Christian Obedience, Love, and Perseverance: 1 John 2:3–27

Don Carson: We turn tonight to 1 John, chapter 2. I shall read from verse 3 to the end of verse 27.

“We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, ‘I know him,’ but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.

Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining.

Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness. He does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded him.

I write to you, dear children, because your sins have been forgiven on account of his name. I write to you, fathers, because you have known him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one. I write to you, dear children, because you have known the Father. I write to you, fathers, because you have known him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God lives in you, and you have overcome the evil one.

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes, and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.

Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.

But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth. I do not write to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it and because no lie comes from the truth. Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist—he denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.

See that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you. If it does, you also will remain in the Son and in the Father. And this is what he promised us—even eternal life. I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray. As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about all things and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit—just as it has taught you, remain in him.”

So reads the Word of God.

For a number of years I worked with an organization called the World Evangelical Fellowship running one of their study units. These study units brought people together from all over the world. They had papers to write in advance on some assigned topic.

Then we came together … often here in Cambridge … in fact, at Tyndale House, and spent days together going over the papers everyone was supposed to have read in advance, arguing about them paragraph by paragraph. Eventually, people went home and rewrote them, and I edited them, and they came out in various books that have been used in various corners of the world.

In that context, it was fascinating to watch the different cultures interplaying, even the way people come into a room. In come the Hispanics with their cheek kisses, with a great deal of enthusiasm in some cases. In come the Arabs. Some of them … I swear, they have three kisses, but I never know which side to start on. It confuses me everytime.

The Germans shake everybody’s hand on the way in and everybody’s hand on the way out. It’s quite rude to go out without shaking everybody’s hand on the way out. The chap in the tweed coat over there is smiling benignly. Someone goes up to him and says, “Have we met?” “I don’t know. Have we been introduced?” You know he’s British. In comes Ed Clowney from the US, “Hi, everybody! Sorry I’m late.” Someone comes in from India.

The real fun began when the debate started. There was Brother Yoshiaki Hattori from Japan. He felt very strongly about a point he wanted to make, so he said, “Is it possible that we should understand that the apostle Paul in this passage, perhaps, wanted to say something like this?” Whereupon some brother from Norway or Germany said, “Oh, no! That can’t possibly be. It doesn’t work like that. What the passage really means is this.”

Yoshiaki Hattori thinks Germans are barbarians; the Germans think Japanese are wimps, and I’m in the chair. Culture. It affects so many of the ways we look at things, shape our questions, even think about our faith.

John lived at a time when there were many competing religions and Christianity was just old enough to be losing its edge. You had now second- and third-generation Christians. Many people who had been around for a while had lost something of their first love, and others … new young Turks … were convinced that new rising theologies were far more attractive, far more convincing than the old stuff passed down by the has-beens.

At the same time, there was a great deal of pressure in the empire towards what we would call today philosophical pluralism. That is, you could believe anything you like, so long as you don’t say that your view is right and other views are wrong. That you must not say. Then, inevitably, there were some people who were very strong on picking up particular points and making them everything. The person who comes out of an extremely conservative narrow culture, who dogmatizes about absolutely everything and feels very insecure if there are loose ends.

In that context, John writes his epistle. What he tends to do is to gravitate towards the essentials of the faith and set up absolute boundaries. They are as striking, they are as definitive today as they were 2,000 years ago. In this passage I read, John articulates three contrasts: those who talk and those who perform, those who love the world and those who love the Father, and those who are antichrists and those who are Christians. He does not leave much room for anything in between. We’ll take them in that order.

1. Those who talk and those who perform

John begins, verse 3: “We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The person who says, ‘I know him,’ but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him.”

In fact, what John does in the original (it’s a bit hidden in our English texts) is set up three times in these verses, down to verse 11 … “If a person says …” “If anyone says …” “If a man says …” For example, in verse 4, “The man who says, ‘I know him,’ but does not do what he commands …” Or again, very strongly in verse 9, “Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness.”

Clearly what John is dealing with, in part, are some competing religious claims. It turns out they are made by people who once worshiped with his community, and these people claim to have a deep and intimate knowledge of God, even while they did not think obedience was very important, and even while love did not characterize much of their lives.

