That We May Know Him

--- As we begin our final chapter today in our study of 1 John, which we called Light, Love, and Logic, I'm thinking about all the titles that I could have used. I do this to myself. I agonize over a title as I put together a study guide, and then I torture myself the whole session long with all the other titles I could have used. After last week, I thought Abide would have been a fantastic title for this Bible study. There's some other chapters that I kind of thought, like Truth and Lies would have been good, but no one would have come, so that would have been fruitless. But after this week, I thought a great title would have been what we see in our text, That We May Know Him. Because that was really John's heart as he was writing this letter, that we may know him. And he uses the word know multiple times throughout the letter, but it's really compact in this last chapter. So what I want to do is read verse 20, almost at the end of this chapter, as kind of our way of getting into this study. Verse 20 says, We know that the Son of God has come, and he 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. He is the true God and eternal life. This was John's heart toward the church. And as he was writing this, in order to reinforce how it is that we know the Lord, he took us time and again back through the buffet of topics that we have covered in this theology and Christian living, because this is a discipleship manual. Do you guys like to go to buffets? I think buffets are the bomb. I love it. I think when we first started making those long trips to Minnesota, one of those trips we discovered that when everybody was tired and cranky and four kids in the car, and all of a sudden you see a golden corral, and you're eating two and a half minutes after you walk in the door. And it is awesome. But the best thing is that we started taking our grandkids maybe about once a year over to Nampa to this buffet when they were younger. It's still fun. It's awesome to take grandkids to a buffet and just watch and see what are you going to choose. And one of our granddaughters got this bowl and she filled it up with canned peaches. And she sat down and she was eating canned peaches and she's saying, these are so good. I love these peaches. They're so good. And she finished the bowl. Someone at the table said, well, you can go back and get more. She said, I can? And like seven bowls of canned peaches later, she was just a happy camper. But it's so fun to see. But anyway, I feel like this study, this book has been a buffet because we keep going back and back. And for this time through, we're going to leave the lessons about false prophets behind. But don't worry. Come back next week. We're going to do second and third John together, and we'll get back to that. But for today, loving the children of God, the true identity of Jesus, and our confidence as we imbibe in the Father, particularly our confidence in prayer. So let's get started reading verse one. And I want you to listen as, listen for this familiar phrase that we've talked about, born of God, okay?

So this represented our first day of study this week, and I have three thoughts about these five verses. First relating to the phrase born of God. It is very important for us to really understand and to grip how we enter into God's place in the family. And if you think that the phrase born again is a hippie phrase, born out of the last great revival in our country, no. John coined it, well, Jesus first, when he talked to Nicodemus, you must be born again. But John picked that up and rolled it over and over, especially in this letter that we are born of God, and we are reminded it is not an intellectual decision on our part, as much as it is a spiritual birth, a rebirth that changes, substantially changes our nature. Second thought is when we are born of God, we love the others that are born of God. Now some people in this life are just people people, they just love people, and maybe you're one of them, maybe you're married to one, maybe you know people. My mom and dad were people people. They would just, you know, they loved everybody, they wanted to talk to everybody. I guess I picked up just a little bit of that from them. I can't stand to even check out a Kohl's without engaging in a conversation, you know, because you just want to express to that person, hey, you're worth more to me right here in this moment than processing my visa. You know, like I value you as a human being, but this passage isn't telling us that God's going to turn us all into extroverts just because we're born of God. That's not the point. The point is that when the seed of Christ abides in us, we will grow to love others that are born of God. It's something that God does in us, and it's expression in us of our love for our Father. And the third thing I thought of is when we're born of God, we keep God's commands. And John says his commands are not burdensome. And I want us to think about that for a little bit, because his commands actually might seem difficult. Some of his commands aren't easy, but they're not burdensome. For example, the command to love one another. Is that easy all the time? No, it is not easy to have agape sacrificial love for others, even in the body of Christ. It can be difficult, but it's not burdensome to us. I thought of another thing, like resisting our natural urge to covet. And our urge to covet comes from comparison. And so the single woman looks at the treasures that the married girl has with the family and covets that situation. And the girl with three babies under three years old looks at the single girl and says, For her life, you know, right? We compare and we tend to naturally covet. It's not easy for us to be content with our lane in life and to be content with the boundaries that God has given. But it's not burdensome. And if we find that we are burdened, well, then we may be a passage like this tells us to stop, drop, and take a look, take inventory of why are we feel burdened? Because if we feel burdened in our walk with the Lord, we are not going to feel like overcomers in this world, right? So I want to take us to a familiar passage. I'll just put it on the screen for us. You know it. It is Matthew 11, 28 through 30.

