Message Info:
- Text: 1 John 5:9-15, 18-21, KJV
- Series: Individual Messages (2010), No. 32
- Date: Sunday evening, October 17, 2010
- Venue: Pleasant Hill Baptist Church — Blanchard, Oklahoma
- Audio File: Open/Download
Listen Online:
Watch Online:
Video Unavailable
Transcript:
⟦Transcript⟧ I think back to my college days and all of the philosophy classes that I ended up having to take there at the University of Oklahoma. And at the time, I thought it was by accident, but now I think it was just God preparing me to be able to think about my faith and reason it out and be convinced and persuaded in my own mind, at least, of why I believe the things that I believe. And I remember a lot of discussions in a lot of these classes had to deal with the subject of absolute truth, and you would hear people throw out their beliefs that they would either say there is no such thing as absolute truth, or they would say there may or may not be such a thing as absolute truth, but even if there is, it’s unknowable anyway, so why worry about it?
And I would hear some students and even some professors espouse these beliefs, And I just think it’s ridiculous to believe that there’s no such thing as absolute truth. Absolutely no absolute truth. And I even had professors argue against that point about how foolish it is.
Even atheist professors arguing against it and saying, no, it’s foolish to believe there’s no such thing as absolute truth. But the world has taught us that absolute truth is either not there or not knowable. But God says otherwise.
And we’re seeing, I think, the beginnings of a real problem. We’re seeing more and more people begin to espouse these ideas that absolute truth doesn’t exist. And I’m not talking about in society as a whole, oh, we’ve got to get them back to a place of absolute truth. I’m not talking about society as a whole at all.
I’m talking about the problem here is that we’re beginning to see more and more people in the churches, more and more professed Christians, saying they don’t believe in absolute truth. And that’s where it becomes a problem. It really shouldn’t shock or surprise any of us in the least when the world around us says that they don’t believe in God, they don’t believe in his word, they don’t take those things as absolute truth, that they don’t take God at face value, but they don’t believe what he says at face value.
It shouldn’t shock or surprise any of us. The history of the last 6,000 years of human civilization is one example after another of people disobeying God. It started in the very earliest days of humanity when in the garden, God told Adam and Eve, you can do whatever you want, but don’t eat the fruit of this one tree that’s in the midst of the garden because if you do, you will surely die.
Then Satan came along, the serpent came along and told Adam and Eve, oh, that’s preposterous. God said you’ll die if you’ll eat that plant. You won’t die.
God just knows you’ll become like he is and he doesn’t want that. What God said is ridiculous. And instead of choosing to believe what God said, instead of taking God’s word as the truth, people chose to question God and say, well, we’re going to find out for ourselves.
And they chose to eat the fruit and to disobey God. And it’s led to sin and disobedience against God in the world ever since. And it should be no wonder to us.
It should be no surprise to us when people in the world say, I don’t believe what God has to say. When they say that God’s truth is not necessarily the absolute truth. But when it does become particularly shocking is when we see it in our churches, when we see it in our Christian brothers and sisters, people who profess to be Christians and yet don’t believe in God’s absolute truth, don’t believe that there are some things that God has said that they can know without a shadow of a doubt.
It’s a problem because those who supposedly have faith in Christ and whose job it is to lead other people to faith in Christ end up having their faith subverted by this idea that’s crept in either through the pulpits or through popular culture or maybe even a combination of both, but this idea that’s crept into our churches that God’s absolute truth is not always absolute. But it’s become very personal for me in the last couple of years as I’ve seen people that I consider close friends, people that I’ve served together in ministry with, people that I’ve pastored that have sat under my teaching week after week, who when you talk to them, they profess to be Christians and they would never come out and say they don’t believe in absolute truth. they would never come out and say they don’t believe in absolute truth.
But when you ask them about their salvation, when you ask them about eternal life, when you ask them about the forgiveness of their sins, they say, well, I hope so. Well, I think so. Salvation has gone from being a certainty to being a best-case scenario.
And it’s not just that they haven’t heard the gospel. It’s not that they haven’t understood the gospel because you ask these people, well, did God say this in the Bible? Well, yeah, he did.
Hey, did you believe this? Did you trust in it? Well, yeah, I did.
Did God say you’d be saved if you trusted in Christ? Well, yeah, he did. So are you going to go to heaven?
Well, I hope so. And some people have gotten to a point where they think they cannot know some things about God’s word that God never intended for us to be uncertain about. And I’m not talking about people who doubt.
