Part 3 – 1 John 2:28-3:24

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of New Testament studies from 1 John 2:28-3:24.

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“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 is right has been born of him. How great is the 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 he appears, we shall be like him, for we will see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure. 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 in 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. He who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. He 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. No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has 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 a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother. This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous.

Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him. This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.

If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.

Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. This is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.”

One of the most intriguing charges leveled at Christians in almost every age is the charge of hypocrisy. Just let a vicar, better yet, a bishop, get caught out with a prostitute, and the press loves it. All the stereotypes, from Elmer Gantry on down, come rushing back. There are snide chuckles on all the comedy programs. But we also enjoy stories like this: “Well, you know, I went to such-and-such a church, but I sat there in the pew and nobody said anything to me. I went three times and no one spoke to me.

Eventually, I asked someone at the door whom I should see to join a house group, and I went up to that person and she told me the house group she was leading was full. So I never went back. They’re all a bunch of hypocrites.” God knows some of us are, and all of us are sometimes. But what intrigues me is that people should think there should be righteousness. You see, if there were not some expectation Christians should be different, you couldn’t charge them with being hypocritical.

You really wouldn’t go to a nightclub and discover the people at the next table weren’t overtly friendly, didn’t invite you to their home society … If you discover one of them was sleeping with a prostitute would you start talking about hypocrisy? No, no, no, no. In fact, in most of the religions of the world, there is no tie between morals and ethics on the one hand and religious commitment on the other.

In fact, it is part of the measure of the lingering influence of Christianity in the Western world that the Western world still thinks Christianity ought to be different! We have done such a good job of insisting there is a tie, that Christians will be different, that when we are not we are accused of hypocrisy. I say, “Amen!” We ought to be, but that means, of course, biblical Christianity is not simply a question of how men and women are reconciled to God by some judicial act by which our sins are forgiven, by which God declares us to be just, and that’s the end of the story.

That is absolutely foundational, but that, by itself, wouldn’t change me. God could forgive me, and I would say, “Well, thank you very much,” and go out and do it again. Let us have lots of sin so we might have more grace! Paul knew a few of those. “Whose damnation is well deserved,” he said.

The answer, biblically, is our conversion to God is bound up also with reception of the Spirit, with new birth, with an inner transformation so not only are we declared just because Christ pays for our sins and we accept his substitution on our behalf by faith, but in addition, God pours out his Spirit upon us so we are changed from the inside.

Sometimes that is accompanied by a very dramatic change. Sometimes it’s almost imperceptible at first, but on the long haul it changes the values, it changes the hearts, it changes the orientation of life so in due course you start seeing a different direction from what was there before. That is how biblical Christianity demands there be changes of life. Everything is predicated on the new birth.

You’ll recall what Jesus says in John 3, the passage that deals most with this subject. After he talks about it and relates the new birth to Ezekiel 36, new covenant language there, he then says, “It’s like the wind which blows through, and you see its effects but you can’t tell where it comes from. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit of God.”

What he means is, when the wind blows through Cambridge, and you see the branches swaying in the breeze or you see the dust kicking up or it’s harder to go on your bicycle this way than that way, then you don’t stop and think, “Now, let’s see, this must mean there’s a high in the North Sea and there’s a low in France, and the isobars are closer today, and so on.” And we know more about weather than they did in the first century.

We simply say, “Yes, it’s windy.” We don’t speculate on all of its origins. So it is with someone who is born again. What he is saying is there is always effect. You might not be able to give it a detailed, step-by-step analysis, but you will always see the effect, and the effects are undeniable. Before John sets out some of these effects, he talks rather briefly about the nature of this new birth. In particular, he talks about the Christian’s status, the Christian’s destiny, and the Christian’s determination.

1. The Christian’s status

He ends up in a transitional verse at the end of chapter 2. “You know that he is righteous, and if you know this, you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of him. How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” We are so used to some of this language it doesn’t blow us away the way it blew away the first generation of believers.

I worked for some time in the province of Quebec when the gospel was going through there very quickly, when you would find whole churches with no one who had been a Christian for more than 18 months or so. The sheer delight in calling God, “Father,” in being a child of God was fantastic. There was a kind of pulsating gratitude in the air. When they sang the French version of “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,” amazing was not too strong a term, still less a mere bit of verbal baggage.