Maybe you have lost your awareness of who you belong to, the fact that God's seed is within you and you're functioning under your own yoke. And so this is a reminder for us to surrender that to the Lord, willingly surrender as we abide. This has been our theme, especially from the last chapter, as we learn how to abide in the Lord, to function under his yoke. And that's why John was writing, you know, very little in this letter was earth shattering news to us or to the readers that first read it. It's a reminder. John was doing a discipleship manual. We need to go through this book again. This was not a once for all kind of a thing. As believers, we meet these passages. We'll need them again and again because John was reminding and we can have the ministry of reminding each other as well. If we see one of our sisters with this heavy burden, as if the Christian life is so burdensome, no, remember who you belong to. And we can encourage her in the Lord. I want to move on to verse six through 12. And this, these verses, I feel I hear them as specifically speaking to the people to whom this letter was written. John says, this is he talking about Jesus who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not by the water only, but by the water and the blood and the spirit is the one who testifies because the spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify, the spirit, the water and the blood. And these three agree. All right. So this is a part where we not only ask, what does it mean? But we ask, what did it mean to the original readers? Part of, we talked in the very opening about the Gnostic teaching that was very popular and part of the Gnostic vibe culturally was that they rejected very important teaching. things about who Jesus Christ was that we now embrace from the writings of the Old Testament. There are core doctrines, but they rejected things like the virgin birth, for example, because the virgin birth tells us that Jesus Christ was conceived of the Holy Spirit, fully God, and born of Mary, fully man. This is how he entered into our experience in life. This is how he was made flesh, both fully God and fully man. And, of course, they had a teaching so that they could kind of compartmentalize things the way it made sense to them. The people that John was writing this letter to had influences that said, excuse me, Jesus was a human born of Mary and Joseph. He was a good man to whom the God Spirit came on in his baptism and left before the cross. This, in the words that the original readers would have made sense of, more than us, this passage is telling them, no, he was fully man, born of the waters of birth, and he died by the shedding of his blood. Both the water and the blood and the Spirit testifies to this. It's not a little detail that doesn't matter very much. Like, don't be so picky about this. No, it's a core pillar of our doctrine that Jesus entered into our existence, fully God and fully man, so that he could represent us and so that he could be sinless. And then the word testimony in this section is a big deal. If we pick it up in verse 9, if we receive the testimony of man, which we on this side of the cross, we have received the biblical account of the eyewitnesses, that is the testimony of men, then John says, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God, that he is born concerning his Son. Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. We have the Holy Spirit to give us further testimony of Jesus in us. Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar because he has not believed in the testimony that God is born concerning his Son. And this is the testimony that God gave us, eternal life and life is in his Son. Now this next verse is a what does it mean to me verse when John says, whoever has the Son, he has life. Whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. Clearly the Son, Jesus Christ, is the key to having life. He is the key to eternal life. This is what we believe and this is how we test ourselves to see if we are in the faith. Do I have the Son? Then I have eternal life. And then John goes on to talk to us who say, yes we have the Son. He says, I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life. Now all of those verses are birthed out of such rich soil that it would be awesome if we could just keep rolling it over but I want to get to the next passage because when I put together this study guide in August I had a chance you know to go up for a couple days in my trailer up on Cascade Lake and and just put some thoughts together. These next verses just ministered to me personally so much and I've been so anxious to share them since that. So let's read verse 14 and 15. John writes,

Okay John is an old man who is confident in his relationship with the Lord. This is these are the things that he knows. He walked with Jesus in the flesh and then he walked with the Spirit of Jesus after that and he wants us to be confident as well. Whoever is reading this letter and the confidence here is expressed in prayer because prayer is an ongoing aspect of our relationship with the Lord. After believing and receiving which happened in one point in time we continue to believe certainly but we are left with a lifetime of prayer. We're left with a lifetime of communication with the Lord. It's like a man and a woman who decide to become married and they go to the altar to say their vows and enter into a covenant and once that marriage is consummated they're left with a lifetime of communicating. That is how they relate to one another. So look at John's use of the word know here in verse 13. We know that we have eternal life. Verse 15 we know that he hears us. God is attentive to our communication. We have entered into a covenant with him, a union with him and we know that we have the requests that we have asked. God answers prayer. Sometimes we need that reminder. Sometimes we need to encourage one another with that reminder. I think that's what John was doing here to encourage the believers. God hears, God answers. I want to encourage you with this. Now this isn't the first time that he mentioned prayer in this book. We had it back in chapter 3. We said that we were going to leave it