John lays out some absolutes. The first one is in response to the first speaker. “The man who says, ‘I know him,’ but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” Of course, Jesus, himself, had taught this pretty clearly. In the Sermon on the Mount, he said, “On the last day many will say, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? Did we not cast out many demons in your name? Did we not perform many wonderful works in your name?’ Then I will say to them, ‘Depart from me you workers of iniquity. I never knew you.’ ”

This, in a context, where Jesus insists on obedience. Biblical Christianity never, ever suggests we attract God’s mercy by being good. It never suggests somehow we win brownie points with heaven and secure an abundant entrance by trying hard. Biblical Christianity, nevertheless, does insist on obedience.

That is, we are so changed, so transformed that the effect in our lives is to orient us toward following Jesus. Otherwise, the confession “Jesus is Lord” is meaningless. It doesn’t mean a thing. John puts it in the baldest terms. Not feeling, not sensation, not happy worship, not sensing one is particularly spiritual. But obedience, John says, is a fundamental test.

Later on, John talks increasingly about how such things as obedience and right doctrine and so on have a place in giving us assurance we know God. In fact, the first verse here says as much. “We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands.” Since that’s such a big theme in this epistle, and I shall be returning to it later, I don’t want to say much about it now, but clearly our obedience is tied in some way to our assurance before him.

“We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands.” In other words, if we claim to know him and have hearts that care nothing for his commands, we have no right to claim we know him. “But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him.” That expression, God’s love, could either mean God’s love for us is now complete in the sense that it is producing its perfect fruit. As we rest in his love, so we grow in obedience.

Or it could mean our love for him becomes complete. Our love for him is not some mere affirmation or some mere emotion but works out in obedience. Either way, it is made complete in him. “This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him …” In short. “… must walk as Jesus did. Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command, but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard.”

You can almost hear what the other side is saying. They’re saying something like this, “This John, he’s always changing the ground rules. He says you’re saved by grace. He emphasizes the love of God. He stresses how wonderful it is to be freely forgiven, and now he says you’ve got to be obedient. He’s always changing the ground rules.”

“Not so,” John says. “I am not writing you a new command. I’m not changing the ground rules. This is part of ancient Christianity. This is part of what has always been the case. It’s an old one, one you have had from the beginning. The old command is the message you have heard.” What is the message? We saw that last week. “God is light and in him is no darkness at all.” If we are to be conformed to him, we must increasingly reflect his light. That’s been from the beginning.

“Yet,” he says, “there is a sense in which I am writing you a new command. I’ll warrant you that.” What sense? There have been many suggestions. Some say God’s commands are new in the sense that Christianity is new every day. You wake up in the morning and you have to come to terms with what God says every day. Yesterday’s grace won’t do. God’s command that applied to you yesterday comes to you afresh today. As one writer puts it, “Doctrinal Christianity is always old. Experiential Christianity is always new.” Well, it’s true, but it’s not what John has in mind.

Some point to the new commandment. That’s what Jesus calls one of his particular commandments. In John, chapter 13, verses 34 and 35, he says, “A new commandment I give you: that you love one another as I have loved you.” What’s new about that? The Old Testament tells us to love one another, too. Then Jesus says, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.”

For reasons we will see as we progress through this chapter tonight, I think what John has been saying is this. With the coming of Christ and his gospel, a new age has dawned, a new period in the history of the world. In the past, God was constantly, through his prophets, speaking to the people and telling what was coming at the end of the age.

Now the end of the age, as it were, has already overlapped with this age. It has started, and what must be the characteristic mark of this new age is love amongst Christ’s people. “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.” That’s his new commandment, and it is to characterize this new age.

“In that sense,” John says, “I warrant you; what I say is a new commandment. There’s a whole commitment to Christ. It is new in the sense that it belongs to this new age, but it’s not new in the sense that I am changing the ground rules on you. This is basic Christianity. It’s always been there. It’s what you had from the beginning.”

“I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining.” That is this reference to the new age that has started to dawn. This world is passing away, and the new age is already dawning. Often it’s been when Christians have gone through terrible discouragement and persecution that they’ve understood that the best. In the terrible years of slavery in the United States, many astonishingly insightful negro spirituals, as they’re called, were composed. One of them:

This world is not my home

I’m just a-passing through

My treasures are laid up

Somewhere beyond the blue.

There’s a sense in which every Christian ought to say that. This world is not my home. I’m just a-passing through. This age is dying. It is exactly the sentiment of Jim Elliott, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

In fact, John will expound exactly those points in a few verses, as we’ll see. No, no, no … The darkness is passing. Don’t belong to the darkness. The true light … God is light, and in him is no darkness at all; chapter 1, verse 5 … is shining. God has disclosed himself spectacularly in the gospel of his dear Son. Align yourself with that.