I think every Christian doubts their salvation from time to time. Every Christian, I think, questions their salvation from time to time. Certainly those that I’ve talked to, I’ve yet to talk to one person who will honestly tell me that they’ve not doubted.
Someone who’s genuinely saved but still questioning, still has some lingering doubts, is generally not coming from that position of questioning God and was God’s word real, was God’s promises real, but was my faith real? And so it’s a sense of questioning ourselves, not of questioning God. Paul even tells us in 2 Corinthians 13.
5, he tells us, examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves that Jesus Christ is in you, unless indeed you are disqualified?
but I trust that you will know that we are not disqualified. So he says, examine yourselves. Make sure that the change that you believe happened really happened.
Make sure you were genuine in faith. I’m not talking about doubting and questioning and wanting to make sure, but I’m talking about a life and a walk characterized by salvation as a best-case scenario instead of an absolute certainty. And that’s when it becomes a problem because God intended for this to be a certainty.
Now, where am I taking that from? I’m taking that from primarily the book of 1 John. If you look at the book of 1 John, it was written with one of the purposes in mind, being to reassure the early Christians and us indirectly, that there were certain things that God not only made possible for us to know, but God really intended for us to know for sure.
Now the word know, the letters K-N-O-W, the word know, or some variation thereof, using those letters, is used in the book of 1 John over 30 times in the King James. Over 30 times. This was written for people to be reassured.
Reassured about the fact that they could know God. Reassured about the fact that they would be able to look at one another and look at themselves and see evidence by the fruit of their spirit that they truly belong to Christ. It was all about evidence to reassure us of what God intended us to know. And in the next few minutes, I want to look at 1 John chapter 5, where John lays out for us four things just in that passage that we need to know that God intends for us to know and that will help our Christian walk, will help our lives if we get these things nailed down because God never intended for us to walk through trying to serve him and at the same time living this life of uncertainty when it comes to what his will is and what he desires for our lives.
Now, 1 John chapter 5, starting in verse 9 says, If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater. For this is the witness of God which he has testified of his Son. He who believes in the Son of God has the witness in himself.
He who does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed the testimony that God has given of his Son. And this is the testimony that God has given us eternal life, and this life is his Son. He who has the Son has life.
He who does not have the Son of God does not have life. These things have I written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life, and that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God. Verse 14, now this is the confidence that we have in him.
If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of him. Skipping down to verse 18, we know that whoever is born of God sin, but he who has been born of God keeps himself, and the wicked one does not touch him.
We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one. Now there are four things that it’s important for us to pick up on in this passage that John has told us we need to know. Not just know with a head knowledge, but we need to be sure.
We need to have assurance of. We need to have these things nailed down so that we are as sure of these things as we are of anything else in the world. Now the first of these things that we need to know from this passage is that God’s credibility is sound.
John tells us in verses 9 and 10, If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater, for this is the witness of God which he has testified of his Son. He who believes in the Son of God has the witness in himself. He who does not believe God has made him a liar because he has not believed the testimony that God has given of his Son.
And the first thing that we need to nail down is that God’s credibility is sound. So many people are willing to take man’s word about everything that they hear. Someone told me this, someone told me that, and we’ll listen to people in our lives that aren’t even credible.
And just on a daily basis, as we go through life, we extend credibility, and we extend the benefit of the doubt to fallible human beings who are prone to, and sometimes intend to, give us wrong information. And I’m not here in this message, anyway, to try to convince the hardcore atheist to believe in God. And so if that’s your intent in listening to this, I’m sorry.
Right now I’m talking to the people who profess to be Christians and they’re sitting on the fence about this issue. If you receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater. We extend the benefit of the doubt to human beings on a daily basis.
And too many times we are unwilling to extend at least the same benefit of the doubt to God and to what his word has said. I’ve read the books. I’ve looked at the manuscript evidence.
I’m not an expert. But the word of God has not changed in thousands of years. There may be punctuation and spelling errors, but there’s an amazing continuity and an amazing consistency to God’s Word, to the manuscripts throughout the centuries.
God’s Word has not changed. It’s been ripped on. It’s been torn apart.
It’s been attacked from every conceivable corner, and yet it prevails to this day. People believe it to this day. It stands up to scrutiny today, and yet it’s so easy when the newest scientific theory comes along that we try to force God’s Word into the mold.
We try to force God and what he said into the mold of what science tells us, of what psychology tells us, of what political correctness tells us. Not realizing that these theories are being refined constantly. Darwinism has been refined and reworked because Darwin was not infallible.
