A Trinity of Assurances
We all struggle with doubt and God knows this and in his kindness put an entire book in the Bible to help us know that we belong to him. That book is First John. This short letter is God’s way of reassuring his children that they’re his children. He wants his kids to know that they’re his kids. He knows how strong and debilitating doubts can be. He knows that we struggle to trust his grace, that the evil one whispers lies to us all the time, and that the world is constantly alluring us away from our first love. So he says to us in First John, “You can know that you’re mine and I’m yours.”
The striking thing about the bases for assurance in First John is that they’re all objective, not subjective, not based on feelings but on facts. One writer put it like this, “With St. John the grounds of assurance are ethical, not emotional; objective, not subjective; plain and tangible, not microscopic and elusive. They are three, or rather, they are a trinity: Belief, Righteousness, Love. By his belief in Christ, his keeping God’s commandments, and his love to the brethren, a Christian…is recognized and recognizes himself as begotten of God.”[1]
In other words, we can know we’re true Christians, and others can know that we’re true Christians, if we believe the right things, live lives of growing obedience, and love the church. Where any of these are lacking, we have reason to wonder whether we’re saved. But if we’re believing the gospel, growing in obedience, and loving our brothers and sisters, we can know that we belong to God.
This is what the letter of First John is about. We’re coming to the end of the letter today as we look at 5:13-21. Here John states his purpose for writing explicitly and then follows that up with several more assurances. The main point of this text is that we can be confident that we belong to God (v. 13), and that this confidence produces a life of prayer (vv. 14-15), a life of love (vv. 16-17), a life of war (vv. 18-19), and a life of worship (vv. 20-21).
“That You May Know”
Verse 13 is John’s purpose statement, telling us why he wrote this letter. Some would say that to know you’re saved is presumptuous, and that certainty isn’t possible this side of death. But certainty and humility aren’t mutually exclusive. If God’s says that we can know, then presumptuousness would be doubting his word, not trusting it.
Our confidence that we belong to God should lead to gratitude not presumption. Everything we have is from him. Our confidence is in him, not in ourselves. Confident humility is what we need.
A Life of Prayer
We see next in verses 14-15 that this confidence produces a life of prayer. Along with assurance of eternal life, we can also have confidence in our relationship with God, in particular, confidence in prayer.
Verse 14 could be translated, “confidence in approaching God.” Believers have freedom and boldness to approach God. Why? Because our Father wants to hear from us. We often struggle to pray because we don’t think God is interested in us. But don’t parents love it when their kids want to talk to them?
We want our prayers to be like a rocket, but they often feel like a balloon fluttering around the room. But God isn’t looking for perfect prayers. He’s looking to hear from those who’re his. Our prayers, however disjointed and clumsy they may be, are like sweet incense to God.
Notice that there’s a condition to the kind of prayer God will answer: “if we ask anything according to his will he hears us” (v. 14b). In 3:22, the condition of answered prayer was whether we keep his commands. Here it’s whether we ask according to his will. I can’t improve on how John Stott explains this, so let me quote a few lines from him:
“Prayer is not a convenient device for imposing our will upon God, or for bending his will to ours, but the prescribed way of subordinating our will to his. It is by prayer that we seek God’s will, embrace it and align ourselves with it. Every true prayer is a variation on the theme ‘your will be done.’ Our Master taught us to say this in the pattern prayer he gave us, and added the supreme example of it in Gethsemane.”[2]
In the moment of his greatest need, Jesus’ prayer was, “Father, I’m struggling, but you know what’s best.” That kind of honesty and humility should infuse all our prayers. “Father, you know where I am, and you know what I need, please help me to trust you.”
I think we can also say that “asking according to God’s will” means asking God to do things that he’s explicitly said he wants to do. For example, God wants us to be more like Jesus, so praying for that is praying according to his will. God wants us to love him with all our hearts and to love our neighbors, wants husbands to love their wives and live with them in an understanding way, wants wives to submit to and respect their husbands, wants children to obey their parents, wants us to make disciples, pray unceasingly, love our enemies, forgive one another, encourage one another, serve one another, and love his church, so when we ask for help in these things, we’re praying “according to his will.”
A Life of Love
In verses 16-17, John gives us an example of the kind of prayer that God will answer. In doing so, he shows us that our confidence in God produces a life of love. This is a specific illustration of what John was saying in verses 14-15.
Before we talk about the “sin not leading to death” and the “sin leading to death,” I don’t want you to miss the overarching point here. John is telling us to pray for those struggling with sin. What does this mean? It means that one of the ways we love and care for one another is by praying for each other in our struggles. We love each other by meeting material needs, as in 3:17, and by meeting spiritual needs, as is the case here.
Being a part of a church means looking out for one another spiritually. Our confidence in God shouldn’t lead us into spiritual silos, but into spiritually vulnerable relationships. We have a duty to care for each other in our prayers, rather than being preoccupied with ourselves. We can’t say, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and do nothing. That’s not what family does. We look out for each other. Is there anyone outside your family you’re praying for?
“Sin Not Leading to Death”
Now what does John mean by “sin not leading to death” and “sin leading to death.” Of course, the penalty for all sin is death (Rom. 6:23). But John is saying that when a believer (“brother”) sins, that sin has been forgiven by the atoning blood of Jesus, so that sin will not “lead to death” because it’s been forgiven. This is why John is confident that praying for the restoration of a sinning believer will be answered and “God will give them life.” They belong to God and God wants to restore them, and he wants to use our prayers for one another to do it.