Then he comes explicitly to this new command, “Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness. He does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded him.”

This is a theme John returns to at several points. I will say much more about it in a later talk, but it is worth saying this. It is possible in CICCU to be ever so orthodox and ever so spiteful. It is possible to develop a reputation for piety, even disciplined prayer, and really be quite careless in how we treat others.

All of us want to be esteemed and cherished, so we can focus so much on ourselves and how others are thinking about us that in fact, we’ve succumbed to the old idolatry again. Up with number one. But what marks Christians is love for one another. Work at it. Ask yourself how you can demonstrate something of the love of Christ to the people in CICCU you find most obnoxious. It’s excellent discipline. Any pagan can love people he or she finds compatible. It takes a Christian to love the unlovely.

When you leave the university (some of you, I hear, are graduating this year) and you get into churches … Let me tell you frankly, the church attracts more than its share of twits, because for all its faults, it is still one of the most accommodating, gentle, forbearing societies, and at its best, it is astonishingly loving. You find people with bad breath, people with no education, people who are socially uncouth, people with minimal mental powers, all rubbing shoulders in the same church. Some of them, quite frankly, are just not from your background.

What did Jesus say? “Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother lives in the light and there is nothing in him to make him stumble.” The heart of the matter, then, in this initial contrast is this. There are those who talk and those who perform. Real Christianity issues in people who perform.

2. Those who love this world and those who love the Father

We’ll pick up at verse 15, skipping verses 12 through 14 for a moment, coming back to them shortly. “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes, and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.”

What is worldliness? Those who you who have been reared in conservative churches, you know we are warned against worldliness. What does it mean? I was brought up in a very conservative home. “Never drink, smoke, swear, or chew …” That’s chew tobacco. “… and never go out with girls that do.” That was not the sum of all godliness, but it wasn’t far off.

It was pointed out to me by one enterprising pastor who thought he understood Greek that the word for world is kosmos. It is cognate with kosmeō, which means to adorn. Kosmeō is the Greek word from which we derive cosmetics. Hence … You fill in the conclusion.

At the same time, others have found difficulty with this passage because it sounds so sectarian. Do Christians have to be quite this introverted? Don’t love the world. How on earth are you going to evangelize the world if you don’t love it? In fact, some have said this book couldn’t possibly have been written by the same author as the chap who wrote the fourth gospel, because in John’s gospel we read, “God so loved the world,” and here now we’re being told not to love the world. No, there are quite different things that are at stake.

First of all, the word world in John’s writings, a very common word, most commonly means the moral order, human beings in defiant rebellion against God. That’s what it means. Once in a while it is used neutrally. In the last two verses of John’s gospel, the world is a big place that holds a lot of books, the author says. “There are many other things Jesus did, and if all of them had been reported, I suppose the world itself could not contain the books that could be written.”

But normally, world in John is a wicked place. In fact, when the text says, “God so loved the world” we are not to think God’s love must be wonderful because the world is so big. We are to think God’s love must be wonderful because the world is so bad. Within this framework, God loves the world with the holy love of redemption. We are not to love it with the selfish love of participation.

God loves the world in order to save sinners. We are not to love the world so as to share in their sin. God’s love for the world inspires all at God’s condescension. Our love for the world evokes disgust at our lust. John here is not countermanding evangelism. He’s saying, “You’ve got to recognize you’re in a conflict.” There are different world orders here. “As I use the word world,” he says, “it’s characterized by four things.”

The first thing that characterizes the world is the cravings of sinful man. (What some versions put down as the lust of the flesh.) This does not mean sex. At least it does not mean only sex. It’s more comprehensive than that. What it has to do with is all those desires that emanate from us as constitutive physical people where we want things simply for ourselves.

Then he says the second thing that characterizes the world is the lust of the eyes. Now he is focusing rather on external things that we go after, that we desire. Not things that emanate from who we are as people in all our fallen-ness and brokenness and self-centeredness, but now this desire to acquire things, to look at something and say, “I want that.” It is the endemic covetousness, which Paul labels idolatry.

