Today we went back over the last three weeks in 1 John, and added observations where we missed them.
Springfield Baptist Church
September 1st 2024 - Pastor James Tyler - 1 John 5:1-15
All right, 1 John, chapter 5, we'll begin it, verse 1. Everyone who, I can read it when it's up there, maybe I won't need these. Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God and everyone who loves the Father, loves whoever has been born of Him. By this we know that we love the children of God when we love God and obey His commandments. For this is the love of God that we keep His commandments and His commandments are not burdensome. You will recall, because it wasn't that long ago, that we talked about the necessity of the new birth here, everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God. The idea is not every human being on the face of the planet has been born of God. As many as believe in Jesus Christ, to them He gives the right to be called children of God. So, there's not a literal physical birth, but there is a literal spiritual birth wherein the dead sinner enslaved to sin is brought to life able to be obedient to and pleasing to God in a way that prior to that rebirth we couldn't be. The reason that you need a rebirth is because in the fall, not in autumn, but in the fall of man, you have the permanent from human perspective, corruption of our nature. So Adam and Eve sinned, everybody who descends from Adam, therefore, because he's our federal head, as they like to call it, everyone that descends from Adam is now bound to the same tendencies for sin as Adam and Eve were. The nature of man becomes corrupted, we go from being able to be obedient and pleasing to God to unable to be obedient and pleasing to God, yet still responsible for being obedient and pleasing to God. So the new birth provides us with a new nature. If I weren't lazy and we're more creative, which I blame the fluoride in the water because I used to be pretty creative, I would draw this out for you in a way that you could visualize it so that we can get a better sense of the superiority of the new nature that we have in Christ Jesus. And so what I would ask you to do is in your mind's eye picture you moving from chains and evil to freedom and goodness of God, right? Just picture you moving out of enslavement and evil into freedom and the goodness of God. Get that picture in your mind. And then we also saw there are consequences of the new birth that we might interpret as somewhat unintended, right? So he says by this we know we love the children of God when we love God in obeys commandments for this is the love of God, we keep his commandments and his commandments are not burdensome. Tough to illustrate commandment keeping in this mental picture that you have right now of yourself moving out of enslavement and evil into freedom and the goodness of God. But the way that you need to think about it is what I used to want to do, I don't want to do as much anymore and things that I never used to want to do I now want to do. This is not gritting your teeth and trying hard. This is not white knuckle obedience. What happens is there's a change of heart as a result of the new birth, you have a change of heart that makes you actually desire the things that God desires before. You might have feared the punishment of hell and the wrath of God, but now you have new desires to be pleasing to him that you didn't have. So commandment keeping there where he says we keep his commandments and his commandments aren't burdensome, he's trying to tell you something about your heart. If the commandments of God are burdensome, it's because you may not actually be born again. And that shouldn't, like I'm not saying that to freak you out and maybe, well, what am I supposed to do? No, no, I'm just trying to point out that if your heart's been changed, there's an involuntary desire and preference toward the things of God. You don't make that happen. So if it's not in you, you're not going to make it be in you. What you need is to be born again. So you have to look at you and go, well, I don't keep the commandments and I don't want to. Like, I'm afraid of hell, I'm afraid God's going to hate me, but I don't actually want to keep his commandments and then what I would say to you is, then his commandments are probably burdensome for you, aren't they? Because what the commandments carry with them, if you don't want to obey them, is the promise of wrath and judgment. So you hear a commandment, you look at your life, you go, uh-oh, and then every time you look back at God in heaven, his face is angrier than the time before when you looked at him. And so you keep trying to do stuff and trying to do stuff and everything that you do just ends up being more sin and you're like, I mean, I don't know how to stop. It's just, it's what comes most naturally to me and you sin and you turn around. He's even angrier and you're on this cycle. It's going deeper and deeper into enslavement and evil and the longer that you're on the earth, apart from Christ, kind of typically the grosser that gets and the worse are your, the worse are, the worse your habits become. The solution then is not rigorous religious activity, it's you need to be born again. How does that happen? Well, you've got to embrace Jesus Christ by faith. You have to pray, confess your sins and seek to turn away from Him. And what will happen is when Jesus saves you from sin, you will not see sinning altogether. But what happens is his commandments aren't burdensome. They're not. They just aren't. It's like magic. I don't know what else to tell you. I used to work really hard to try to prove to God and anybody who might be watching that I don't find his commandments burdensome when I did. And how that comes off when you're faking Christianity because you're