And yet we continue to try to put God’s word in the mold of, well, can we make it conform to Darwinism? Marxism has been refined and reshaped over the years. All of these human theories have been refined and reshaped over the years because their creators were human beings and were fallible, and yet we’re willing to look at human beings and what they tell us, and we’re willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
We’re willing to receive the witness of men. Well, John tells us that if we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater. If man is credible, God is so much more credible.
And if God is not credible, if God is not worth the benefit of the doubt, then mankind sure isn’t either. But there’s an amazing amount of evidence to support the fact that the Bible is God’s infallible word. The prophecies of the Old Testament that have been fulfilled.
As I said, the manuscript evidence that goes back thousands of years and there’s barely an alteration. And certainly not an alteration to the message. There’s the fact that this is not just a book.
It’s a collection of 66 books written by 40 plus authors on three continents in three languages over the course of about 4,000 years. And if that’s not amazing enough, the fact that there’s one continuous thread, one continuous theme running through this collection of books, and that theme is God’s redemption, God’s plan to take fallen sinful mankind and make a way back to Him. There’s no other book like this.
And if God and His Word are not credible to you tonight, let me ask you, who are you trusting? Are you trusting your feelings? Are you trusting your own opinions?
Because have you not ever been confused by your feelings or your opinions? Are you trusting in what somebody else told you? Folks, we’re so willing to listen to man who’s fallible, but we’re so unwilling to listen to God whose credibility is sound.
And if you’re a Christian and you’re sitting there and thinking, well, I believe most of God’s word, and I believe this, and I believe that, and I believe the Bible, but I’ve got problems with it. I don’t believe this really could have happened the way God said it was. Make no mistake.
Verse 10 here tells us, he who does not believe God has made him a liar. If God has said something and we say, no, it can’t possibly have been that way. We’re calling God a liar.
And I want to ask you tonight, are you so sure about your reasoning faculties? Are you so sure about your own credibility that you’re willing to stand and say, I am right, God’s a liar. John reminds us that God’s credibility is sound.
If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater. God is more credible than any of us. God is more credible than all of us.
And when God says it, folks, we have reason to believe it, and we do well to believe it. Secondly, and this is a big one, he tells us that our eternal life is secure. Not only is God’s credibility sound, and we’re supposed to know that, and we’re supposed to be sure of that, but our eternal life is secure.
He tells us in verses 11 through 13, and this is the testimony that God, who we’ve already talked about his credibility, and God said this, and if God said it, and God’s credible, then so is the message. And this is the testimony that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life.
He who does not have the Son of God does not have life. Pay attention to this next verse. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life, and that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God.
If you’re like the people I’ve already described, who you’ve heard what God said, and you believed it. When God says, Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. If you heard that, you believe God said it and God meant it.
And you’ve come to Jesus Christ in faith. And you also have believed that he will save, that he will give eternal life to those who put their trust in Jesus Christ. And yet you’re still in the position like the people I described earlier, that have all that nailed down and yet say, I hope so, or I’m not certain. This verse was written for you.
These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life. John lets us know that our eternal life is secure if we’re in Jesus Christ. If we’ve trusted in Christ, he says, he who has the Son has life. It’s not life that man can take away.
It’s not life that we’ve earned for ourselves. It says in verse 11, God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life.
Folks, eternal life is God’s free gift. It’s not something he dangles in front of us and tries to confuse us and tries to mislead us to keep us away from getting it. It’s something that he gives us that he offers freely through his son.
And we’ll trust in Jesus Christ and what he did for us on the cross. We know that when he died on the cross, his blood was spilled to buy the pardon for our sins. He bore the wrath of God in our place on that cross.
And we trust not in our own goodness, our own ability, our own merit for eternal life, but we trust instead on his payment of our penalty. We trust in him as our substitute on that cross. Then we have eternal life that God has given.
John says, I want you to be absolutely certain about this. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God. He’s not talking about people who just made a profession and said, yes, I’m a Christian, I go to church.
He says, I’ve written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God. People who’ve trusted in Christ, who’ve believed in Christ and what he did for them. These things I’ve written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.
For what purpose? that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God, that you don’t get so caught up in the doubts and the questions that you end up walking away from the one who died for you. He says, I want you to know for certain that if you’ve trusted Christ, God has promised you eternal life.