Then he says the third thing that characterizes the world is what the NIV calls the boasting of what he has and does, the pretentiousness of life. What it really is is a fixation on the things of this world and a proudness for all that belongs to me in this world. Thus, worldliness does not reside simply in things, but it certainly resides in our concentration on things.

In fact, there is a particularly deceitful kind of arrogance, of pride, that apes humility. You can find preachers who are extraordinarily proud of their libraries or of their ministerial successes. The whole world becomes a vanity fair. It becomes a place where I can show off … find my identity … by being the center of attraction.

John says, “Do not love the world or anything in it. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” Again, this could mean our love for the Father is not in him, or it could mean the Father’s love for us cannot be part of our felt and shared experience because if it were, clearly we’d be drawn to that.

We’d bask in that. We’d find that drew us as a magnet. We’d delight to be loved by the living God. No, no, no … Don’t love the world. John says, “For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes, and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world.”

The fourth thing that characterizes the world is it is transitory. It doesn’t last. “The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.” You may know the story of some missionaries like Jim Elliott who gave their lives. It is important not to make heroes of them, as if they are a cut above other Christians. They shouldn’t be perceived that way. They should be seen as faithfully displaying elementary Christianity. We are all called to the same fundamental decisions, although they may work out in our lives in different ways.

My father died last October. He was 81. He had been a church planter in French Canada from the age of 26. I don’t know what you know of Canadian history, but French Canada was not open to evangelicalism at all until 1972. During those brutal years of trying to plant churches, ministers in the province of Quebec, when I was a child, spent eight years in jail between 1950 and 1952 for trying to evangelize. I would occasionally get beaten up as a maudits Protestant, a damned Protestant. It was part of growing up in French Canada at the time.

During those years, my father … who had an earlier career with a life insurance company and was doing very nicely, thank you … began to plummet the pits of despair. It is very difficult to work in a church for 15 years with the same 15 people, or you add one and lose one and add one and lose two. Add one, and his business is burned down, and he leaves the area. We saw all of those things.

Then in the midst of this I recall, by the late 1950s, things had changed in French West Africa. The Congo, as it was then, had gone through a terrible bloodbath and a lot of missionaries had gone home. Eventually, of course, out of this was formed Zaire. When they went home, they started casting around looking for a francophone part of the world where they could go and minister. They couldn’t go back there for a while. Some of them cast their eyes on Quebec and came north.

They didn’t overtly say, “Shove over you guys, and we’ll show you how it’s done,” but there was, nevertheless, a small edge to some of what they said and did, because most of them had been extraordinarily successful in French West Africa. Not one of them lasted more than six months. By this time I was old enough to ask disturbing questions to my father. I said, “Why don’t any of them have the guts to hang in there?” I was very self-righteous about the whole matter.

He was far milder. He said, “You have to understand, Don, they’ve been used of God in places where there’s been a lot of fruit. They’re used to seeing conversions, people coming to study and to think through the Word of God in large numbers. They find it difficult to imagine the promulgation of the gospel in any other way. So, don’t be too hard on them.”

I said to him, “Why don’t you go to some part of the world, then, where people want the gospel, where there can be a little more fruit, where you can see large numbers? Why are you wasting your life here?” He rounded on me, and he said, “Because I believe God has many people in this place,” and he walked out of the room.

He was 61 years of age before the harvest began to come in, and in the next five years there were thousands converted in French Canada, hundreds of churches planted. He died at the age of 81 as the grand old man of Quebec, but somewhere along the line he had made some fundamental choices. He would not be deceived, even by the triumphalisms of religion. The pretentiousness of life didn’t mean much to him.

After he died, I started reading through his journal that I didn’t know he kept. Eighteen months before he died he wrote in his journal (after my mother had died after eight years of Alzheimer’s), “Dear God, keep me from the sins of old men.” Again, “Lord God, in my declining years when I do not have the powers I used to have, help me to find young men and nurture them.”

Four months before he died, “I am such a sinner and such a failure. I am ashamed to stand before you. My only hope, now as ever, is in the cross.” And he wrote out in his peculiar mixture of English and French that he used by this stage,

Alas! and did my Savior bleed

And did my Sovereign die?

Would He devote that sacred head

For such a worm as I?

Was it for crimes that I had done

He groaned upon the tree?

Amazing pity! grace unknown!

And love beyond degree!