The truth of the matter is when we stop for just a few minutes and read through again some of the passages that talk about the transcendence of God, Isaiah 40 and 44; the holiness of God, Revelation 4 and Isaiah 6; that talk about the justice and severity of God, the anger of God, Romans 1 and 2, and then we remember this God, who does not owe us anything, chose, because he is that kind of God, to send his Son to die for us and declare us his children.

When we look into our own hearts and see how alienated we are apart from his love, then we start saying, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!” In fact, in the ancient world, the child normally did what the father did. The son did what the father did. The daughter did what the mother did. So if your father was a baker, you would be a baker as well. If your father was a farmer, you would be a farmer.

Whatever your parents did, you tended to do the same thing. That is still so in most non-industrialized, handcraft, agricultural societies. The percentage of all children who did what their parents did was 97 or 98 percent. Now it’s 97 or 98 percent don’t do what their parents did. Thus the sonship languish becomes very functional in the New Testament. When Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God,” what he means is God is the supreme peacemaker and in so far as we make peace, we are imitating God and we are thus repeating his actions all over again.

Thus there is a sense in which we, ourselves, have become children of God, functionally. That’s also why some people can be called children of Belial, children of worthlessness. They do worthless things so they are children of worthlessness. If you go to the nation of Israel today and someone calls you the son of a pig, it’s no aspersion on your parents. It means that, as far as the name-caller is concerned, you partake of all the disgusting attributes of the filthy animal.

So when we’re called children of God, this is not just a status question. It’s not just, “What amazing love that God has called us children of God. Well he has named us. That’s all there is to it. It was nice of him.” John wants us to see the naming brings power. He says, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!” And, lest we miss the point, “And that is what we are!” As God’s children we start doing the sorts of things God does!

If people don’t recognize that in us, if people don’t look at us and say, “Oh, well, that person must obviously be a child of God,” John has a reason. The reason the world does not know us is it did not know him. The world was not too keen to recognize Jesus as the Son of God, par excellence, the one who perfectly and absolutely reflected all God did. Now he wants us to understand we are children of God. We have the Spirit. We have been born of him. We have a new origin. He has called us this; he has empowered us. That is what we are as Christians.

2. The Christian’s destiny

John wants us to understand we are not yet what we will be. We have a destiny beyond what we are now. He says, “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we will be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

You may recall that last week I spoke about the model developed after World War II, the difference between D-day and V-E Day, the difference between the day when the troops were on the ground and victory was assured, but yet there were a lot of struggles before the final consummation and the end of the conflict.

For the Christian, the cross is D-day. The consummation, when Christ himself returns, is V-E Day. For us, we are already children of God. Already we enjoy the privileges of the sons of God. Already we are in some measure conformed to him. “But,” John says, “you don’t have it all yet.” Against the Gnostics of the first century, that was very important. There have often been heresies in the Christian church where people act as if they have all God has got to give.

They don’t look forward to anything. They’re not ashamed of anything that still hangs on from this world. They think they have it all! But John says, “It still does not yet appear what we will be. But we do know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” It’s encouraging, isn’t it, that there is a kind of confession here of apostolic ignorance? We don’t know quite yet how we’ll be transformed. John says we don’t yet know exactly how it will happen. We don’t know exactly what it means to be fully like him, but we do know that we shall be like him.

As Paul puts it, “He is the firstfruits of the resurrection.” We shall all be resurrected and have resurrection bodies like his! Oh, we will never be one with the Godhead the way he is. No. But Christ will transform this body of our humble state into conformity with the body of his glory by the exertion of the power he has to subject all things to himself. Philippians 3. That is why Christians sing:

Face to face with Christ my Savior,

Face to face—what will it be?

When with rapture I behold Him,

Jesus Christ who died for me?

Only faintly now I see Him

With a dark’ning veil between,

But a better day is coming

When His glory shall be seen.

3. The Christian’s determination

John, here, is not interested simply in talking about these things in a theoretical vacuum. He’s after a particular point, and it comes to the fore in the third verse. “Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure.” “Everyone who has this hope in him …” Which probably means Jesus. That is, this hope in him, not this hope in himself. “… purifies himself just as he is pure.”

