A Sure Faith

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Transcript:

Good evening. If you’d like to turn there with me, we’re going to be in 1 John chapter 5 again this evening. We’re going to look at a different part of the chapter from what we looked at this morning.

1 John chapter 5. It’s really no secret that these days the Word of God is under attack, that the authority of God’s Word is under attack. And it really shouldn’t surprise us because it’s been going on since the earliest days of this world.

It seems like such a new thing that people would say, well, God’s word, that’s outdated. It doesn’t really apply to us anymore. It doesn’t mean that you can’t tell them.

Think of all the things you hear people say, and we think this is kind of a new thing. But God’s word and God’s authority have been under attack since the earliest days of creation. If you think back to the Garden of Eden, I refer back to the Garden of Eden so much in my preaching, and it has occurred to me that that really did mess so much up in Genesis chapter 3.

You know, everything can be traced back there. But the question that the serpent, who if we didn’t already know is identified later on in the New Testament as the devil, the question that the serpent asked of Eve was, hath God said? And he wasn’t asking, did God really say that?

He knew very well what God had said. It was not a question of, okay, remind me what God said because I’ve forgotten. It was a matter of, does that really mean what he said it means?

It was not a question of whether God had said the words or not. It was a question of God’s authority. And we live in a day and age just like that one when God’s authority is questioned, where God’s word is questioned.

Two kind of crazy ideas that I was exposed to in college. I say exposed to because they were taught, not exposed to as though I caught them, although they do seem to be kind of contagious. A couple of crazy ideas that I was exposed to in college are the ideas that either, on one hand, there’s no such thing as absolute truth, absolutely no such thing as absolute truth.

That one to me is pretty glaringly obvious that it’s false, because you’re making an absolute statement, a statement of absolute truth by saying that it negates itself and contradicts itself. And the other one is there may or may not be absolute truth, but we can’t know. Nobody can know for sure anyway.

I don’t know about y’all, but I don’t want to live in a world where there is no absolute truth. I thought about this when I was almost to the church. You know, you’re coming down Main Street and you’re still on the brick streets downtown and there’s one place where as you’re coming down Main Street, you’ve got a four-way stop and you stop there.

Well, I stopped there because the sign says stop. And it is true, it is absolutely true that you need to stop at the stop sign. And I’m coming down to the next intersection where it’s just a two-way stop and doesn’t involve me, and I’m just driving along down Main Street, happily headed to church, and somebody else came through and didn’t think the stop sign applied to them.

I had to slam on my brakes. And it got me to thinking, okay, a world where there are no absolutes or where we can’t know absolute truth, nobody stops its stop signs. Really, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t all be out in the streets killing each other.

And I’m not advocating for this, by the way. I’m just saying this is the logical conclusion of the statement that there’s no absolute truth. You know, I want to do what’s right and abide by the rules, but that’s my truth.

Your truth might be different and say you can run amok. Okay, a world where there are no absolute truths sounds good to some people. Hey, I can do what I want.

But a world where there’s no absolute truth or there’s no basis for knowing absolute truth is a world that when you really start to think about it, nobody is gonna wanna live in. There is truth, there is black and white, there is right and wrong, and there is an objective standard for knowing these things, and I submit to you that it’s the word of God. I submit to you that the way we know what’s right and what’s wrong is because God has said.

Now, did God, another thing that they talked about in crazy college classes, did God just make up the rules arbitrarily? And so if God said lying was okay, then lying would be okay. Well, God wouldn’t say that.

And so the other option they gave us was either God made up rules arbitrarily, and so it’s just okay and right and wrong because he said so, and it could have been anything. Or it’s because God is subject to some other law. I don’t like that option either.

Guys, God’s word is God’s word because he said it. God is not subject to anybody’s law. God is sovereign.

I think there’s a third option, that God’s law and right and wrong flow from his nature. They’re not arbitrary. His rules, his standards are not arbitrary.

And they’re not that he’s subject to somebody else’s outside rules. Lying is wrong because it’s not in God’s nature to lie. Murder is wrong because it’s not in God’s nature to take innocent life.

All of these things flow from who God is. And so there’s an absolute standard of right and wrong that I believe flows from the person and nature of God. And we are able to know it by reading his word.

And yet society will say, well, that book is outdated. Those rules don’t apply anymore. Why should we take your opinion?

Why should we take, people might not say this in our area of the country, Because there are a lot of people who are cultural Christians. We live in the Bible Belt and they believe in God and at least believe in doing the right thing. And they think people in a general sense should do the right thing.

But when it applies to them, I believe in God, but why should I do what he tells me to? I want to live my life. The world tells us God, God’s word has no authority.

