react if the judge says, that’s okay, cupcake, you can go. Just don’t do it again.

All right. We would be screaming for that judge to be thrown off the bench. I don’t know, after the last two years we’ve had, I’m sure somebody would storm the courthouse, right?

They’d go in after that judge, because we know that’s not right. God, as the righteous judge of the universe, can’t just let sin off the hook. It has to be punished.

It has to be paid for. And yet God is loving. Even as God is just and He’s wrathful toward sin, He’s also loving and kind toward sinners.

And that’s why Jesus Christ came, lived a perfect sinless life he had no sin of his own to pay for. So that when he went to the cross and he was nailed to that cross and he shed his blood and he died, it wasn’t to pay for anything that he had done, it was to pay for everything that you and I had done. So that that sin could be paid for in him.

That’s why John said he is the propitiation, he is the offering for our sins.