Have you every traveled to other countries, faced a bit of decent culture shock that we were hearing about tonight? You brace yourself if you’re going for a while. If you’re going for a tourist and are all sheltered away in chalets and coaches and you’re with friends and you have translators, it’s not too bad, but if you go to some country that really is very different from your own and you’re thrown in at the deep end, you brace yourself.

You find out something of the basic courtesies and the language, and you learn the money system. You learn how to ask the basic questions: “Where’s the restaurant?” “Where’s the loo?” “Where’s the bus station?” “Where’s the embassy?” It can be a lonely, frightening sort of thing, but it can also be exhilarating, and you get ginned up for it. If you’re staying for a long period of time, you change so much yourself you have to brace yourself for reverse culture shock when you get home, too.

The biggest culture shock that will take place will take place when Jesus comes again. We’re going home, and everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, as he is pure. We’re already doing our bit to reduce culture shock. We start praying with that famous Scottish preacher from the last century, “Lord God, make me just as holy as a pardoned sinner can be.”

Holiness is now not something for the elite of the elect or some corny term we’re slightly embarrassed by or a sense of awe when we walk into a rather dusty, gothic cathedral and hear the pipe organ whining. Holiness is conformity to the living God, and one day our conformity to him will be complete. “And everyone who has this hope purifies himself, as Christ also is pure.”

That’s what the new birth is about. We’ve been changed from the inside. We have those sorts of desires. So much so, so much of the rest of this chapter turns on this truth that let me tell you quite frankly, if you do not have desires for holiness, if you do not have desires to be pure, check again whether you really have been born again. Being born again is not to be equated with having walked forward at a meeting somewhere or simply having made a decision or simply having prayed some formulaic prayer somewhere.

There is a transformation from inside so we have a God-centeredness that simply was not there before. It doesn’t mean we don’t fight against sin. It doesn’t mean we’re free from all temptations. It means precisely the opposite! We have temptations and now see them! We fight against them because we don’t want sin. We’re embarrassed by it. We feel sullied by it.

That is one of the reasons why new Christians often come to you six or eight or ten weeks after their conversion and say, “You know, since I became a Christian, I feel dirtier than I have ever been before. This isn’t right!” And I say, “Yes, it is! You’re going to feel a lot dirtier yet. The closer you get to the light, the more dirt you’re going to see. That’s part of growing in grace. Before you didn’t even see all kinds of sins. Now you see them and you’re ashamed of them. That’s a mark of the new birth. Struggle on.”

There is determination, then, to deal with sin, to be obedient, to line up with Christ. Now we don’t want the kind of formulaic prayers. We start examining our own hypocrisy. You know the little poem on temptation by Studdert Kennedy? He struggles with temptation and prays. Then he pens words like this:

Prayed? Have I prayed?

When I’m known for praying, praying,

When I’ve bored the blessed angels

With the battery of my prayer,

But it’s only saying, saying,

And I cannot get to Jesus

For the glory of her hair.

It never bothered you before you were a Christian, did it? Thank God, it does now. Now, granted, then, this new birth is powerful and it changes your orientation. Then John can lay out some clear evidences of belonging to God. After talking, then, about this new birth, insisting Christians are twice-born people, he now says twice-born people demonstrate their status first by obedience, verses 4–10, and second, in love, verses 11–18.

A) Twice-born people demonstrate their status by obedience.

I will say more obedience this week and a little more about love next week, although I will not let the passage drop entirely tonight. John makes two points about this demonstration in obedience.

First, the purpose of Christ’s coming is contradicted by sin. Verses 5 and 6: “You know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins. And in him is no sin.” That’s why Jesus came. He came to remove our sins, and he himself was sinless. The New Testament makes much of that truth. Not only that he was objectively sinless, but that he knew no sin. He didn’t recognize sin in himself.

If I got up and said with a straight face, “Is there anyone in Cambridge who can convict me of sin?” besides the fact that there would instantly be hundreds and hundreds of volunteers, the fact that I could put it like that would either reflect that I’m astonishingly holy or disgustingly duped. But Jesus can actually say that. “Which one of you can convict me of sin?” He can just say that sort of thing.

It means you start to divide around him. “In him is no sin and he came to free us from our sins.” How, therefore, can we be lethargic about sin? John puts the conclusion in the strongest form. “No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.” The language is startlingly strong, and it’s going to get stronger yet. In fact, to make it as strong as possible, he puts it this way: paternity to God or the devil is marked out be observable righteousness or observable sin.

