I was excited when I found out we were going to be looking at 1 John this year because, as Ruth said last time, it was written by the author of the gospel of John which we studied two years ago. And this was one of my favourite years, remember the ‘I AM’ statements? My favourite passage was in John 18 when a whole battalion of soldiers came to arrest Jesus, and at the mere mention of his name, ‘I AM’, the army are knocked flat on their backs. This is the God we are going to be looking at tonight.
Last month Ruth spoke to us from 1 John chapter 2, about how we are to ‘stay the course’ and be on our guard against false teachers, and she encouraged us that with the Word of God in our hand and the Holy Spirit in our hearts, we have all we need to live for God. The final verse of her passage commanded us to ‘remain in [Jesus].’ But how do we do this?
In the first two chapters that we’ve studied, John talks a lot about obedience and doing right. Now, in our passage tonight, he’s going to get to the heart of how to know God, which is good timing because otherwise we might start to think that being a Christian is merely a matter of effort. No, no, says John. To know God, we must be born of God. And that, says John, is definitely not something we can do on our own.
Let’s read chapter 2 v 28-29:
‘And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when he appears we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming.
If you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who does what it right has been born of him.’
Although we’re still in chapter two, we know we’re hitting a new section here because John begins ‘And now.’ He’s saying, take a deep breath because I’m about to introduce some new important themes and emphases!
So, he pulls out the big guns, because John’s fellow believers were struggling with assurance. Have you ever struggled with this? Have you ever asked, or thought, ‘Am I a real Christian? Am I doing it right??’ I know I have. Probably about once a week.
Here is John’s answer in verse 29: A real Christian is someone who is a child of God. Sounds pretty simple, right? Someone who has asked Jesus to enter their life, and who wants to follow him.
Now, I imagine many of us have done that here (and if you haven’t, we’d would love to talk to you about taking that step). I have, many years ago, but somehow I don’t always feel filled with the unshakeable assurance that John seems to have here. So, let’s stop and think about why he is so confident in what he’s saying.
John is saying that when you’re born of God, when you become a Christian, what is implanted in us is the DNA of God, his Holy Spirit. When we accept Jesus, we don’t just become part of his family – the DNA of our awesome, creator God, becomes part of us.
This is how John is able to say that everyone who is born of Christ ‘does what is right’ (verse 29). It’s not by our own efforts, as pathetic as those would be. Instead, we have been re-programmed with God’s own DNA, that is so powerful it starts to overwrite and delete our old sinful natures
Now, if you’re like me, as amazing as this sounds, we doubt it when we keep falling back into the same sins, right? This morning I shouted at my kids – does that mean that I haven’t been born again? I got really angry in my car yesterday when someone cut me up at the Sainsburys roundabout….does that mean I’m not a real Christian? (These are probably similar to the doubts John’s fellow Christians were having, but maybe replace the car with a donkey…). But basically, can we lose our ‘born-again-ness’ when we sin?
Let’s read this quote from Tim Keller which promptly disabused me of that notion:
‘We give ourselves too much credit when we wonder if we are indeed born again – you’re not capable of wondering whether the Holy Spirit is at work in your life. When you do, you’re insulting the great person who now lives inside of you! We worry, ‘I can’t change… have I really been born again?’ The Holy One has put his DNA in you! – it’s holiness itself! It’s acidic! It will eat through the impure, the broken, it will consume the sin in your life. Don’t say, ‘I just can’t get out of this situation’ – look what’s in you! You’re born of Him! Get up off your anthill!’
The very fact that we’re concerned about whether or not we really have been born of God, means we are. I hope you can take heart from that, like I did! It’s all about God and his power…and thank God for that!
And thank God also that while we don’t undergo complete, instantaneous change when we become a Christian (it’s more like lifelong progress!), we do start to reflect his character and likeness in our lives. God gives us a new nature, with new affections and dispositions, and he promises that once in His family, we will begin to show the family characteristics.
I hope you don’t mind me saying, but I look around this room and I see characters and temperaments that I know haven’t come from within yourselves. I see women who have had really tough upbringings who are some of the most loving and gentle people I know. I see women who have had terrible losses, but are so joyful and full of hope. I know you yourselves would say, those characteristics haven’t come from within yourselves, or from your own hard work. They’re evidence of your family likeness, because you are a child of God.