for this week but back in 321 John said beloved we have confidence before God that whoever, excuse me I'm sorry, and whatever we ask we receive from him because we keep his commandments and here comes the key to some of these passages on prayer which by the way this isn't everything the Bible has to say about prayer. This is just one aspect about prayer to encourage us but here's the key in verse 24 whoever keeps his commandments abides in God and God in him. John was talking and reminding that prayer has a direct link with abiding and these passages express the importance and the blessing and the centrality of abiding because when we abide in the Lord we begin to absorb his desires, right? We have our own desires but as we abide we absorb his desires. We enter into a union. Abiding makes our hearts united and then our desires become united. Does this happen in a day? No it doesn't but over time as we abide in the Lord our desires become united and this is what makes sense of the psalmist saying in Psalm 37, delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart because they are becoming united. They are merging as we go on. Abiding makes our hearts united. Now he doesn't, John doesn't use the exact word abide in the chapter that we're studying but he uses a word that just in my own paraphrase of making sense of this I like the phrase toward him. This is the confidence that we have toward him. Now toward is a preposition. It shows position. The position can either be I'm either facing toward the store, I'm facing away from the store, right? It shows position. It's like we said last week it's not so much about perfection as it is direction but I like this concept am I honestly facing toward the Lord? Am I genuine in my communication with him? And you probably like me can admit no there are times when I just would rather not talk to him at all. There's a barrier there that I have erected. Something, some disappointment, some sin, some entanglement causes me to really not face toward him. So that's I think why I like this confidence that we have toward him. In our study guide we went back to John's Gospel the through verses or excuse me chapters 14 through 16 and what did we learn? That our prayer life is a matter of abiding in Jesus and his words abiding in us. It's a matter of God loves to do what we ask so that the Father will be glorified through his Son. We learned that God responds to us so that we will bear fruit and that our fruit should abide. So we can be confident that God will grow us as we pray. Just get started, just get started and God will grow us and he will turn our prayers from the silly and selfish prayers that we start with into significant prayers that sound more like thy will be done, thy kingdom come. It is a work of the Lord. The Lord does this as he grows us. Now that's the first little part about prayer and we're gonna get to verse 16 here in just a minute but I want to remind you about how John models this for us. Back in chapter 3 we were talking about loving other people. He said hey you should love the brothers and then he said for example if you see someone in need of the world's goods and you can fulfill that need. He used a specific example. Well now that he's talking about prayer and entering into prayer, he is going to use a, for example, if you see, so let's read it, verse 16, if anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he should ask, and God will give him life to those who commit sins that do not lead to death. Now let's just throw out, I actually, in my notes I just had a strike through the controversial prayers, so let's just take the not leading to death part and just set it over here, we'll cover that in just a minute, but let's just talk about the point of it. The point is, if anyone sees his sister committing a sin, sees her sister committing a sin, he should ask, and God will give her life. So John is giving us a, for example, as we are loving those in the body of Christ, when we observe someone else who is not facing toward the Lord, they have decided to face against the Lord, okay? When we see that, what should be our response? We should pray to the Lord on their behalf. We should intercede. Rarely does someone change their position and turn back to face toward the Lord based on debates or biblical proof texts or public shaming or, you know, calling out their sin, maybe, but rarely. John is instructing us here, we should intercede. We have confidence in the Lord. We have confidence in what the Holy Spirit is going to do. Who do you have? Everybody has someone in their life right now for which this is a today application, and we need to be reminded that it is only God's Holy Spirit that changes the hearts of those who have turned away. And so engage. We have confidence before the Lord. John says, girls, have confidence, pray. You should pray to the Father on behalf of that one, and don't stop. Don't say, well, I did Tuesday, no. We keep going, don't we? Because the Lord has plenty of, he's given us plenty of pattern for perseverance in prayer. So prayer is a result of our confidence. Our confidence is built on our assurance of eternal life, and our assurance of eternal life starts when we believe in Jesus Christ. Now, if you want to know all the ins and outs about the sin leading to death, I thought about this. I'm going to tell you, go to our church website and listen to my husband teach it, and I'm not chickening out. This is why, is because we're covering one chapter in 30 minutes, and he took three 45-minute sessions to cover this chapter. So just go ccontario.com, listen to the very last message. I remember being in the auditorium the last time he covered it and sitting there and going, that is brilliant. That makes so much sense. And so I went back and listened to it. It's still brilliant. So if you want to know, just do it. We don't have time to cover it since he already did. What we want to do is finish up this chapter and this book by looking at this trilogy at the end. And this one closes up by saying, we know, we know, we know, every one of these verses. So the first one, verse 18 says, we know that everyone who's been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who