I don’t know how far this society has become litigious, but North America is an extraordinarily litigious society. Not infrequently, especially in California, you find cases written up where some woman who has given birth to an illegitimate child sues a particular man on the ground that he is the father and owes child support.

Such a lawsuit is called a paternity suit. Nowadays, of course, you can take a genetic test. It is not absolutely foolproof, but the probabilities are so high they’re accepted by a court of law. You can prove, therefore, whether this little tyke was sired by that father or that father.

How do you prove you have been sired by God? There’s no genetic test. You can’t take a snippet of flesh. But there is a test. There is a test in a fallen world. John says, “Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. He who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. He 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. The Devil comes along and, morally, he entices us to sin; physically, he inflicts disease and death; intellectually, he seduces us into error; and Christ comes to destroy the Devil’s work. Ultimately, he reverses all of this.

In fact, Jesus addressed some of his own contemporaries and said, “You are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father you will do.” In other words, you can be a child of the Devil as well as a child of God, one or the other. The Bible never talks about new birth by the Devil. It is a purely functional category.

The Bible does talk about new birth to God. It is not only functional, but the giving of his Spirit, the giving of something internal, that does transform us. But if you work at the merely functional level, you can either line up with God as your father or you can line up with the Devil as your father. Jesus says, “You are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father you will do.” John picks up exactly that sort of language. “He 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.

Secondly, Christians must not continue to sin. Verse 9: “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has 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 a child of God.” Now what are we to make of a passage like that?

In the history of the church, there have been a number of interpretations of this sort of passage. There are several of them in this book. This is the strongest one, and it is important to think three or four of them through. Some have taught this teaches sinless perfection is possible for Christians, here. Occasionally you read books on this theme, especially from the nineteenth century, but it has recurred in various periods in the history of the church. They’re not quite entitled “Sinless Perfection and How I Attained It (Complete with Humility),” but very close!

The assumption is God’s power is so availing right now you can be sinlessly perfect. Now I have to say I can’t buy that interpretation. I can’t buy it, in the first place, because already chapter 1 has told us that if we say we have no sin and are not guilty and do not sin, we kid ourselves, we’re liars, and we call God a liar. There, we are told the proper thing to do is to confess our sins and remember Jesus is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.

There, the proper thing is to remember we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one who is, if you recall, the propitiation for our sins. That’s what you do with your sins. You don’t deny them. You still have them. “If we walk in the light as he is in the light …” That sounds like perfection, but then it says, “… and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin.” So there’s still some there. Not only so, but one of the prayers Jesus himself taught us to pray includes the line, “Forgive us our trespasses as we also forgive those who trespass against us.”

But in the second place, it’s just flat-out against experience. This text does not talk about an elite group of Christians. It talks about all who are born again. “No one who is born of God will continue to sin.” So if this is only for an elite group, by our standards of observation, then you must conclude all the rest haven’t been born again. This does not say sinless perfection is possible. It says it is the inevitable result! So I cannot quite buy that interpretation. I cannot believe John contradicted himself quite that quickly.

Others have suggested this is talking about what we will be on the last day. After all, chapter 3, verses 2 and 3, has looked forward to what will be. “It does not yet appear what we will be but we know that when he appears we will be like him.” So maybe verse 3 is saying, “Listen, one day all who are born again will be absolutely sinless.” The trouble is, verse 9, in its context, is talking about Christians here and now, not what we will be.

Then some struggle with the fact seed could mean a couple of different things. This could be taken one of two ways. This could mean: “No one who is born of God will continue in sin because God’s seed [God’s offspring] will remain in him [in God].” But you still have a very strong claim for a kind of sinless perfection. Or, seed, more likely in my view, means something like God’s nature. God’s nature remains in him, the Christian! We have been talking about the new birth. Last week we saw John talked about anointing. We’ll come back to that one, too.

The argument is because there is a new birth, a new generation, something from God, you do change, and you cannot go on sinning because God’s nature is in you. Unlike lining up with the Devil, where there is no actual transfer of nature, some new birth unto Satan, with respect to God, that is exactly what happens! Paul describes it in 1 Corinthians 2 as a communication of the Spirit so the natural person becomes a spiritual person. Jesus himself teaches the new birth. Now God’s seed remains in us. There will be change. We cannot go on sinning.