installed in the church before you're ever a Christian, which is the case for most people, let's be honest. When you're faking Christianity, you're projecting this version of yourself out there on Sunday that is completely different than the one you project from Monday through Saturday. And then you live with this divide in your personality where you're like, okay, which compartment does this life experience go? Is this my Christian life experience compartment or my feeding, my flesh life experience compartment? And you become more and more bifurcated and miserable. You give your heart to Jesus a thousand times and nothing ever changes. But when you take hold of the reality of the love of God that you should be called his son or daughter, that'll change your heart. That'll really change you. Commandment keeping is tough to illustrate, but I'm telling you, if you're like, I hate it. I don't want to do it. The solution is not to try harder to keep the commandments. The solution is to get to know Jesus. And then the other unintended consequence of the new birth is it turns out we have siblings. So we're just chasing redemption, I'm like, ah, don't want to go to hell. Angry God is not my favorite. So you start to explore the gospel and you discover that there are promises for sonship or daughtership, if you need the Bible to be more egalitarian than it is. Just remember it was the sons who inherited everything. So that you're called a son is probably a good thing. Yeah. You begin to find the promise of sonship in the scriptures. You embrace it by faith and then all of a sudden you find there's a bunch of other people that have done the same thing or are doing the same thing. And the Bible is like, hey, I have inseparably linked you to them. God in heaven, by adopting you into his household, giving you his name, making you a relative of Jesus, also makes you a brother or a sister to all the other jacked up sinners who have come to Jesus for salvation. And so then the Bible goes, I would God through his word says, I would like you to treat one another a certain kind of way. So what I want you to do is love one another. And that's hard because even though we have, you know, his commandments are in burdensome, we still have the remaining flesh and all of its desires that we have to contend with and I don't know about you, but my desires are primarily about magnifying me and other people needing my time, attention, affection, wisdom, prayers, like those things really take away from the energy and time that I have to magnify myself. So I wasn't expecting siblings. I was just trying to be not in hell, not separated from my Creator and then I ended up with siblings and lo and behold, God has so designed this salvation that we have that your siblings become an integral part to your understanding of and clinging to Jesus Christ for salvation. So you get encouragement, you get every now and then a little bit of maybe some discipline, some correction, some rebuke, some exhortation, all these things happen in the context of relationship. They don't generally, like you're not doing most of what's in the Bible if you're sitting in a room in your basement with just a light bulb on a chain. You have to get out and rub shoulders with other people, right? And so, oh my gosh, the implications of that are myriad. This is a diagnostic. At the same time it's given for your good as a commandment, it's a diagnostic too. If you don't really care about people, it's kind of like the commandments are burdensome, you might actually have an issue where you think that you are in a spiritual condition that you're not actually in. You think that you know God, you think that you've made friends with Him because you've had some emotional experiences at church or whatever. But listen to me, listen to me, Audrey. It's about how you interact with other people in this context of the family of God. That's what is going to tell you besides commandment, keeping that's what's going to tell you the most about the authenticity of your faith. So if you could care less, I'm just telling you that's a problem and it's God's way of letting you know maybe what you think has happened in your heart hasn't actually happened. Now, if you do, if you care about people, even just a little bit, like you spend a little bit of yourself to help other people, in my estimation, that's a God thing. Because I'm about me, folks, left to myself, even when I'm talking bad about me, really what I'm doing is like humbly letting you know how amazing I am. That's what I do left to myself. So to find in my heart the capacity to stop having me at the center and move you there even for a nanosecond, that did not originate with me, folks. That came from Jesus Christ in me, so it's a diagnostic, commandment keeping, love of the brethren. Tough to illustrate though, other than what you should do is you drew this mental picture of yourself in chains, in evil, and then in freedom in the goodness of God. Just draw a lot of other people over there with you and then you dying to yourself so that you could get along with them. There's no way to draw them dying to themselves to get along with you. Don't worry about that. It's just you decrease, Jesus increases, but tough to illustrate. So onward we go, verse 4, "For everyone who has been born of God, overcomes the world, and this is the victory that has overcome the world our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?" All right now. So to our benefit here, let's carefully define our terms. In Galatians a couple of years ago, we defined the flesh. Remember, I told you, we're not talking about this. We're talking about all that remains of your sin nature. So after you become a Christian, you take most of what you are with you into this new life and it's a sanctification is that forever