Let’s read the next few verses, chapter 3 verses 1-3:
‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be made like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.’
One pastor I listened to when preparing for this talk said he was almost afraid to speak about this passage for fear of obscuring the glory of it. So, you’ll have to excuse my more than inadequate words, and I just pray that you will see just how incredible these verses are, and what they mean for you.
Because we’ve looked at how we know we are real Christians – John says that it’s when we believe in Jesus and are born again into his family – but have you ever known the assurance of God’s certainty that you belong to Him?
I have only heard God speaking directly to me once, on a starry night in Cornwall, and I’ll never forget it. I was in a quandry, and my heart was very troubled. I knew I was at a turning point in my life and I heard His voice.
He didn’t say, ‘Be bold!’, or ‘This is what you need to do now.’ He simply said, ‘I am your Father’. And that was precisely what my heart needed to hear. That reminder that I belonged to him. That he was in control of my life, and that he loved me. Is there ever anything better than knowing that? That the creator of the universe loves us?
John is really asking us to focus on this here – he says ‘Look – Behold – See’ how amazing God’s love is for you! If you look at the original translations of this, he is actually saying, what kind of love is this?!? It’s not a love you can find on this planet, this isn’t how we do love down here – it’s otherworldly! Where is it from?! It’s miraculous!
And it’s not just that God’s given us a little bit of this otherworldly love – what does it say he’s done? He’s lavished it upon us – showered it upon us. He’s taken a great big vat of it and poured it over us, and then just kept pouring and pouring until we are dripping with love!
It makes me smile when John goes on to say ‘And that is what we are!’ It’s a completely unnecessary phrase from an English point of view, because he’s just said what we are, children of God. But he still can’t quite get his head around it. It staggers him, as it should stagger us. We are children of God. Children of the living God! We sinful, perfectly normal, constantly failing people, are children of God. No wonder John has to repeat it to even start to get his head around it. That iswhat we are!
Now, if you’re like me, when something really good happens, you’ll start to fret. You’ll start to see all the ways it could go wrong (I’m a glass half empty king of gal…). ‘Yeah, I’m a child of God, but what if I mess up. What about when I sin, or when my faith isn’t strong. What happens then?’
Are you not hearing what I’m saying, says John? You are a child of God. A child isn’t something you try to be. To say ‘I’m trying to be a Christian’ shows you don’t really understand the nature of it. To be a Christian, says John, is primarily a standing, it’s a legal position. You don’t hope to be a child of God, or try to be a child of God. If you are a Christian, you are a child of God.
I was thinking about it this way. Here’s a photo of my kids. Now, those kids are either my children or they’re not. There’s no such thing as a 50% child: those kids are either legally mine or they’re someone else’s.
And if I have a bad week (believe me, this happens!), I don’t say, ‘Oh, I wasn’t a very good Mum this week. I don’t know if they’re still my children.’ My behaviour and my attitude don’t actually matter at all in this situation – I’m in a covenantal relationship with those children – for me to be their Mum is a contract, an obligation that nothing can change.
In the same way, we can’t lose the Father’s heart. You don’t lose your status if you have a bad week. God’s taken us on – we are ‘legally’ his when we become a Christian. And, fortunately for us, it’s a parent’s job to love their kids no matter what.
So, what does this mean for our lives? One thing that struck me is that it means we have tremendous access to God.
Imagine you are the young daughter of a (fictional) president of America. He’s one of the most important men in the world, super busy and sought after. But you’ve woken up at 3am and you’re thirsty and want a drink. No one else has the right to cry out at 3am to the president to ask for a drink, not even his wife – but you do – you’re his little girl. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve had a bad week, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done wrong that day, that Daddy will go and get his little girl that drink, no matter how busy he is, because that little girl has access, and that little girl has rights as his daughter.
Access like that comes to us as children of God. Ephesians 2 v 18 says, ‘We have access to the Father.’ We have the right to cry out to God whenever, wherever because it says here that he has promised us the rights of children. He has covered us with his wings. He has said, ‘These are mine, the women in this room’. He has taken us on, sins and all, just as my children are mine, failings and all. As our Father, he is fully responsible for us.