Let me tell you something, quite frankly. I’m not telling you this to make a hero of him, because he wasn’t. He was a very ordinary man. He never rose in the ranks of ecclesiastical parties. He was never highly regarded. He wasn’t a great preacher. He certainly wasn’t a scholar. He knew himself to be a sinner, but by God’s mercy he had made some fundamental choices. He didn’t love the world. He did love the Father.

Make up your minds. You will not drift into sanctification. You will not drift into godliness. You will not drift into holiness. You will not drift into self-denial. You will not drift into disciplined prayer life. Make up your minds. It was F.W. Myers who said,

Whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest

Cannot confound nor doubt Him nor deny;

Yea, with one voice, O world, tho’ thou deniest,

Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.

That’s not heroics. That’s elementary discipleship, and sometimes you may be called to make a fundamental decision. In one of the great early controversies of the church, when the church was struggling through how to articulate the deity of Christ, and it seemed as if the entire church in the West would end up with what was, in fact, a heretical Christology, in which Jesus was not truly God, there were a few heroes who stood up, and it cost them everything.

One of them was Athanasius. At one point a senior cleric came to him and said, “Athanasius, do you not understand that the whole world is against you?” Athanasius is said to have replied, “Then it’s Athanasius against the whole world.” Do not misunderstand. On the wrong issue, from the wrong person, that could be unbearably arrogant, but from obedient faith in a child of God, it is nothing but confession of elementary discipleship.

Decide. Decide what you will do with your bodies. Decide what you will do with your life. The habits you engender in your life now will either bless you all your life, or they will haunt you all your life. Make no mistake. Do not wait until you graduate to be holy. After that, it will be until you get your next promotion or until you’re married or until you have children or until your children are grown up. There’s always more to do until finally you’re too old. Decide. “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” Then, the final contrast.

3. Those who are antichrists and those who are Christians

“Dear children,” John says, “this is the last hour.” Now his whole vision of the future is coming very clear indeed. That is part of the whole Christian understanding of the sweep of things. A very common illustration that has been used since World War II … You may be familiar with it. In case you’re not, let me outline it for you.

Once the troops landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, it was clear very quickly to anyone with half a brain in his head that the war was over. The Russians were making wonderful advances in the east. Rommel had been beaten out of Africa. Italy was finished, and now within three days there were a million men and tons of war materiel on the beaches of Normandy.

You could see it from the sheer statistics. Where were things being manufactured? Where did the energy come from? Who had the reserves of steel? Who had the power in the air? From D-Day on no one with half a brain in his head could deny that the war was over. But was it? There were a lot of lives lost after that. Hitler broke out again in the Battle of the Bulge, almost made it to the coast. Do you think the German generals could not see things were lost?

It took a madman to keep them going. Out of fury and rage, precisely because he knew his time was short, because he knew he was licked, he gave order after order for the troops not to lose an inch of ground, to die where they were fighting. Still the Allies came on amid some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. Eventually, there was V-E Day (Victory in Europe), and the war in Europe was over.

For Christians, the coming of Christ, his death, his resurrection was D-Day. And if I may say it, anyone with half a spiritual brain in his head can see that the war is over. Satan has been defeated. Sin has been atoned for. The climactic engagement has been won. It is over. The new age has dawned.

The new heaven and the new earth may not be here yet. Death is still the last enemy to be overcome. Still Satan, according to Revelation, chapter 12, is doubly enraged because he knows his time is short, but the climactic engagement has been fought. Now we wait for V-E Day. And in that engagement, that does not mean now we lay down our arms and say, “Well, the spiritual troops are on the beaches of the spiritual Normandy. Jesus has done it all. No use fighting.”

No, no. It is the last hour. We are in the last engagement. This world is passing away and all its values, but the crucial engagement has been won. Within that framework, he says, “… as you have heard that the antichrist is coming …” That is, the final outbreak of evil lead by one figure. So 2 Thessalonians 2 and elsewhere. “… even now many antichrists have come.” That is, we are living in the period when ultimately the Antichrist will break out, but it is going to be characterized by many antichrists throughout this period.

That is one of the reasons why in almost every generation you can find books that argue that this figure or that figure or the other figure is the Antichrist. I have books on my shelf at home that prove that Mussolini was the Antichrist. I have books on my shelf that prove that Mao Zedong was the Antichrist. I even have a book that proves that Henry Kissinger was the Antichrist. I collect weird books.

