Due to technical error this sermon was not recorded, but a manuscript can be read below
We All Struggle with Doubt
We’re studying the short letter of First John, a letter written to churches at the end of the first century who were being harassed by people who’d left the church. The teachers were going around saying new things about Jesus and about what God wants from his people. They were saying things like, “Jesus didn’t come in the flesh,” or “Jesus isn’t the Son of God,” or “You can know God and live however you want,” or “You don’t have to love the church to really be a true believer.”
These things were upsetting the faith of true believers in the churches, so John rights to remind them of the things they’d heard from the beginning, things about Jesus, things about how God wants us to live, and things about loving the church. John’s purpose in writing is twofold, to expose the false ideas of the false teachers and to comfort true Christians by reminding them of the basic truths they’d already heard.
It’s often said that First John is about assurance, about knowing whether we’re truly saved or not. Have you ever wondered if you’re really a Christian? Have you ever doubted your salvation? Have you ever agonized over whether you’re going to heaven or hell? In a sense, it’s good to think about these things because our eternal home is more important than anything else. But sometimes we can get lost in introspection or paralyzed by doubt and fear. Sometimes our confidence in God is weak and our faith feels more like gasping for air at rather than breathing deeply.
First John teaches us that we aren’t the first ones to struggle like this. It should be really encouraging to us that we aren’t the first believers to struggle with whether we really believe or not. God the Holy Spirit wouldn’t have put a letter like this in the Bible if this wasn’t a universal experience, something that all believers at all times in all places deals with.
Hope for Those Who Struggle
The passage we’re looking at this morning is more encouragement from John for those who sometimes wonder whether they really belong to God or not. The passage we’re looking at (3:19-24) is all about assurance. This paragraph begins (v. 19) and ends (v. 24) with the words, “by this we know,” or “this is how we know.”
The main point of this passage is that there’s hope for those who sometimes feel condemned. First, we’ll see the condemning heart and how to reassure it in verses 19-20. Second, we’ll see the uncondemning heart and its blessings in verses 21-24.
The Condemning Heart and How to Reassure It
First, in verses 19-20, we see the condemning heart and how to reassure it. These verses are super encouraging because they presuppose the fact that believers sometimes have condemning hearts and need our hearts to be reassured before God. John is writing to churches! He’s writing to people who believe the gospel and are in community with one another and doing their best to live like Jesus. Yet, he knows that there’s a real struggle to feel like we actually belong to God.
John knows that it’s not an infrequent or unusual experience for a Christian to not feel great about their salvation. John could’ve come down hard on these believers and told them to get their act together. But instead, he recognizes their problem and doesn’t shame them for their struggle. He says, “our heart,” meaning that he hasn’t been exempt from this experience. If someone who actually lived with Jesus and saw him die and rise sometimes had a condemning heart, then we shouldn’t beat ourselves up when we do as well.
The word “heart” here means the deepest part of us, the immaterial center of our being. Sometimes our heart accuses us with true accusations, when we’ve done something truly wrong. But sometimes the accusations will be false, usually inspired by the “accuser of the brothers” (Rev. 12:10), the Evil One.
Difference between Accusation and Conviction
There’s a difference between accusation and conviction of sin. How do we know the difference? Tone of voice. God’s voice to us is always kind. Evil’s voice is pernicious and shaming. God never accuses, he always convicts. In Romans 2, Paul says that it’s the kindness of God that leads to repentance (v. 4).
Perhaps what you’ve thought of as conviction of sin has really been the subtle attempts of evil to accuse you? What if some things you’ve always known and resigned yourself to labor under are actually accusations from the Evil One?
Why Does the Devil Accuse Us?
Have you ever considered why the Devil loves to accuse us? Because he wants us to live and labor under the weight of shame. He wants shame to paralyze us and keep us on the ground so that we’re unable or unwilling to serve the Lord and help others.
Shame is the ultimate downer. It leads us to think that giving up is really the best option. It makes us want to hide, to curl up in a ball and die, to not take risks for God, to not take risks for the sake of love. Shame devours our souls from the inside out. It’s like a cancer that slowly spreads, often going unchecked, until it’s consumed our souls and rendered us powerless.
Can anything heal the cancer of shame? Yes, God wants to save us and set us free from shame. Psalm 69:19, 20, 29, 32-33, “You know my reproach, and my shame and my dishonor…Reproaches have broken my heart, so that I am in despair…I am afflicted and in pain; let your salvation, O God, set me on high!…You who seek God, let your hearts revive. For the Lord hears the needy and does not despise his own people who are prisoners.”
The Lord knows our shame, our broken hearts, our despair, our pain, and he hears us and does not despise us for our bondage to shame. He wants our hearts to come back to life by realizing that, because of Jesus, our shame is covered and we’re made new. If shame is paralyzing you, please listen to the voice of Jesus. You are his. You wear his garments of purity. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, you’re his child no matter what.
Love is Evidence of Faith
Whether it’s because of the accusations or the evil one or a just an overly sensitive conscience, or maybe even the words of a friend or family member, sometimes we feel like God is against us even if we know that he isn’t.
John says in verse 19 that our hearts can be reassured if we “know that we are of the truth.” The mind’s knowledge can silence the heart’s doubts. But what does the “this” at the beginning of the verse refer to? By what can we know and be assured? John seems to be referring to his previous paragraph about love. If our lives are marked by love, we can know that God’s love lives in us (v. 17). “Whoever loves has been born of God and knows God” (4:7).
John is saying that love is the final, objective test of our faith. True love, defined by John as self-sacrifice (3:16), isn’t natural to us in our fallen state. So its existence in anyone is evidence that the God of love has taken up residence in us. True love grows where God lives, and true love shows itself with actions (v. 18). One commentator says that we can see true love because “There are actual things we can point to – not things we have professed or felt or imagined or intended, but things we have done.”