I was thinking about John 17 in the garden of Gethsemane when Jesus prayed that God would love us, his followers, as God loved him. I know at least one of my friends here tonight has both biological and adopted children. In that situation, it’s the job of the parent to say to the adopted child, ‘I will love you just as much as I love my biological children’. Now, try as we might, we might fail at that, but our Heavenly Father will not fail. When John says here that we are children of God now, that means God loves us every bit as much as he loves his natural son Jesus. And how much do you think God loves Jesus? We can hardly even imagine how much… and yet this verse is telling us that if we’re God’s child by faith he loves us like that right now.
Tim Keller says:
‘God will not be able to love you more, a billion years from now, when you’re perfect and glorified, than he does right now. He couldn’t – because when you adopt a child you say I will love you, even as you are now. Isn’t that incredible?’
It blows my mind. And yet John then tells us something even more incredible – something far greater, that will happen in the future; greater even than what we have now. Verse two says:
‘But we know, that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’
Boom. Want to know what the climax of your life is, says John? That one thing that can satisfy us completely in a way that nothing on earth ever could? The climax of our lives, says verse two, is to see Jesus, completely, perfectly and fully.
Everything else is penultimate to this. We are made – we exist – to look into Jesus’s face, to see him as he is. And in heaven we will no longer only able be to see him by faith, but to gaze upon him fully, seeing all his beauty and letting it fill and satisfy us because we will be made like him. We will be able to ‘cope’ with the mind-bending, ultimate glorious reality of looking upon his incomprehensibly wonderful face because we will be finally be the perfect people he always wanted us to be.
If our lives were a symphony, this is the moment it is all building to.
And, says John, this is such an….insane (for want of a better word) experience, that even though we haven’t had it yet, to even want it starts to transform us!
When we hope in these things (to be a child of God, to live to see Jesus) and we make them the meaning of our lives, filling our minds with them, purity will grow within us, says John.
But how does this work? How could knowing you’re a child of God stop us from sinning and make us pure? Well I think we’d all agree that simply trying harder, or beating ourselves up doesn’t stop us from sinning. I know this full well from my experience. But what difference would it make, when we feel the temptation of sin, to say, ‘I am a child of God. I bear His name.’ Would that help you stand strong against temptation? Reminding ourselves of the honour we have in bearing the name of our heavenly Father, that He is on our side and His power is within us? I find that a pretty good motive for purity.
Indeed, as Eddie Larkman pointed out to me, knowing the security and joy of being held in God’s love also breaks the stranglehold that any distorted loves have on our lives. Whether it’s money, sex, or even good things that we have placed too high a love on – being secure in God’s love for us helps us let go of these ‘false’ loves and their false promises of satisfaction.
John is saying that when we grasp and reflect on these truths properly, they will clean us from the inside out. We are to use them where we are, where we live, and see what difference they make.
After all, how can I be tempted by the things of this earth when I already have what I most want – to be a daughter of God Most High?
2 Corinthians 3 v 18 says, ‘All of us who have had that veil removed can see and reflect the glory of the Lord. And the Lord – who is the Spirit – makes us more and more like him as we are changed into His glorious image.’
We’re going to have a short discussion time now and I have couple of questions I’d like you to chat about in your small groups:
- How does the knowledge that you will one day be with, and be like Jesus, motivate you to live a life of obedience now?
- How can you put into action the benefits of your daughtership to the King in your daily life?
So, we are children of God! Hallelujah! But John immediately moves from the heights of heaven and what we will be, to the windswept plains of real life where sin is rampant right now. Let’s read verses 4-8:
‘Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness. But you know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins. And him is no sin. No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.
Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.’
Man! You often see verse 1 (‘You are a child of God!’) on art prints and coffee cups, but you don’t often see verse eight, do you? (‘The one who does what is sinful is of the devil’).
John is saying that the trajectory of your life actually shows who you are – our behaviour functions like a paternity test. Do we belong to Jesus, or to the devil? It’s that black and white, says John. If you’re practising righteousness, you’re a child of God, but if you’re habitually practising sin, your father is the devil. It’s really stark.