But at the end of the day, however many antichrists there may be, there is one at the end. We live in this concentrated period where there will be opposition to Christ. Those who either claim the honors due Christ, they stand in for Christ (antichrist) in that sense, or those who are opposed to Christ (antichrist) as an opponent. This is how we know it is the last hour. Christ has come. The antichrists have come. We are in the last hour, and we see this struggle.

Now these particular antichrists that John is dealing with, however, are not political rulers. They are not opposition from outside. You find some of those antichrists in the Apocalypse, but not here. These ones are people who formally came faithfully to John’s church. He describes them in verse 19. “They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.”

Do you hear what that text says? It can all get a bit confusing, but the long and the short of the matter is this: real Christians stick, they persevere, but that doesn’t stop the fact that there will be all kinds of spurious ones that won’t. Listen to the text again.

“They went out from us …” That is, they’ve left us. They were once baptized members of our church. They worshiped with us. They sang our choruses. They heard our sermons. They were part of us, but they went out from us. “… but they did not really belong to us.” Despite all superficial appearances to the contrary, they did not really belong to us. “For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.” This is part of a theme that is very common in the New Testament. Real Christians stick.

For example, in John, chapter 8, verse 30, when various people believed in Jesus, we’re told, he then says to those who have believed in him, “If you remain in my word, then you are truly my disciples.” Hebrews 3:14 says, “You have been made partakers of Christ, if you hold the beginning of your confidence steadfast to the end.” Do you see that? The perseverance and the preservation of God’s people.

Jesus, himself, taught as much. Do you remember the parable of the sower? It’s really a parable of the soils. The seed is sown on different kinds of ground. On hard-packed ground, where the paths were, the seed didn’t actually go into the ground and the birds of the air, we’re told, came and plucked it away before there was any germination at all.

Then, in the interpretation of the parable, we’re told this is like people who hear the Word of God, but it doesn’t produce anything. Before there is any time for them to think about it, for them to turn it over in their mind and weigh it and see how they should live in the light of it, it’s just taken away. It’s gone. The Devil comes and snatches it away, replaces it with other thoughts.

But the soil that interests me the most for our purposes tonight is the rocky soil, the stony earth. What is meant by that in Palestine is soil with a limestone underlay and a thin layer of topsoil. What happens is the seed falls into the thin layer of topsoil, and because it is so thin, in the spring it heats up the fastest, precisely because of its thinness, and so the seed germinates the quickest. It seems to be the most promising. Up come the little shoots.

Everybody says, “This is going to be a good part of the field.” Then the first rains are over. There are no more rains until some weeks, even months later. The roots go down, and they hunt for moisture. What they hit instead is the limestone bedrock. The plants keel over and die. Jesus interprets this for us. He says, “These are like those who hear the Word of God and immediately receive it with joy.” That is, they promise to be the most enthusiastic of the crop … the best Christians.

“But later,” Jesus says, “when a bit of tribulation comes, things get tough.” A bit of persecution, a bit of opposition, they just keel over and die, which shows how it is possible to have some element of Christian life, some element of Christian fellowship, some element of Christian doctrine, some element of Christian belief, to be associated with the people of God but still not to have that kind of root in you which perseveres, which presses on, which says with Job, “Though he slays me, yet will I trust him.”

Now over against these people who quit, John says, in verse 24, “See that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you. If it does, you also will remain in the Son and in the Father. And this is what he promised us—even eternal life.” Plan for the long haul. Plan to persevere. Develop strategies for growth and reading and understanding and discipleship and outreach for the long haul. Plan to persevere.

Do not treat Christianity as a quick pop-up medicine that you take or leave depending on your mood, or else you will side with the antichrists. Sooner or later you will side with the antichrists instead of with the Christians. Not only so, but John says, “But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth. I do not write to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it and because no lie comes from the truth.”

Then a little farther on he says again, “I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray. As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you.” What does that mean? You can well imagine in the history of the church this one has been wonderfully abused.

All kinds of people have come along and said, “I don’t need anybody to teach me, thank you. I’ve got the anointing of the Holy Spirit. I know it all.” But on the other hand, before we dismiss such people, this text does say, “You know the truth, and you have an anointing, and you don’t need anyone to teach you.” What does the text mean?

The passage reflects a major shift from old covenant faith to new covenant faith. It’s very important that we grasp this since much of the theology of this epistle rests on this simple truth. You might turn for a moment to Jeremiah 31. Jeremiah 31 is a passage that announces the coming of the new covenant.