Others make a very strong point of observing the Greek tenses. Don’t you love it when preachers talk about Greek tenses? I think they bleed this one to death, but there’s a bit of truth in it, a smidgeon. If you were to translate a bit literalistically here you would have to drop the continues. That’s the translator’s attempt to handle present tenses in Greek. “No one who is born of God sins.” That’s what the text says, and because it’s a present continuous tense, people try to render it as “will continue to sin.”

So you may sin now and then, but you don’t continue to sin. Because God’s seed remains in him, he cannot … present tense. He cannot, usually, but every once in a while he does. There’s just a wee bit of truth in it. I won’t try to unpack Greek tenses for you. But I think there is another point that is more important. The particular construction “he cannot go on sinning,” everywhere it’s used in the New Testament … “He cannot do something,” in this particular construction, is not dealing quite with ontological incapacity (it is impossible) but something more shocking.

Let me give an example. When I was in grade seven at school, which would be like first-year juniors, here, I had a teacher by the name of Cooper. Mr. Cooper was a World War II vet who should have remained in the army. He was game in one leg from the war, and this had done something to his psychology. He felt he had to prove himself. Every issue was confrontation.

Every once in a while when the noise of the room got up to about the 140 decibel mark, if you weren’t actually talking yourself but watching what he was doing, you would note that he would hobble up to the side of the desk, put his fingers under the lip, pick it up three or four inches, and slam it down with a terrific crash. It stopped all the noise, anyway. Everybody would look up, and he would say, “That’s one one-tenth of my strength!” As if that proved something.

Now Mr. Cooper’s favorite thing to hate was gum chewing. He loathed it with a passion. It bespoke all the lack of discipline he saw connected with anything un-military. Children in grade seven are not noted for discipline. Cooper hated gum chewing. Every time he saw a girl or a boy chewing gum in his class, he always did the same thing. He would hobble over to the dustbin, and you knew what was coming. Then he would hobble down the aisle to where your seat was.

He would stick it under your nose, and he would recite, “ ‘A gum-chewing girl (it could have been a boy; it doesn’t make any difference) and a cud-chewing cow look so much alike, yet different somehow. What is the difference? Ah, I see it now: ‘Tis the thoughtful look in the face of the cow.’ SPIT!”

In other words, this was Mr. Cooper’s way of saying, “Gum chewing is not done here. You cannot chew gum here. You cannot chew gum in my class!” It would quite miss the point for Johnny to stick up his hand and say, “Sorry! You are uttering an ontological untruth, for I am doing it!”

Now John is interested in his people being holy, but he’s realistic enough to realize, this side of the final transformation, we still do sin. So he says two things: In chapter 1 he keeps saying, “If you say you don’t sin, you’re kidding yourself. In fact, you’re calling God a liar. The way to handle sin is to confess it.”

Here he says, “Christians don’t sin. Christians cannot sin. Sinning is not done here, for it is important to recognize every single time you or I sin, every single time, in word or thought or deed, it is inexcusable. Twice-born people don’t sin. That’s it. Believe it. Twice-born people can’t sin. That’s it. Believe it.

And we do all the time. Believe that, too, because unless you see that both of those truths are complimentary in our experience, you will feel none of the tension of being blood-bought, twice-born on the one hand, pressing on for glory but yet not there! You won’t fight. You won’t try. You won’t press on to be holy! You’ll enjoy letting your mind having a few hours of roaming in the gutter. You will nurture your bitterness. You will use your tongue to cut people down. You will foster hate.”

Then you’ll say, “Yes, but, you know … I’m not finally transformed, yet, am I? We all sin.” No. No. No. No. Sinning is not done here! You cannot sin here! You’re a twice-born person. Christians don’t sin. You can’t sin! It misses the point to say, “Uh-uh. Wrong again. Ontologically you can. I can prove it.” That’s part of all of Christian life, caught between the struggles of those two poles. The final resolution comes together when Jesus Christ comes back, and we will see him as he is. Every Christian who has this hope in him purifies himself.

B) Twice-born people demonstrate their status in love.

Verses 11 and following. Christians are twice-born people, we have been told at the beginning of the chapter. You could make the same sort of test about love as you could about obedience. John makes a number of points there, too.