But wait a minute, my nervous self asks, has all that reassurance John’s just given us in verses 1-3 been removed, as he’s now saying that if you’re a Christian you can’t sin? (and I sin all the time!).
Definitely not. John himself said in chapter 1 verses 8-10 that we all sin – and that when we do we have an advocate in Jesus. So it’s not if you sin, you’re out. Sin is not impossible for Christians, but John is saying that if we truly understand why Jesus came, it’s an incongruous way of life for us. Making a practise of sinning is simply not in the family genes.
Now, if you’re like me, you’ll want some assurance (my favourite word tonight!) that we are on the right trajectory. I want to be becoming more like my heavenly father, and not more like the devil. How can I check this?
Sam Allberry had a helpful spot check I thought I’d share:
‘Each year, ask yourself: ‘Is Jesus more beautiful to me? And do I hate sin more?’’
Even when we’re not obeying perfectly, the heart of a Christian is to say, ‘I do want to obey’. In our better moments we do want to be like Jesus. If there was some lever we could pull to jettison the sin from our hearts to be more like Jesus, we would pull it. That’s the test.
Because our sin is serious. If we are merrily pursuing an agenda of sin in our lives with no troubled conscience, we are actually contradicting why Jesus came. Because he came to destroy sin, and to win his children back.
I was thinking about the story of Jesus and the woman who was accused of adultery in John chapter 8. I love this story. The Pharisees want to stone her for her crime but Jesus rightly points out their hypocrisy. And what does Jesus say to her about her sin, once they are alone? Does he say, ‘Ah well, who really knows what sin is anyway, if it’s right for you, just do it’? Or does he tower over her, shouting, ‘You have transgressed the law of the great God, and now you shall pay for your sin!’ No, he simply says:
‘Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.’ (v11)
He says to his daughter (who could have been any of us) – that what you’ve done is a sin but I don’t condemn you. Because, as John says, Jesus appeared because there is sin in the world, and it is so serious that nothing less than the entrance of the son of God into the world could deal with it.
But how did he deal with it? What did cost Jesus to say that though she had sinned she did not have to be condemned?
2 Corinthians 5 verse 21 says:
‘God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of the living God.’
To say to the woman that she was not condemned for her sin cost Jesus his life. It cost him everything, even his relationship with his father. The reason Jesus was able to say that the woman – and us – were not condemned, because he was condemned for us at the cross.
You see, it’s not doing right that makes you a child of God, which is what every other religion says. Doing right flows out of the thankfulness we feel when we are welcomed openly into the family of God, because Jesus has dealt with our sin completely.
Because the first thing that happens when you realise what Jesus has done – for him to say, ‘you are a sinner and I don’t condemn you’ and what it cost him to say that – when you really take in that knowledge, in it changes you.
So how do you know you’re a Christian? It’s when you think it’s an absolute miracle that you are loved by God. It’s when the amazing knowledge that a sinner like me has been saved by Jesus flows out of me and starts to change me from the inside out. And that’s how true righteousness can flow out of us in worship, in love, and in joy. It happens when we behold – see – gaze upon – what Jesus did for us on the cross, so that we would not be condemned.
Okay, let’s look at our final two verses, chapter 3 v 9-10:
‘No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God. This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister.’
So as children of God, how do we show our family likeness? John says it’s when we love as our heavenly father does.
And how do we do this? Well it’s because of God’s seed in us, says John.
I love that John says when you understand the gospel and receive Jesus as your saviour, it’s not a tidal wave that comes into your life – it’s a seed.
A seed is not a large thing. I actually brought one with me. This is an apple seed. Does anyone know what God’s seed is? It’s the Holy Spirit, God’s nature in us.
I find this both a comfort and a conviction. The comfort is that when God’s seed comes there isn’t a whole lot of change at first. When I pop this seed in this soil, what happens at first? Nothing. One minute after you plant a seed you can’t see any change, can you? Seeds grow gradually, as Sam pointed out to me in our study buddy meet, invisible roots first, and it’s hard to see them grow.