seems like process where those parts of you that are not glorifying or pleasing to God are being put to death, are diminishing. And the flesh is those parts of you that are like, "No, I don't want to obey the commandment. I want to go to the casino and spend my retirement so I don't have to work anymore." Okay, I'm by myself. Yeah, well. That's the flesh. I don't want to be faithful to my spouse. I want to run around. That's the flesh. I don't want to take care of my body. I want to eat trash. That's the flesh. It's not the spirit. I don't want to be kind to the people that I live in my household with. I want them to just serve me when I need them and otherwise disappear. That's the flesh. In 1 John 2, we defined what I called the desire triumvirate. Remember this? So in 1 John 2, 15 it says, "Don't love the world or the things in the world." And I'm like, "I love my dog. Is that a sin? I love my kids, I love my wife, those are part of my world. I love my guitar." Now, I don't do acts of the will of coming to my emotion designed to do my guitar good at my own expense. None of them may be a restring occasionally, but I really am fond of those things, right? I don't believe that's what's in view. Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him for all that's in the world. This is 1 John 2, 16. All that is in the world, the desires of the flesh, desires of the eyes, pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world and the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. So we said, I mean, I said it and nobody opposed me, so I'm assuming you agree. The desire triumvirate then would be eyes, appetite, and ego, right? So when these things are engaged in your prioritization and decision making, generally speaking, that's a sign that you're loving the world. If we don't have a diagnostic for the commandments, then it might be easier for us to get away with not keeping them. Does that make sense? So how do I know if I'm keeping the commandments and not love the world? I just described my dog, my guitar, my family, maybe for you, it's the car, the tools, the makeup. I don't know, self-tanner, whatever it is, the thing that you love. Is that what's in view? And I think it could be, yeah, if eyes, appetite, ego are engaged in appropriating and applying and making use of those things, then very possibly yes, that's love of the world. But what happens is in Genesis 2, pardon me, 15, the Lord took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man saying, you may rather surely eat of every tree in the garden but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat from the day you eat of it dying, you will die. So God essentially said, as we all know, for your own good, do not take from this tree and do not eat, excuse me, from this tree. This is not a threat. This isn't like God going, listen, person that I made, you're going to have all this. But if you so much as think about touching this, I will beat you until you're dead. That's not what God did. What God did was he set up the garden, included things in the garden for reasons I can't fully understand, but I think I kind of know, we'll get to that in a second, that they weren't allowed to interact with and he says to them, not if you even, don't you even, that's us. What he says is listen, for your good, for your flourishing, don't touch this. This is not for your good or for your flourishing. Now, my agnostic and atheist friends, I mean, I will never forget this, doing a gospel presentation. And this is when I wasn't, like I was, I was pretty fluent, but I wasn't as fluent as I am now because I hadn't turned it into this by-wrote thing that I jammed down your throats every few Sundays. But I'm doing gospel presentation and this guy was an atheist. He goes, why would, if God's good, why would he put the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden and tell Adam and Eve not to eat of it? That's like putting a gun on the coffee table where there's a two-year-old in the house and telling him not to touch it. And I was like, oof, that's a tough one. And admittedly, like I didn't have an answer in that moment. I was just like, well, God knows what he's doing and, you know, I felt, I didn't like undo my faith, but I felt bad that I didn't have a good answer and it, you know, compelled me to actually give it some thought and I did and what I've come up with brilliantly. Yeah, it's not that brilliant and I didn't come up with it. As I always tell you all, I'm not insightful. I just read a lot and steal ideas from other people, right? So what I found was that our good, our fulfillment, our satisfaction, our deepest satisfaction is found in being obedient to God because he made us that way. So if he doesn't give us something to do and be obedient, we're not satisfied, right? Why does he allow evil? I don't know. I don't know that. Why do you let Satan into the, I don't know God's good and he knows what he's doing. So I'm still right. I'm still in process. I'm still figuring things out. Anyway, the point is God essentially said for your own good, don't take and eat from that tree. And all right. So is there a threat built into the commandment? Yes. He says, "Don't do this for in the day you eat of it." What? Dying. Dying. You're going to die. Yeah. And so it's not that there's no threat, but it's not only there's you even, it's not that. So how does sin come about? Eve is lied to. That's important, right? She's deceived. She believes the lie. She looks. She discerns two things right off the bat. This is food. This will make me wise. She ignored one thing. God said don't. That's all it takes. So eyes, appetite, ego and really that the boastful pride of life is what the devil told her when she first pushed back. He's like, you're not, come on. You won't die. God just knows the day