I want you to know it. I want you to be assured of it, so that you may continue to believe in the name of Jesus Christ. Now, the third thing that we need to look at tonight, that John tells us about in this passage, is that not only is God’s credibility sound, And not only is our eternal life secure, but God’s provision is sure. John writes in verses 14 and 15, Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.
And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him. John tells us in verse 14, we can have confidence. And not only can we have confidence, but we do have confidence.
He says this is the confidence that we have in Him. We have this confidence. We’re assured of this, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.
John said, it’s a done deal. If we are praying and we’re asking God for things, and we know that what we’re asking is according to His will, then we can be absolutely certain that God hears us. And that’s not to say that God’s deaf and can only hear certain things. That’s talking about God hearing us as though God is listening, God is paying attention, with an ear towards granting us those things that we ask.
If we ask things that are according to His will, He hears us. Now, God has never promised us that everything we want, everything we ask for, we’re automatically going to get. God’s not a genie.
Christianity is not a magic formula. There’s nothing magic about prayer. But what God has said is that what we ask for in accordance with His will, He’ll grant to us.
And says we can be confident of that very fact. You know, if I pray for God to give me the biggest house, if I pray for God to give me a nice car, those things may not necessarily be God’s will, and he’s not necessarily going to grant those things. And it doesn’t even have to be something selfish.
It can even be something good. God, let me participate in this ministry. God, let me do this for you.
And it may not be that that’s part of God’s will and what he wants accomplished by you at that particular time. I think, for example, when Paul wanted to continue to preach in Asia in the book of Acts, And he had a mind to continue preaching in Asia, but God told him that it was time for him to go over to Macedonia. Now, was it a good thing to want to preach God’s word in Asia?
Absolutely. But the point is, it wasn’t God’s will at that point for Paul to be the one to preach in Asia. And so it doesn’t even have to be something that’s bad or selfish, necessarily.
Sometimes we can ask for good things that are outside of God’s will, and he’s never promised us that he’s going to grant us all those things. But when we ask according to God’s will, he’s promised us that he will hear our petitions, that he’s listening. When we’re asking his will, he’s listening.
Now, does that leave us in deep frustration over not getting our prayers answered? Only if we continue to ask according to our will. Now, what we’ve got to do here is to get in the center of God’s will, but it’s really not a trick.
It’s just the way things work. If we get to a point where we are more concerned about God’s will than accomplishing our will, then it’s not going to be that big of a stretch. It’s not going to be that big of a chore to begin asking for things that are according to God’s will.
Say, how do I know God’s will? Read his word. There are a lot of things that are revealed in God’s word.
Get into his word. Study his character. Study who he is.
Pray and ask him what his will is. But we think it’s so impossible to know the will of God. It’s because we’re not willing to invest the time in getting to know God’s will.
We just expect to be part-time Christians. And we’re going to come to church once a week. We’re going to pay our money.
We’re going to say prayers once a day when we feel like it. We might pick up the Bible once a week and we just expect God’s will to come to us through osmosis. But if we’ll invest time, we’ll invest energy, if we’ll invest ourselves in knowing God, I believe He’ll reveal Himself to us through His word and through prayer, and He’ll reveal His will to us.
We’ll fall in love with Him and we’ll desire not only to know His will, but to do His will. And I think the more time we spend getting to know God, the easier it’s going to be for us to pray things according to God’s will. God, this is what you’ve said you want to happen.
And so, God, we’re just going to pray today that your will be done. And when we start praying like that and move past all the selfishness and move past all the concerns about our own will, and we begin to pray God’s will with sincerity that his will be done, we have confidence that he hears us. And in verse 15, it says, and if we know that he hears us, we know that he hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions we’ve asked of you.
Folks, when we start asking things according to God’s will instead of our own, we not only have the assurance that he hears us, but we have the absolute confidence we know that he’s going to do something about it. And God tells us in his word some things that are his will, and if we pray for those things, we know that they’re going to happen. God’s told us there are some things that he’s going to do, some things that he wants to do, and if we’ll pray for those things, they’ll happen.
Get away from this idea of praying for everything I want and my will. But that doesn’t mean we can’t ever ask God for things for ourselves. God never wants promise to supply everything we want to but he does tell us things like Paul writing my God shall supply all of your needs through his riches and glory in Christ Jesus he’s promised us that he’s going to take care of us so I don’t think it’s wrong at all to ask God for things that we need to ask God to take care of us to ask God to do things that he’s already said he would do but we’ve got to make sure it comes from a place of loving God and wanting to know his will and to see his will be done and then when we start to get in line with God’s will and we pray for his will to be done in things, then we’ll start to see our prayers answered.