What about the “sin that leads to death”? It’s like John is saying, “All the food on the table is good except the dish with poison, don’t eat that one!” But which dish is it? This “sin” has been variously interpreted (i.e. specific or mortal sins, apostacy, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit). I think that John has the false teachers in mind. They’ve denied that Jesus is the Christ come in the flesh and denied the significance of his death on the cross. More broadly, it refers to those who fall away from the faith. They’ve placed themselves outside the sphere of forgiveness, thus their sins become sins unto death.
We don’t know who these folks will be until after the fact. Would we’ve known to pray for Peter and not Judas? Probably not. So we pray for anyone who’s struggling with sin. John doesn’t explicitly say to not pray for the one who commits the sin that leads to death.
John adds the words of verse 17 because he doesn’t want to be misunderstood as minimizing the gravity of sin, but he also wants to assure us that, though we fall into sin from time to time, a believer’s sins do not lead to death.
Our confidence in God creates a life of love for sinning Christians. Praying for those who’re struggling is one of the most concrete way we can love them. It’s also how God intends to heal them. When you pray for someone who’s struggling, let them know that you did. It will encourage them and let them know they’re not alone in their fight.
A Life of War
In verses 18-19, John says that our confidence in God creates a life of war. The war is between us and sin (v. 18), and between us and the world and the evil one (v. 19).
Everyone who “has been born of God” has a new relationship with sin. They don’t minimize it, rationalize it away, blame others for it, or hide it. They fight it. Living in sin and living in Christ are incompatible. They may meet sometimes, but they cannot live together in harmony.
John says that one of the reasons a child of God won’t “keep on sinning” is because “he who was born of God” will protect them so that the devil won’t touch them. In the context of First John, this means that Jesus will keep his people from being led astray by false teachers. But more broadly it means that he’ll keep his people from being overtaken by any evil thing. Jesus prayed for this in John 17:15 because he knows that the evil one is strong and subtle, more than a match for us. So he came to destroy his works (3:8) and keep us safe from him.
This means that in our war against sin and Satan, we have the strongest possible ally on our side, as Martin Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” says:
Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing,
Were not the right Man on our side, the Man of God’s own choosing:
Dost ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is He;
Lord Sabaoth, His Name, from age to age the same,
And He must win the battle.
The evil one doesn’t touch the Christian because the Son keeps us, and because the Son keeps us, we don’t persist in sin. This is the “deliverance from evil” that we pray for at the end of the Lord’s prayer (Mt. 6:13).
By contrast, verse 19 says that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. The evil one doesn’t lay his hand on believers, while the world cuddles up in his arms. John states the two alternatives very boldly: we either belong to God or to the world, and the world belongs to the evil one. There’s no third category.
The world isn’t necessarily getting more evil because the world has always laid in the power of evil. We may see and know more of the evil. But ever since Genesis 3, the world, like the mountains of Mordor, has lived under the dark clouds of evil.
A Life of Worship
Finally, in verses 20-21, John says that our confidence in God creates a life of worship. Those who’re in Christ, have been brought out of the “domain of darkness” and “given understanding, so that we may know him who is true” (v. 20). This creates a life of worship.
Then in verse 21 John closes his letter with what appears to be a random exhortation. Why does John all of a sudden mention idols? In verse 20 he talks about coming to know “the true God,” using the word “true” three times. So verse 21 makes sense because all alternatives to the “true God” who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ are properly idols.
John’s conclusion means that the ultimate goal for a follower of Jesus is worship, not belief, behavior, or love. Those things flow from a heart and life properly oriented around the greatness and goodness of God.
But even worship can be an idol because anything can be an idol. Peter Kreeft explains this well:
“An idol is anything that is not God but is treated as God: any creature set up as our final end, hope, meaning, and joy. Anything – anything – can be an idol. Religion can be an idol. Religion is not God but the worship of God; idolizing religion means worshipping worship. That’s like being in love with love rather than with a person. Love too can be an idol, for ‘God is love’ but love is not God. Every divine attribute, separated from the divine person, becomes an idol. God is Truth, but Truth is not God. God is just, but Justice is not God. The first commandment is surely the one most frequently broken, and the apostle John does well to end his first letter with the warning, ‘Little children, keep yourselves from idols.’”
Kreeft goes on to explain why idols will ultimately break our hearts:
“Since an idol is not God, no matter how sincerely or passionately it is treated as God, it is bound to break the heart of its worshipper, sooner or later. Good motives for idolatry cannot remove the objective fact that the idol is an unreality. (As Augustine says) ‘Food in dreams is exactly like real food, yet what we eat in our dreams does not nourish: for we are dreaming.’ You can’t get blood from a stone or divine joy from nondivine things.”[3]
Idols are anything we look to as our ultimate meaning, significance, identity, hope, or joy in life. Anything from financial security, a spouse, children, ministry position, house, career, looks, intelligence, or education. These things aren’t necessarily bad, they just aren’t God. And so they’ll all eventually break our hearts because a gift isn’t designed to be a giver.
A Letter of Love
John loves these people dearly, calling them “little children,” a term of endearment. He wants to help his friends stay in the life-giving truth of Jesus Christ and avoid the life-sucking lies of idolatry. His entire purpose in writing this letter is to comfort Christians, to encourage and reassure troubled saints in the gospel.
He says that we can be confident that we belong to God and that this confidence produces a life of prayer, a life of love, a life of war, and a life of worship. You can know whether you belong to God!
Do you have confidence that you belong to God? Is it producing these things?
[1]Robert Law, quoted in Colin G. Kruse, The Letters of John, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020), 215.
[2]John R. W. Stott, The Letters of John, The Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1988), 188.
[3]Peter Kreeft, Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing, expanded edition (San Fransisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 20-1.