First, paternity to God or to the Devil is equally marked out by observable, demonstrable love. There’s a transition clause at the end of verse 10. Verse 10 reads, “This is how we know who the children of God are and the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother.” Then you move into the second phase. “This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. Do not be like Cain who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother.” He belonged to him.

Cain is the only Old Testament figure mentioned in this book. What a mark against the human race! According to Genesis, the first baby born is a murderer and the second is the one murdered. Paternity is marked out by our emotional relationships as well as by our obedience or lack of obedience to Christ. Why did Cain murder his brother? John wants to know and asks the question himself. Because, we’re told, his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous.

Now in the account in Genesis 4, we’re told Cain brought the fruit of the ground as an offering before the Lord and his brother brought something from the flocks, as he was a shepherd. He brought that before the Lord. The Lord accepted the latter but not the former. Not because he had stipulated sheep and had forbidden carrots but because, we’re told, God had ownership, God had recognition, for Abel and his gift and not for Cain and his gift. There was something in Cain and his gift God did not recognize, that God saw was not right.

But that still didn’t provoke the murder. The murder came when Cain, like a spoiled child, was hurt because his brother had won some approval from God Cain himself did not receive. In other words: jealousy, bitterness, envy. Sometimes that is the root of a fair bit of animus against Christians. Sometime people look at Christians and just don’t like the fact they do have their lives together, if they do in a particular case, which is almost reason enough to hate them right there.

But sometimes such envy can go on in the group, too, can’t it? We see some Christian who seems to have his or her act all together and instantly we don’t like them. If we find a leader rising in the group, they’re all right if we can sidle up to them and rise with the leader, but if the leader is over there and I’m over here then, clearly, there’s something wrong with the leader. “I know he talks a good line, but his quiet time isn’t very good.” Or, “She’s ever so effective in evangelism. She should be here to study.” And on and on and on.

Gradually, gradually we prove yet again the natural person, the person without the Spirit, or the person in outright defiance of the seed God has placed within us, is selfish. It’s self-centered; it wants to please self. It is not interested in building up the other person unless it’s going to build us up as well. John insisted this love has always been of the essence of the Christian gospel. “This is the message you heard from the beginning.”

The gospel does not change with respect to its truth nor with respect to its moral demands. Phrased differently, love is a test for regeneracy, for eternal life, because its antithesis is hatred, which is sin. Verses 14 and 15: “We know that we have passed from death to life …” That is, enjoyed the new birth. “… because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death.”

We’re going to come to the way these tests give us assurance that we have passed from death to life in a couple of weeks, but it is worth pausing just briefly and thinking about this. This means Christians ought to be able to look back and say, “I do love the brothers. That is, I do love other Christians now in a way that I didn’t before. I love really unlovable types, all kinds of people with different personalities from mine. I care for them now the way I never cared for them before.”

That becomes evidence God’s seed is working away within you, that you are a twice-born person. “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him.” You say, “Well, that’s going too far. I mean, I don’t hate. I may not love him. I mean, sometimes he’s pretty hard to love, but I don’t hate him. I wish he would get transferred to Oxford, but I don’t hate him.”

No, we cannot duck. Jesus himself made this same basic moral judgment in Matthew, chapter 5, did he not? The person who hates has got the same germ of murder in him as the murderer. The person who lusts has the same germ of adultery in him as the adulterer. Love is a test for regeneration, then, for eternal life because its antithesis is hatred and that’s sin.

That’s why Jesus can say love is the mark of the Christian. “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Do you want to see a great year in Cambridge, in CICCU? Yes, increase your prayer meetings. Yes, be concerned for outreach. Give heartily to these campaigns. Support your president. But love one another.

When I was an undergraduate at McGill University, one year we heard a speaker come in right at the beginning of the year and speak from James 1. James says, “My brothers, count it all joy when you fall into various temptations.” He preached away at it, made a lot of points I don’t remember.

Afterward, half a dozen of us got together and said, “You know, we do a lot of complaining and a lot of criticizing. We do an awful lot of it. Let’s make a covenant together to take this seriously. Anytime any one of us in our group hears another one complaining or criticizing, we’ll quote this verse.” We shook hands on it, had a word of prayer, and went away. You know what happened. The next day, somebody came on campus moaning, “Math exam at 10:00. Advanced Calculus. It’s awful.”

“Count it all joy, my brother, when you fall into various temptations.”

“Tuition’s going up again.”