And in telling us that, the world tells us that God has no authority and that we can’t know for sure what God wants anyway. And it’s just your opinion. And stop being so, why don’t you people stop being so judgmental?

Folks, we can have confidence, I believe. We can have confidence in what God’s word says. We can have confidence in what God’s word teaches about right and wrong, about heaven and hell, because it is the word of God.

Because God has credibility. Because God speaks with authority. And so as we read his word, his word carries credibility and authority as well.

I want to look tonight at this passage in 1 John 5 that talks about the witness of God and how men, even in the Apostle John’s day, were so quick to write off God’s authority and God’s witness and God’s word and yet so ready to take man’s advice. We’re going to start just a verse or two after where we left off this morning in our discussion about the Trinity. Start in verse 9 that says, If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater.

For this is the witness of God, which he hath testified of his Son. We left off this morning talking about verse 7. It said there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one.

We talked about the witness of God in verses 5 and 6 that talked about Jesus Christ being the Son of God. That God the Father was heard to testify. That sounds so strange to say that God the Father testified.

But God the Father made it known to the people at the time of Christ’s baptism that he was the Son of God. God, through miracles and wonders that attended the crucifixion, the death of Christ, made it clear even to the pagan centurion that this was the Son of God. And so it was part of what he’s talking about here, the witness of God, is that Jesus Christ is who he says he is, and that sin and judgment and redemption are what he says they are as well and work the way he says.

And so he says, if we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater. Folks, that’s truth that applies even to us today. People are so willing to listen to the advice of people around them, aren’t they?

Especially if it’s something they want to do. You know, we have a tendency, if there’s something I want to do, I’ll go and ask advice, and if you don’t tell me what I want to hear, I’m going to go to the next person. If they don’t, I’m going to keep going until I find maybe the tenth person who agrees with me, and I’m going to say, great, that’s wonderful.

That’s, I was just making sure I was right. But especially if it’s what we want to hear, we’re willing to take other people’s advice. But we’re willing to listen to the advice and counsel of other people when it comes to how we live our life.

Well, what should I do here? What should I do in this situation? What do you think about spiritual things?

And we will listen to each other, and the world will listen to each other, and yet we are so quick, and I say we, I mean the human race. I don’t necessarily mean this group of people gathered here tonight, but we are so quick to what God says. You know, you get right down to it, and people who are not basing their teaching about morality, about salvation, about eternity, that are not basing their teaching on these things, on the Word of God, are basing it on man’s opinion.

I don’t care if it’s written down in some other book, or if it’s just being spouted by somebody on TV, it’s man’s opinion. And we’ll listen to the opinion of man. The world will listen to the opinion of man, and yet it’s so quick to write off the witness of God, what God has to say.

Think about how crazy that is. We’ve got the God of the universe saying this is the way it is. You know what?

He’s the one who was there and saw all of eternity, has seen all of eternity. He’s the one who set up the way all of this works. He created the universe.

He set up the law. He knows how all this works and he tells us this is the way it is. And yet we go to people who don’t know any more than we do.

I remember when I was working with youth years ago and talking with other youth workers about conducting Bible studies with the teenagers or teaching classes with teenagers and saying, you know, sometimes you want to ask questions to get them discussing, but try to limit your questions because why do you want to draw from a pool of ignorance? And I thought, well, that’s true. They don’t know because you’re teaching.

Here they are telling each other, well, I think it means this. And none of them know. Guys, in contrast to God, none of us know.

None of us know even a fraction of what he knows. Altogether, we don’t know a fraction of what he knows. So why are we so quick to listen to other men instead of taking the witness of God for what it is?

So he says, if we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater. And he says, this is the witness of God, which he had testified of his son. He that believeth on the son of God hath the witness in himself.

He that believeth not God hath made him a liar because he believeth not the record that God gave of his son. You can’t say I believe God. You can’t say I believe God’s word and not believe that Jesus Christ is the only begotten son of God, that he is the Messiah, that he is the one and only savior.

Because we can say, well, I believe in the Bible. I believe in God. I believe in all these things.

What God has said, one of the most important things God has ever revealed to us was his son. One of the most important things that God has ever made known to man was that salvation was available in and only in Jesus Christ. And for us to say, well, I believe in God and I believe in the Bible, but I don’t believe that stuff about Jesus being the only way to heaven. Then we don’t believe in God and the Bible.

It says we’ve made him a liar. Now that doesn’t mean he actually is a liar, but that means we’re acting as though he’s a liar. And this is the record that God hath given to us eternal life.