Jeremiah 31, verse 29: “In those days people will no longer say, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ ” That’s a proverb. It’s found twice in the Bible, once in Jeremiah and once in Ezekiel. It’s applied slightly differently in the two passages. What is meant here is Old Testament covenant religion was tribal. God spoke through prophets, through priests, through kings. There was a covenantal tribal relationship between them such that when the king fell into sin, he led the whole people astray.

Do you remember when God gave the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai? Read it for yourself in Exodus, chapter 20. At the end of this terrible, frightening display of God on the mountain, the people cried to Moses, “We’re afraid to come close to this God. You be God for us. You represent us to God. You represent God to us.” Thus, Old Testament covenanted religion had these intermediaries … the priests, the prophets, the kings. On them, the Spirit came in abundance and on a few others like Bezalel and Oholiab, of which I shall say nothing.

As it were, what happened was, the fathers ate sour grapes. That is, the dignitaries of the nation, the prophets, the priests, the kings, they ate the sour grapes. They went astray. They sinned. They led the people off, and the children’s teeth were set on edge. But God says, “In those days …” In the days of ultimate restoration of things, it will not be like that. Nobody will say that proverb anymore. “Instead,” he says, “everyone will die for his own sins; whoever eats sour grapes—his own teeth will be set on edge.”

Now, this announcement of the new covenant. “ ‘The time is coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers …’ ” That is, it won’t be like it in this matter that has just been discussed in the proverb. It won’t be tribal. No, no, no … It won’t be like that.

“ ‘This is the covenant I will make with them in that in that day. I will put my law in their minds and I write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor or a man his brother saying, “Know the Lord” because they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest,’ declares the Lord.”

Do you hear the overtones that John is citing? Under the new covenant, it will not be essentially tribal, an intermediated structure. Rather, “Everyone under the new covenant will know me, from the least to the greatest. No one will have to say, ‘Hey, I’m the priest. Know the Lord. This is what you do.’ Because they will all know me from the least to the greatest.”

That passage is picked up in the New Testament in Hebrews 8 and Hebrews 10 and elsewhere. Ezekiel 36 has the same sort of thing and is picked up by Jesus in John 3. Joel 2 promises the gift of the Spirit to all of God’s covenanted people under the new covenant and is picked up by Acts. That’s a major theme in the New Testament.

The idea, thus, is not that there are no teachers under the New Testament, but there are no insidetrack teachers. There are no mediating teachers. No teachers who have a special enduement of the Spirit. No teachers who have such an inside track that they become as God to you.

No, no, no. Under the new covenant, we all have this anointing. We all know the Lord. If I exercise a role, as I’m exercising it tonight, as a teacher in the church, it is not because I have the right to stand up and say, “I have a special enduement of the Spirit of God that you poor people don’t have.”

In fact, the most I do, as it were, is to point to this Word and say, “You, who know the Lord. You, who have the Spirit of God within you. You, who have tasted and seen the Lord is good. You, who are living in the power of the age to come. Look at his Word. Is this not what it says? I don’t want you to believe me for my sake. Is this not what the Word says? Is this not how it must apply to our lives?” Thus, whatever influence I have upon you is not because of what I think up, but only insofar as I faithfully unpack what God has given as his heritage to all his people.

I have no inside track with God that you do not have. That’s very important to understand as well. Clearly, some of the seceders in John’s day, these supercilious, super-spiritual types in John’s day, thought they were a cut above the Christians John was writing to, and the Christians John was writing to, therefore, felt threatened. All these people seemed so spiritual. They claimed to have had wonderful experiences. They belonged to a rising movement that I defined last week as Gnosticism. I’ll say more about it later.

John says, “Listen, it is part of being a Christian that we all have this anointing. Under the new covenant, we all have it. You don’t need somebody to come along and tell you what you’re missing. You know it. I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray. As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you.”

There is one more difference here between these Christians and the antichrists, and it concerns a point of truth. Verse 21: “I do not write to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it and because no lie comes from the truth. Who is the liar? What lie am I talking about? The liar I’m looking at is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist—he denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.”

These people did not deny that Jesus is Lord. What they denied is that Jesus is the Christ. Apparently, they held some sort of view in which the Christ came upon Jesus, perhaps at his baptism, and then left him before the cross (we will explore that two weeks from tonight), or perhaps they held some sort of view in which he only appeared to come on Jesus, but they didn’t believe in the one person Jesus Christ, God and man, Son of God, human being Jesus.