“Count it all joy, my brother, when you fall into various temptations.”

“Did you see what she did? You know, I have been going out with her for three weeks!”

“Count it all joy, my brother, when you fall into various temptations.”

It didn’t help. It was like pouring raw salt into all the wounds, but gradually after the weeks passed … We kept this up. We had vowed. “Pay your vows to the Lord.” Actually, it got to the point to where at first we were intimidated to complain or criticize, and then gradually we saw the great wisdom and a kind of click took place, a switch in mentality. We spent much more time trying to encourage one another so we could hear complaints without being smart-mouths, but at the same time we weren’t quite so self-focused.

We learned to love one another. By mid-year the whole group was transformed. That year we saw more conversions than any other year I was at McGill, in four years. “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Let your university know, let your college know that Christians love one another. Jesus commanded it. It is the mark of genuine Christianity. It is the mark of regeneration. Not only so, but the motive and the standard and the empowering of the Christian’s love flow from the sacrifice of Christ.

Do you hear this powerful verse? Verse 16: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ has laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” The motive of our loving? Is Christ’s sacrifice. The standard? Is Christ’s sacrifice. The empowering? It flows from Christ’s sacrifice. The Spirit is bequeathed to us because of Christ’s sacrifice. This is how we know what love is, not because we are feeling mushy or spongy or sentimental.

There have been Christian revivals where all that has been gained is a kind of sentimentality. In the so-called “Kentucky folk revivals” in the last century, do you know what historians have discovered? The number of illegitimate births rose nine months after every one they’ve examined.

It’s not shocking. All these wonderful camp meetings. You can guess what happened. Jill and Bob feel loving towards one another. “We love one another. We accept one another in Jesus.” We accept one another in some other ways, too! There is a kind of smarminess to Christian love that won’t do. No. No. No. No.

The motive and the standard is this kind of self-denying love of Jesus himself. Now John puts teeth into it. Love is not spongy sentimentality. It is intensely practical, so he ends up the paragraph by saying, “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.”

One commentator writes these words (they’re from the last century; the language is a bit old, but he has the point exactly): “We must above all beware of crediting to ourselves as love what is but the mouthing of well-sounding phrases, the play of imagination upon lofty ideals, or the thrill of merely emotional sympathies. We are apt to regard our appreciation of these ideals and our susceptibility to these emotions as entitling us to a high place in the moral sphere, to feel as if we had paid every debt to love when we have praised its beauty, felt its charm, and experienced its sentiment.”

John wants us to reach for our wallet. At a major seminary in the United States a number of years ago a test was made. The students were divided into two groups. One group was told they were going to listen to a lecture on the parable of the good Samaritan by a famous New Testament scholar. “Please prepare your Greek texts. Read your commentaries. Come ready.” The other group was told they were going to hear another lecture by a famous Greek scholar on an entirely different passage.

Then both groups had their times manipulated. One sub-group thought they were early, another sub-group thought they were on time, and a third sub-group thought they were late. The same was done in the other group as well. The bells ring. Both groups go off to their respective lectures. Some think they’re early, some think they’re on time, and some think they’re late.

Along the way there is an actor. He’s dressed in old clothes. He’s smelling of booze and vomit. He’s bleeding, apparently from a gash in his head, and he’s groaning by the side of the pavement. “Help me. Help me.” The question: Which group had a higher number of students stop? The one that was heading for the lecture on the Good Samaritan or the one that had a lecture on something else? Answer: No statistical difference. None.

But there was a lot of difference between those who thought they were on time in both groups and those who thought they were late. Those who thought they were late didn’t have time, so while they were rushing off to hear a lecture on the Good Samaritan, they stepped over this groaning person. But those who were early had time to stop.

Now in the first instance John, here, is talking about love for Christians. I will try to put this in a larger framework on another night, but the principles are still exceedingly important. The kind of love he envisages is like Christ’s love, self-denying. It is sacrificial. It costs something. It might cost you in time or convenience or money or discombobulation. Your life will be put out of joint. You get involved with other people and they cost something.

I don’t want to lay a kind of guilt-trip on you so at the end of the day you’re so busy going around as a nosy people-helper you don’t have time to do your studies. That’s not the point. Nevertheless, it is the case that Christ’s life in us so pulsates it must change our attitude toward our brothers and sisters in Christ. It is going to demonstrate in help, in practical, self-denying help. Love, clearly, or else we may question the reality of our very conversion.