And this life is in his son. He that the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life. So God’s testimony and everything that God did to verify what Jesus Christ was saying was proof and was a record and was a witness of the fact that Jesus Christ came to save us and was the only one capable of doing so as the only begotten Son of God.

And as a result, he says in verse 12, He that hath the Son of God has life. Those who have Jesus Christ have life, have life abundant here on earth, and have eternal life. And those who do not have the Son do not have life.

That’s really not complicated. There aren’t exceptions to that rule. God said, if they have the Son, they have life.

If they don’t, they don’t. These things have I written to you that believe on the name of the Son of God, that ye may know that ye have eternal life. Ladies and gentlemen, God wants us to know with certainty the truth.

He wants us to know with certainty the truth that we have eternal life in Jesus Christ. God is not a God of confusion. God is not the author of confusion, the Bible says. God is not a God who wants to leave us in doubt.

I feel very sorry for people whose religious system says if your good outweighs your bad at the end of it, it’s as though you’re weighed and judged on a big scale, and as long as your good outweighs your bad, then you’re fine. you’ll get where you’re going, whether it’s heaven or paradise or nirvana or whatever they call it. And if your bad outweighs your good, then you’re in trouble.

And most of the time, there’s no assurance even in these belief systems. They don’t know, even according to their own doctrines, whether they’re going to be in or not. They just get to the end and, well, we’ll have to wait and see. There’s no assurance there.

God never wanted us to be in doubt. He’s not the author of confusion. He never wanted us to wonder, are these things true?

Are these things not true? He said, these things have I written that you may know. You know what?

There’s absolute truth and he wants us to know. There’s absolute truth and he’s made it possible to know. There’s absolute truth about eternal life and eternal damnation.

And he says, I want you to know for sure. And so he says, these things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the son of God. I’ve written these things to you who believe in Jesus Christ as your savior so that you may know that you have eternal life.

All of 1 John is about knowing. Now every time I count, I come up with a different number, so I’m just going to get in the ballpark. But last time I looked, there were 23, maybe 24 instances where the word know, or some very, K-N-O-W, not N-O, K-N-O-W, some variation of it was used in the book of 1 John.

Over 20 times. Now that means I know, I knew, he knew, knowledge, knowing, any of those words, in there over 20 times. This whole book was written to the early Christians and by extension to us today so that there are some things that we would know because God didn’t want to leave us in the dark about the most important things affecting our life and our eternity.

And so he says, I’ve written that you may know, not that you may wonder, not that you may guess that, but that you will know if you have eternal life. And so you can know tonight, do I have eternal life? Will I get into heaven?

You can know. There was the first church I pastored, there was a very nice man who was there all the time. Wonderful man.

But I would ask him, a faithful church member and all this, but I would ask him, do you know for sure if you’d go to heaven if you were to die tonight? And he said, well, I hope so. I just frustrated with him in a very loving way because I cared about him, but I wanted to pull my hair out.

And I said, have you heard nothing that I’ve talked about over the last however long I’d been there. And even up until the point, and I tried to talk with him about it and he indicated he understood that it was by trusting in Christ and Christ alone. But even after I left, talked to him on occasion, up until he died.

I’d say, do you know? He said, well, I hope so. Guys, we don’t have to hope so.

We have hope, but we don’t have to hope so in the sense of wishful thinking. We don’t have to wonder. We don’t have to be confused.

Tonight, if you have trusted in Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ alone, to be the savior of your soul, to be the one who purchased forgiveness for your sins because you’d sinned against a holy God and realized you couldn’t save yourself and that he died to pay the penalty for your sins. And not on the basis of anything good you had done, but on the basis of what he did on the cross, you asked God to forgive you of those sins. And so he’s your savior.

You may know you have eternal life. If you’ve never trusted him as your savior in that way, then you may know that the opposite is the case. He said, These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life, and that you may believe on the name of the Son of God.

And this is the confidence we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us. And He said, Because we have confidence in what He said He would do, which is our salvation, because we can have confidence in His Word, because we can have confidence that when God speaks, he means what he says and says what he means, then we can have this confidence as well because he’s promised us elsewhere that when we ask things according to his will, he hears and he answers. He says because of this, we can have confidence that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears.

We can know that for sure, that when we ask according to his will, he listens, he pays attention, and he grants the requests that we ask in accordance with his will. And we know, and if we know that he hears us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desire of him. And I make this distinction every time we talk about something like this.

But asking according to his will doesn’t mean we get everything that we ever wanted. If I pray and ask God for a nice new truck, brother, I wouldn’t mind having one like the loner you had last week if I didn’t have to pay for it. If I pray and ask God for a nice new truck, if it’s his will, he’ll give it to me.