They didn’t hold that. They had, as it were, a schizophrenic Jesus. Not a God-man Jesus, a sort of two-part Jesus, and the one that was important was not the human one at all. It was the one that came and had gone, this Christ figure. They thought this was a wonderful spiritual insight, a deep truth.

Later on, John will say, “If you don’t see that this one person, Jesus Christ, was God and man, you’ve got no place for theology of the cross in which the God-man suffered and took our sins, in which case you can’t be forgiven, in which case you don’t really know the God who has disclosed himself by this one man, Jesus Christ. You don’t know these things.

This is not merely a picky point in theology. It’s fundamental. Without this truth, no matter how pious you are, no matter how spiritual you are, no matter how prayerful you are, you are, in fact, outside the camp.” Thus, he insists that in addition to this anointing there is a doctrinal test, a non-negotiable doctrinal test.

Do you see what John has done? He has wrapped together obedience, doctrine, spiritual anointing, love for the brothers, and he said these things are part of a parcel. They all hang together. Press on. Note the contrasts … those who are the antichrists and those who are Christians.

But we end with a word of encouragement. It is important to see in the midst of these sharp contrasts that forced people to divide, John breaks, as it were, with verses 12 to 14, and tells these people some encouraging things.

“I write to you, dear children, because your sins have been forgiven on account of his name.” “I’m not writing to you because, quite frankly, I think you’re amongst the heretics, or you’re in terrible danger of diving off the deep end. No, I write to you because your sins have been forgiven on account of his name.” “I write to you, fathers, because you have known him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one.”

If you read the commentaries, you’ll find they argue over whether there are three groups John is addressing … children, fathers, young men … or two. That is, that children is an all-embracing term, and then he divides them down into two groups. I opt for the latter, primarily because John is constantly addressing all of his readers as my dear children. He does so here.

Addressing Christians, he says, “I write to you, dear children, because your sins have been forgiven on account of his name.” “That is the framework in which I write to you.” Now he says, “I can break you down into two groups. On the one hand, there are those who have been around for a long time.” (Not many in this crowd tonight, but in some circles.) “You have known him who is from the beginning. Your aged faith has anchored itself in him who is ageless, him who is from the beginning.”

“And I write to you, young men.” The expression could mean young men and women. “I write to you, young people, because you have overcome the evil one.” That is, you have already tasted something of early Christian victory over sin and temptation and the guiles of the Evil One. You’ve already begun the fight and you know what it is by God’s grace to win. You have tasted something of this victory. “In other words, I’m not writing to you to win you to the Lord. I’m writing to you as Christians.”

Then he repeats the whole sequence. There are some small adjustments in the text, which I think emphasize the “because” clauses. “I write to you dear children because you have known the Father. Not just that your sins have been forgiven on account of his name. You have known the Father.”

The world has conceived of God in many, many guises. Moloch (who burns babies), Baal, Bacchus (have another bottle), Buddha (we are absorbed into the whole universe), Allah (who is stern and sovereign but whose grace is not very clear). Or in more poetic terms … E.B. Browning, “God is the best poet.” Sir Thomas Brown, “He’s a skillful mathematician.” Bacon, “The unconcerned spectator.” Richter, “An unutterable sigh, planted in the depths of the soul. Thomas Hardy, “The President of the immortals.” Wells, “With immaculate condescension, the most significant mind of our time.”

What does John say? “You have known the Father. He is the one who has forgiven your sins. You have known the living, personal, transcendent God as your Father. I write to you, fathers, because you have known him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men …” Here it is. This is what applies to most of you. “… because you are strong and the Word of God lives in you and you have overcome the evil one.”

The next generation of the church’s strength falls on your shoulders. You are the strong ones. I’m already middle-aged. By the time you’re my age, I’ll probably be dead. The next generation of Christian leadership falls on your shoulders. “I write to you, young people,” he says, “because you have already tasted victory over the evil one, because you are strong, because the Word of God lives in you.” Stand thou on this side, for on this side stand I.

Make your choices. Understand that in these fundamental things God draws a line and he insists on a difference between worldliness and godliness, between those who talk and those who perform, between Christians and antichrists, between those who love this world and those who love the living God. Understand that it is a great privilege to stand on this side. You have had your sins forgiven. You have come to know God as your Father. The Word of God rests in you.