3. The Christian’s determination.

Now the chapter ends, and it ends in a rather surprising way. John says twice-born people whose lives approach conformity to Christ enjoy a remarkable double confidence. He says it’s not just that he is laying things on you, but there’s a privilege, too. Where twice-born people find their lives are growing in conformity to Christ, you enjoy a double confidence.

A) Assurance before God

“This is how we know we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.” Do you hear what John is saying? He is saying when we examine ourselves before God, when we look at his Word and hear what it says, and we look in the secret recesses, in the dark things of our lives, and we see lots of sins, we can, nevertheless, see God’s life is pulsating within us because we obey where we didn’t and we love where we didn’t.

We set our hearts at rest so we may have to say, “I may not be what I ought to be, but I’m not what I used to be.” That, too, is a mark of confidence before God. We see the power of new birth working within us. We’re still ashamed we are not better because we shouldn’t be sinning at all. Every sin is inexcusable. But, but, at the same time we still say, “I do see change. I do see growth. I have assurance you’re working within me.”

On top of all that … John doesn’t want to let it go there. He’s coming to some bigger points later, but he doesn’t want to let people go there, as if they’re sort of teetering on the edge of it all. He has already declared him to be the one who sends his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Our ultimate confidence is in God himself.

We will return to this question of assurance on the last night. Nevertheless, it is worth noting in passing part of our assurance before God comes out of the fact that we are not what we used to be. That becomes an incentive for disciplined, spiritual growth.

B) Assurance in your prayer life

“Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command to believe in the name of his son Jesus Christ and to love one another as he commanded us.” Have you tried sustained prayer when you’re nurturing bitterness? It’s hard to pray then, isn’t it?

You get some secret sin really well nurtured on the side and then you come and tell me in six weeks’ time about your devotional life. Either praying will drive you away from sin or sin will drive you away from praying. You find promises of God in Scripture, and you get down on your knees to pray, and God seems so alien. The roof of your room seems as if its bronze. Your prayers just bounce off. The whole thing seems like such a ridiculous exercise.

But if you hate sin, if you fight it, if you’ve discovered forgiveness from him who is faithful and just and who cleanses us from all unrighteousness, if you see some signs of growth in your life, not what you would like, but you still see those signs of growth and you thank God for them, then you come before your heavenly Father with a whole different attitude, a quiet confidence. He knows what is best. He is a good God. You start asking for the things that please him, and you know he’s the kind of God that answers.

Your whole prayer life is transformed. I want to deal a bit more with that one, too. John returns to that theme. But I tell you this: No Christian enjoys an effective prayer life, a sense of the presence of God, of doing business with God, of interceding with others, who is quietly nurturing sin and resentment. It never happens. But where you fight sin and finds God’s gracious provision of forgiveness in his Son, prayer itself becomes a delight.

Hypocrisy? Oh, it’s in the church, all right. We have not yet been transformed. May God help us when we do play the hypocrite. But may God grant that CICCU may always be the sort of organization where it is important to argue hypocrites are there because they preach a kind of gospel that insists we ought to be holy, we ought to be loving, we ought to grow in conformity to Christ, and we’re ashamed of all the times when we are not what we ought to be and find our relief and forgiveness in the blood of Jesus Christ which cleanses us from all sin. Let us pray.

Forgive us, Lord God, if we start play-acting on these matters. Work in us deeply by your Spirit. Grant that the same Spirit who began a good work in us would bring it to perfection and rout out the dark recesses of hidden, filthy, self-centered things and so transform us that not only we ourselves, as we look back, but others who watch us will know our growth in conformity to Christ.

We know, Lord God, as we grow we become aware of new layers of hidden, dark things. We know, Lord God, we will not be utterly transformed until the end. We know the most senior and godly of saints are most aware of their own hidden faults and, therefore, we thank you that we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous One, who is the propitiation for our sins.

Lord God, grant we might have quick recourse to him again and again and again. Yet, far from using this great forgiveness as an excuse for ongoing sin, grant we may recognize afresh sin is not done here, that twice-born do not sin, they must not sin, they cannot sin, and every sin is inexcusable. Keep us in this tension until Jesus comes again and we see him as he is. We ask for his glory and for his people’s good, amen.