But if I’m asking it just because I want it and I’m greedy, it’s not a guarantee that he’s going to give me everything I want. But we do have the promise of God’s word that he meets every need that we have. We do have the promise that when we pray for things that God desires to give us that are in his will, that he will hear an answer.

And we’ll have the petitions that we desired of him. There’s kind of a space in here for about two verses that are three verses that two. They’re kind of in parentheses.

I still don’t understand why they are in this particular spot. And they’re not, they don’t really apply all that much to what we’re talking about tonight, but they’re in there. So we’re going to look at them.

Verse 16 says, if any man see his brother sin a sin, which is not unto death, he shall ask and he shall give him life for them that sin unto death. There is a sin unto death. I do not say that he shall pray for it.

All unrighteousness is sin and there is a sin not unto death. So he talks about there being a sin not unto death and there being a sin that’s unto death. And I guess the reason why it’s in here is that he’s talking to them about God answering their request when he prays according to their will.

And he always says, if you see a brother who’s overtaken in a sin that’s not unto death, you can pray for him and God will restore him. There’s also a sin unto death and there’s a lot of speculation about what that means. my best guess based on what I read in Scripture is that there are times that even believers can go so far outside the will of God and so far away from God, not that they lose their salvation, but I think God says, I’m going to take you home before you do any more damage.

But then we go back into verse 18, more toward what we were talking about. We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not, but he that is begotten of God keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not. Now, this would appear to be a contradiction because he’s just talked about a brother who sins.

But then he says, so a brother then would be a believer. But he says in verse 18, we know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not. And that doesn’t mean, I don’t take it to mean, I don’t understand it to mean, from everything that I know about the Bible, that believers never ever sin.

We know from the Bible that we do sin. Earlier in the book, speaking to believers, it says that, oh, I was looking at the wrong chapter. If we, ladies and gentlemen, we who are believers, confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Threw me off because I looked at verse 9 and it didn’t say that, and I realized I was looking at chapter 2. 1 John 1. 9 says to believers, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

We do, unfortunately, continue to sin. But in the Greek words here, when it says that we sin not, as it’s been explained to me by people who know Greek better than I do, and what little I’m able to ascertain just by looking at the Greek, that it appears to be the case. This is talking about a continuous action, that believers are not supposed to go on, and believers will not go on in the old pattern, in the old lifestyle.

And we as believers, we do trip and fall into sin from time to time. I hate to say. Oh, I hate that.

And yet we’re not supposed to lay down and wallow in it. If we can say, you know what, I’m going to continue on in this sin and just enjoy it and keep doing it, and I don’t care what God says about it, we need to check the condition of our heart and see if that conversion really was a conversion. Because a believer, whosoever is born of God, will not continue in sin.

But he that is begotten of God keepeth himself, guards himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not. And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness. And we know that the Son of God has come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and that we are in him that is true, even in his Son, Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.

Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen. And so in just the next few minutes, I want to share with you four things this evening that we can know for sure.

Some aspects of our faith that this passage indicates we can be sure about. There are more things than four that we can be sure about, but from this passage, here are four important ones. And the first one is that God’s credibility is sound.

And I’ve already hit on this a little bit, but we’re willing to accept the word of fallible men just every day. We listen to each other. We think nothing of it.

We will hear reports on the news. We’ll read things in the newspaper. We’ll hear the back fence gossip when we take it at face value a lot of times more often than we should.

But even those who are credible make mistakes. That’s why we have things like retractions in the newspaper. Even people who are professionals at saying we’re going to observe and write down what happened make mistakes.

and you know it just goes downhill from there. Back fence gossip notoriously unreliable and yet we take it at face value only to find out later on that oh what other people have told us is wrong and without thinking about it we are so ready and so willing to take the testimony of fallible men at face value and yet God’s word says it and we say whoa hold up there that can’t possibly be true. Well it is true We cannot claim to believe in or love God or trust God if we’re at the same time saying, but I don’t believe what he says.

Does that make sense? Because we don’t believe God is unknowing about things, that God is unsure about things. If God says something for us to say he’s wrong, either we’re saying he’s lying or he doesn’t know.

Well, we know he knows everything. So to say, I believe in God, I love God, I trust God, but he’s wrong about that. We have to be calling him a liar.

His word even says we are calling him a liar. Folks, God’s credibility is sound. God sees more than all mankind put together.

God knows more than any of us or all of us. Why on earth? Especially when it comes to the most important issues.

Why especially when it comes to the most important issues of life? would we listen to the opinion of man over the word and the witness of God. God has a 100% track record of credibility.

God’s credibility, ladies and gentlemen, is absolute. If God has said it, it has come to pass. Now, just to clarify what I’m talking about.