If you’re like me, you can often feel like, ‘But I’m a Christian, why hasn’t there been more changes in my life?’ It’s because a lot of biological growth is really very hard to see. For example, trees continue to grow in winter, don’t they? But it doesn’t look like that to us when they have no leaves. We just see bare branches – but they’re still putting rings on in that season.
And that’s just like us. God’s seed in us will continue to grow relentlessly, putting down roots and growing rings that we maybe can’t see ourselves. But keep asking – ‘Do I love Jesus more? Do I hate sin more?’ And slowly we will see that growth.
Because, do you know what’s in an apple seed? An apple. Know what’s in a God seed? The glory of God.
So though it may start small, we have immense power within us. John says, we ‘cannot go on sinning because [we] have been born of God’ (verse 9). So we should not dare to put up with the abiding bad habits of sin in us.
Tim Keller talks about the negative things in our lives that can try and stop our growth as Christians. He describes them as being like a sidewalk slab:
‘Do you know what’s in you? If you plant a daffodil under a sidewalk it won’t come up, but if you put an oak tree seed under a side walk, it will crack that side walk.
What have you got over the seed of God in your life? Fears, anger, a terrible past, entrenched and deep habit patterns of sin? Well this seed can smash anything – it’s the seed of God!’
That’s why John closes this section with this challenge – do you love your brother and sister? He’s particularly talking about our Christian brothers and sisters here. That’s easy right? Everyone in church is sooo easy to love….aren’t they?! If we’re honest, we know that’s not true. If we’re honest, we know we ourselves are not always easy to love. Just come by my house at 5pm when I’m hungry, tired and trying to cook dinner for what feels like a hundred irritable children!
And without the seed of God in us, loving all of our Christian brothers and sisters is simply not possible. To have Jesus’s likeness of compassion in us, the desire to pursue righteousness – I know I am not capable of that without Him in me – are you? But with the Holy Spirit of great power within us, it is possible.
And I know it is because I have seen so many of you do it.
So, will we make use of the greatness that’s within us to reach out with a love that can only come from Jesus?
As we come to a close, I was reflecting on the fact that each time I do these talks, God gives me exactly the passage I need to hear.
This season I needed to hear:
- That I’m a child of God
- That I can address him directly as my Father
- That he went to the extent of sending His Son for me
- And that my being made like Him will be made complete in heaven.
I need to say these things to myself every day. Every time I’m angry. Every time I’m sad. Every time I think I’m doing just great on my own, thank you very much.
The more I’ve looked at these verses I’ve realised that for most of us, including myself, we have no idea just how much we matter to God. Our brains just can’t comprehend it…yet.
But fortunately, the loving father that created us, then forgave us, will also recreate us so that we will one day fully be able to grasp just how precious we are to him.
Because I was thinking, we become like the people we most behold, don’t we? In relationships we start to mirror the other person. Just as we spoke about in my last talk on James, looking at ‘heavenly accents’, we sound most like who we hang out with – and in the same vein, what we most look at, we start to look like.
Psalm 34 v 5 says, ‘Those who look to [God] are radiant, their faces are never covered in shame.’
When we, as children, ‘behold’/look at our father more and more – when we spend time and effort beholding Him – we will start to look like him. We will start the process of becoming pure, letting his tiny seed of DNA grow within us, so that when he appears, just one full look at him will utterly transform us, and the process of becoming like him will be completed in an instant. We will be transformed into our omega selves – the women we were designed to be, and we will finally see the face that governs the universe, that we have loved, but never yet seen – and when we see that face, the sheer power of that perfect countenance upon our countenances will bring a such full transformation that we finally will display His glory.
And until then? John says in verse three that ‘Everyone who has this hope purifies themselves’. We should be like a bride getting ready for her wedding day. Wanting to appear before her beloved without stain or imperfection. A bride spends her time readying herself for the moment when the door opens and she locks eyes with the man she loves. At that moment she will be at her very best and most beautiful. John is saying that’s how you live the Christian life. Ready yourself for Jesus; purify yourself as you wait. Because one day the door will open, and we will see him as he is – full of love, full of joy at his beautiful bride, and ready to welcome us home.
GRACE PLACE 