If we have this kind of love, John says, we can know that “we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him” (v. 19). John is saying that when we feel like we don’t belong to God, we can look at how we’re loving his people and find tangible evidence that we do belong to him.
“God is Greater than Our Heart”
Now in verse 20 we have yet another way to reassure our doubting hearts. John Stott says there’s three actors in this spiritual drama, or three speakers in this inward debate. In this trial, our heart is the accuser, we’re the defendant, and God is the Judge.
When our hearts bring accusations, we can pacify it and put it at rest, partly by knowing we belong to the truth by how we love, but also partly by the fact that “God is greater than our heart and he knows everything.” John is saying that God’s greatness, specifically his omniscience, can calm our doubting hearts. How so?
Our heart sometimes accuses us rightly, but its accusations aren’t infallible. Sometimes it accuses us wrongly. And, as I said, the evil one consistently accuses us wrongly. So our hearts aren’t infallible guides and the evil one wants us to believe his lies, so where do we go to find rest for our hearts?
We go to the one who’s greater than our hearts, the one who created our hearts, the one who knows everything and still chooses not to condemn us. God knows everything and he still loves us. He knows our secret motives and ungodly thoughts, all our words and ambitions and desires and actions. John’s point is that, despite all this knowledge, God doesn’t condemn us. He’s the only One who actually could condemn us and he chooses not to. John is saying that God is more merciful to us than we are to ourselves.
We often think of God’s greatness in terms of his power to create the universe. And he is great because of that. But the Bible also tells us about the greatness of his love (Ps. 103:11-14). God has every right to repay us for how we’ve treated him. Yet, because his love is so great, instead of repaying our sins, he removes them (v. 12). And he doesn’t just give us pardon, he also gives us compassion (v. 13). He gives us tenderness and care. He cries with us, feels for us. He knows how weak we are, he knows that we have no chance apart from him (v. 14). So he swoops in like a Father and scoops us up in his arms.
Of course, the way he “swooped in” was through the cross. The great God who created everything came into his creation and died in our place. The Judge was Judged for things he didn’t do. So that he could take away our sin and guilt and make us his children.
This truth saves us and sustains us. The cross rescues us from sin and relieves our condemning hearts. “Whenever your heart condemns you,” remember, “God is greater than our heart.” He knows everything about everything about you and he loves you. His omniscience is meant to relieve us, not terrify us. His all-knowing love is the only thing that can quiet our anxious hearts.
The Uncondemning Heart and Its Blessings
Second, in verses 21-24, we see the uncondemning heart and its blessings. John now turns to the blessings of a tranquil heart. Verse 21 says that the blessing is more than an untroubled heart, but is communion with God. A heart not weighed down with condemnation starts to grow in confidence before God.
This confidence isn’t bravado or boasting. It’s not confidence in ourselves, but in God. It comes to those who understand their need. The writer to the Hebrews says, “Let us with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (4:16). Our confidence is like the confidence of a child who approaches a loving father with a need, not like the confidence of a well-trained athlete when they step onto the field.
Do you approach him as a child does a father, or like the accused does a judge? Do you think of God more like a Father or more like a boss? God delights in us, praises us, values us, sings over us. He’s our Father, not our Boss. The first blessing of the uncondemned heart is a childlike confidence before God.
The second blessing of the uncondemned heart is access to God in prayer and answers to our prayers (v. 22). John isn’t saying that God answers our prayers just because we have an uncondemned heart. He says that there’s an objective, moral reason: “because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.”
Obedience isn’t the cause of answered prayer. But it does seem that John is saying that obedience is a condition for it. God doesn’t owe anything to anyone. But it’s especially foolish to think that we can do whatever we want and expect God to answer our prayers. For example, Peter tells husbands, “Live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered” (1 Pet. 3:7). The way we live affects our prayer life.
The simple and unqualified promise of verse 22 must be read with other statements about prayer in the Bible, like the one we find in 5:14-15. God isn’t a genie who, if we rub him the right way, will give us whatever we want. John says that our prayers, to be effective, must be accompanied with obedience to his commands, and more generally, by a life that is pleasing to him.
In verse 23, John tells us exactly what commands he has in mind. It’s one command: believe in the Son and love one another. For John these two things can’t be separated. Loving one another was so much a part of the message he preached that he calls it elsewhere “the message” (3:11). The gospel necessarily creates people who love.
Both faith and love are commanded by God. But the tense of the verbs tell us that there is a difference. Faith in Christ is a decisive act and love for one another is a continuous attitude. The one (faith) creates the other (love). Where there’s no love, there’s no faith.
In verse 24, John unites the three strands he’s been unfolding separately so far in his letter. Obedience to God, along with faith and love as mentioned in verse 23, are the three marks of a true Christian. John Stott says, “Living in Christ is not a mystical experience which anyone may claim; its indispensable accompaniments are the confession of Jesus as the Son of God come in the flesh, and a consistent life of holiness and love.”
These three things are how “we know that he abides in us.” This is how we know if the Spirit lives in us. The Spirit makes himself known objectively through our life and conduct. He enables us to believe in Jesus and to follow his example.
John is saying in this passage that if we want to set our hearts at rest when they accuse us and condemn us, we must look for evidence of the Spirit’s work, specifically looking for faith in Christ, obedience to his commands, and love for his people.
But whenever our hearts condemn us even when we’re doing our best to believe, obey, and love, we remember that “God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything.” God’s great love is greater than our feelings and doubts. Looking at the cross (v. 16) will help us remember this.