So there are things that God has said in the Bible. Do any of us know the future? I don’t.

I mean, I think I’m going to get up tomorrow, drive to the school, teach little children, go home, take something for the headache I’ll inevitably have, do it all again for five days, come back here next Sunday. That’s what I think is going to happen. Do I know that for sure?

No, anything can happen. We all think we know what’s going to happen, but we don’t know. God sees and knows the future.

And this book, this Bible is full of prophecies. And you know, every prophecy God has ever made about what’s going to happen in the future either has happened or is still yet to happen. And I know that sounds like, well, yeah, anything would either happen or be yet to happen.

What I’m saying is there’s nothing left unfulfilled. For example, if God said such and such city would be destroyed, because I know there is one in the Old Testament, I just can’t think offhand of what it was, that this city will be destroyed and never rebuilt. You know what?

It was never rebuilt. And God may say at the end of times, this is going to happen, was not unfulfilled in the sense that it was a false prophecy. It just hasn’t happened yet.

But if God said at this time, such and such was going to happen, it’s never come to pass that that date passed and it didn’t happen. Folks, God has an absolute track record of credibility, of absolute credibility, 100%. I mean, the prophecies of the birth of Jesus Christ alone, prophecies of the life of Jesus Christ alone are staggering, that he would be born in Bethlehem, that he would be born of the lineage of David, that he’d be.

. . There are so many prophecies about his first coming.

I preached a series on about 12 of them one time. It’s just incredible to look at the prophecy and the fulfillment. And everything that was said about the Messiah that was to be fulfilled in his first coming was fulfilled against astronomical odds.

I’ve heard that a mathematician did a study on the odds of any person fulfilling all of the, I think it was 8, 10, 12, something like that. I’m not good at remembering numbers. The probabilities of any one person on earth fulfilling just a limited number of the prophecies about the Messiah and said that the odds were the same as if you took silver dollars and covered the state of Texas in stacks of silver dollars a foot deep and marked an X on one at random and put it in there, it would be the same odds as drawing that one with the X out on your first try.

I can’t even imagine those odds. And yet God orchestrated everything that every, ladies and gentlemen, every tiny, what we would see as tiny detail, everything God promised came true. God’s credibility is sound, much more so than mine, much more so than yours.

So God’s credibility is sound. Second of all, our eternal life is secure. we can know for sure that our eternal life is secure in Jesus Christ. He says in no uncertain terms that those who believe in the Son not only have life, but have eternal life.

Now Jesus said, I came that you may have life and life more abundant. So we have abundant life here, but we also have eternal life in the world to come. So those who believe in the Son have not only life, but have eternal life.

And what he’s written, he wrote so that we would know that we have life and that we would know it not just kind of wishful thinking, not just kind of a guess, but know it with certainty. That if we’ve trusted Christ as our Savior, we don’t have to wonder if my plans don’t come to pass and I don’t wake up in the morning and go to teach little children. If something happens to me tonight, I don’t have to wonder, am I going to be in or am I going to be out?

Which way are the scales going to tip? I’ve got to work harder and make sure, and even then I’m still not going to know for sure. No, none of that.

Our eternal life is secure. Why? because it’s not based on anything I’ve done or could do or you’ve done or could do.

It’s based on what Christ did and the promises of God. Third of all this evening, God’s provision is sure. In other words, we don’t have to worry.

This is the one I probably have the most trouble with out of all of this. We don’t have to worry, is God going to take care of me or not? It is a scary thing to let go of the illusion of control of your own life and say, I’m just going to let God be in control here.

He would be anyway, but I’m going to not fight him on it. And I’m going to try not to worry about it. It is a scary thing to step back and say, I’m giving up control or the illusion there of my own life.

But when you really see it in perspective that God knows what’s best and God does what’s best for us, it’s liberating to say, God’s in control here. God is in charge. It’s up to him.

You know, I have been nervous. I have been, when I get nervous, I get sick to my stomach. When anybody around me is in conflict, I get sick to my stomach.

I basically live with nausea. But when I’m nervous, I’m not nervous like other people. I can’t eat, I get sick, these kinds of things.

I have been a nervous wreck before every job interview I’ve ever had, before every going in view of a call I’ve ever had, before every secular job interview I’ve ever had. And a few weeks ago, when I was called about this job at the school, I went in and I was fine. And I answered questions and joked with the interviewer or the principal. Because, and I don’t mean this to sound disrespectful, I walked in not caring whether I got the job or not.

Because I knew I had come to a place, I think for the first time in my life, and I’m not saying I’m still here all the time, but I’d come to a place in my life probably for the first time that I realized that if God wanted me to have this, he w

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