John says we can have confidence at that point that God hears our prayer and God will do something about our prayers. The fourth thing, not only is God’s credibility sound and our eternal life secure and God’s provision sure, the fourth thing in this passage is that our sanctification is certain. Our sanctification is certain.
And we get this from verses 18 and 19 where it says, we know that whosoever is born of God does not sin. But he who has been born of God keeps himself, and the wicked one does not touch him. We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one.
But these verses, 18 and 19, tell us that our sanctification is certain. And if you don’t know what sanctification means, look at it as setting apart. That when we’re saved, when we trust Christ, when we repent of our sins, when we’re born again, God sanctifies us.
He sets us apart. That means we’re set apart as no longer belonging to the world, but that we belong to God. We are marked out as his children with a distinct purpose of serving him and being conformed to Christ. That he set us apart to make us into what he wants us to be.
And while we will never achieve perfection on this side of heaven, God begins to do a work in us and begins to change us from the inside out and make us godly men and women in a way that we never could be on our own. And John tells us here in verse 18, we know, we know that whoever is born of God does not sin. That he who has been born of God keeps himself and the wicked one does not touch him.
We know we are of God and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one. Now whoever is born of God, he says, we know does not sin. Human nature is to fall into sin at every chance we get, sometimes to go and make the opportunities ourselves.
But it’s human nature to sin and to love the darkness and love wickedness and rebel against God. But John says here, if you’ve trusted in Christ, if you’ve been born again, if you’ve been born of God, he says you do not sin. And I read that, my first thought on reading that was, that’s a problematic passage.
Because that tells me there, I’ve not been born of God. Because I still do sin, I still do struggle with sin. As does every Christian I know.
None of us are born of God. But looking at the Greek that 1 John chapter 5 was written in initially, The word sin in verse 18 seems to indicate a continuous ongoing action of sin. Now, I’m not a Greek scholar.
My knowledge of Greek is very limited. But my knowledge of Greek to English dictionaries and concordances and those sorts of things, that knowledge is a little less limited. And what I do understand of the Greek with the help of these tools, and what I do understand of the Greek from speaking with learned men of God who understand Greek far better than I could ever aspire to, is that this word indicates an ongoing action.
And so what it seems to say here is that we know that whoever is born of God does not go on sinning. But he who has been born of God keeps himself and the wicked one does not touch him. And folks, if that’s the case, what it’s telling us is that we know whoever is born of God is going to be different from he who has not been born of God.
He’s going to be different from the person he used to be. He’s going to be different from those around him. I don’t think this verse is saying he’s never ever going to sin.
A familiar passage in James tells us to count it all joy, not if, but when we fall into diverse temptations. That Christians are still going to sin from time to time. But the Bible talks about Christians being known by their fruit, by the way their lives are lived.
And folks, a Christian is going to trip and stumble and fall sometimes. But folks, somebody who is truly a Christian, somebody who’s truly saved, truly born again, and truly trusts Christ and belongs to him, will not live a life that is characterized by an ongoing lifestyle of habitual, unrepentant sin. 1 John 1.
9 tells us that if we will confess our sins, that God is faithful and just to forgive us of those sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we are truly saved, the response for us when we sin is not one of letting it go and ignoring it, or wallowing in it, or continuing, or letting ourselves go farther down the slope. The response of a saved person to sin is for the Holy Spirit to point it out to us, and for us to go to God and confess that sin and deal with it, and to move on.
And for a Christian, sin in his life ought to be more the exception than the hallmark of his lifestyle. And when we see ourselves, or we see other people who profess Christ, and they live the same, or we live the same, or even worse, we live the same way, or even worse off than we did before we came to Christ, something is not right. Because he tells us that if we are in Christ, our sanctification is certain.
We’re going to be set apart by God to be different. He’s going to enable us to do that. We know that whoever is born of God does not sin.
But he who has been born of God keeps himself and the wicked one does not touch him. We know that we are of God and that the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one. There is a distinction here between God’s people.
And God said it is certain. The Bible said it’s certain. We know that there’s a distinction here.
We know that we are of God. And we know that the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one. And for a Christian, that sanctification is certain.
So if we think we’re Christians, and we look at ourselves, if we look at ourselves, and what we see looks more like we’re under the sway of the wicked one than being born of God, folks, we need to step back and check, was it genuine? Because he’s promised us that that sanctification is certain. We know that whoever is born of God does not sin.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download