has been born of God protects him and the evil one does not touch him. And the key here again is keep on sinning, practice sinning in ongoing manner. We discussed this in chapter three, when we went back to this part of the buffet. When someone is born of God and they are actively engaging in sin, which is out of agreement with God because Jesus came to destroy sin, right? So actively engaging in something for which God came to destroy for a believer who has the seed of God is miserable. They are miserable and God will deal with them. God will allow them to continue in a sense of misery until they deal with that sin. He will not loosen his grip on us. In fact, the Lord often tightens the grip more and more to lead us to repentance. Verse 19 says, we know that we are from God and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. Now today in our culture, the word privilege is a nasty word and we're very careful about how we use the word privilege. But I want to say to all of us, we have privilege in the kingdom of God. We are privileged as God's children. We have special privileges. The whole world lies in the power of the evil one. But if I can go up to back up to verse five, who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the son of God. We have entered into a special privileged relationship with the Lord. Now that doesn't mean that bad things won't happen to us. That doesn't mean that we won't succumb to accidents and to illness and to physical death in those things. In fact, our special privilege ensures to us that we will suffer in the same way that Jesus suffered. That is part of our special privilege. But the evil one no longer has power over us. And that's an important text for us to grip and hold on to. It causes me to wonder if in the body of Christ, we need to change our vocabulary up just a little bit and really lower all the conversations about, you know, Satan's really attacking me and raise up all the conversations that say, we know that we're from God and the evil one does not touch me. That's what I see in first John. I don't see anything else. Now certainly the enemy prowls around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. There are temptations. We need to resist him. That isn't part of our understanding. But look at our privilege. The evil one cannot snatch us out of God's hands. We are eternally kept in his hands. Our eternal life has begun. So the last verse says, 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. He's the true God and eternal life. This is what we've been focusing on for six weeks. It's a great summary verse for this Bible study, knowing him who is true and having the privilege to walk in the light and to walk in love and reflect his character. Now these final six words might be perplexing because the very, very last sentence is little children keep yourselves from idols. And you might say, idols, I haven't seen that on the buffet yet in all of these circles. Where is this coming from all of a sudden here at the very end? But if we think about the core attitude of idolatry, what is the core behind idolatry? It's offering that place of worship to something or someone other than the Lord to whom it belongs. Our first commandment is you shall have no other gods before me or above me. Do not have your face toward something other than me. So the final application is for us to just say, well, what does that mean to me? Because that is always a good thing. John would not have reminded us if it wasn't a big temptation in our life. He would not have said little children, keep yourselves from idols. If we didn't need to come around to this once in a while and say, have I made an idol of something in my life? Now certainly there are things that can become idols easily. Maybe you have known a woman who has seemed to make an idol out of her home or her wardrobe to the point that so much of her time and energy and money and all of that is going toward that thing. Sin is definitely an idol because it draws us into bondage to itself. Once sin has drawn us into bondage, then we serve it and we give it our time and our attention and all that. But there are other things that we even mentioned in the study guide that we would consider very legitimate things that have the potential to become an idol. Things so virtuous as my family. And you'd say, how can your family become an idol? Well, anything that is placed on the highest pedestal of our life for worship can become idolatrous to us. When we begin to use it as a filter of our life through which we make decisions of how to, you know, what we're going to do, what time we're going to spend and all those sorts of things, all of a sudden we can look at something very worthy and say, I'm using that as a question to say, how will this affect my family rather than how will this affect what the Lord has for me to be doing right now? Things like friendships, my paycheck, involvement, I don't have one by the way, involvement in a ministry, educational choices for your children. These can all become idols in our lives. So it's good for us to say, Lord, evaluate with me. Have I placed, have I elevated any of these things to a place where they've become my filter? And then I need to make some changes. I need to bring it down a couple notches. resurrect abiding in Christ as the highest thing. So I want to end with just a quote by J. I. Packer. He says, there's a difference between knowing God and knowing about God. When you truly know God, you have energy to serve him, boldness to share him, and contentment in him. I thought that was just a good quote to just tie up this for this first John. Father, we thank you for this letter. Thank you, Lord, for these constant, this buffet of Christian living concepts, theology, that is good for us to go back and to taste of and to absorb and to actually take into ourselves and to use it as fuel for knowing you and for serving you. Lord, that's our heart, that we would be true to serve you and to keep you on the highest place of worship in our life. Lord, help us as we think about all the things in our life. Help us, Lord God, to lower the things that need to be lowered and to raise you higher. Pray in Jesus' name. Amen. ---