he'll be, he's afraid you're going to be like him. And so boastful pride of life says, oh, I can sin and it won't cost me anything. I'll be fine. I can, I won't die. God didn't say, if you realize that I'm wrong, you won't die. He said, in the day you eat of it, dying, you will die. She ignores that. So God saying, don't eat this is no longer ruling her mind. What's happening in your life when the desire triumvirate is engaged in your decision making is what God has said is no longer ruling in your mind. I don't want to obey my parents. Well, you won't be the first or the last child to not obey your parents. But let me tell you what God has said is no longer ruling in your mind. Your desires are eyes appetite ego. Eve believes the lie, boastful pride of life. I can sin and it won't kill me. She's being ruled by something else. So John writes, do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the father is not in him. This is 1 John 2, 15 through 17, right? So we've been over this. All that's in the world, desires of the flesh, desires of the eyes, boastful pride of life or pride of life is not from the father, but is from the world and the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. How can we stop being ruled by the desire triumvirate? How can we obey this commandment? How can we like break the cycle? I'm in love with this sin. My eyes love it. My appetite loves it. My ego is convinced me there's not going to be any consequences for it. How do I stop being in love with that sin? And look, I'll illustrate this negatively. That might not be a good idea. Okay, Kerry says do it. All right. Most marriages do not fail in a vacuum. Generally speaking, there is an incursion from the outside. So there's husband's wife together in marriage, and keep the only unto her. Keep the only unto him till death do you part. If so, say I will, I will, right? And then here comes another hymn or another her. And the eyes are drawn and the appetite is drawn and the ego is drawn. My joys are better in any way, he treats me like crap, he doesn't even appreciate it. Or she's gaining weight, never since she had the kid, she doesn't want me anymore. And as long as there's somebody else to go to, what happens is, rip. What am I illustrating? Well, negatively, if you're in love with your sin, you're clinging to it. Your vows are for it, and you don't know how to give it up. What you need is an incursion from the outside. You need something else to love, you need something better to, you see what I mean? Like you can see it in the destruction of a marriage much more easily, because that's a bad thing, right? We don't want incursions from the outside into our marriage. Okay, thanks. You're all like, what? We do want an incursion into the marriage that we have with our sinful desires. We need to love something else. You can't just stop loving something. You can't. You can't. Victory in the battle against temptation. Back up a verse. Or don't. Everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world, and this is the victory that has overcome the world, our faith. Victory in the battle against temptation has any effect for the Christian already been won. In effect, it's already been won. And Jesus says in John 10, "My sheep hear my voice. I know them. They follow me. I give them what kind of life, temporarily, or is it eternal? It's eternal life. I give them forever life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My father was given them to me. He's greater than all. No one is able to snatch them out of the Father saying, "I and the Father are." One, everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world, and this is the victory that's overcome the world, our faith. So what we're saying is, our union with God cannot be broken, right? Stay with me. Our union with God cannot be broken. Because what? Because God secured it. Jesus paid for it. Nobody can take it away, okay? That means that for the Christian fellowship with God once established through new life cannot be rebroken again. You come into the world separated from God with your sin nature, and as soon as you're like cognitively able, you start adding to the mountain of sins that humanity has done, and the older you get before you bend a knee to King Jesus, kind of the worse that gets, the grosser that gets, and then here comes the gospel, seizes you, pulls you out of slavery into freedom, out of evil, into the goodness of God, and nothing can change that. What if you sin? Now you're over here in the goodness of God. What if you sin? Well, everyone who's been born of God overcomes the world, and this is the victory that's overcome the world, our faith. Jesus said, "No one will snatch them out of my hand. I give them eternal life. The Father's got them. I've got them." So what have you sinned? You're not re-breaking your fellowship with God, so that's a double-edged sword because that means you're dragging the Holy Spirit with you whenever you do that thing. Just not advisable, the Bible clearly says don't grieve the Holy Spirit, but you're never going to be left, and you're never going to be forsaken. That's victory. In effect, that assures us that we're already victorious, hence everyone who's been born of God overcomes the world, and this is the victory that's overcome the world, our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? Faith is the victory. All right, verse 6. This is He who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not by the water only, but by the water and the blood, and the Spirit is one who testifies because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify, the Spirit, the water and the blood, and these three agree. So the testimony of Jesus' baptism, crucifixion, and the accompanying confirmation is what I believe this is a reference to. The other possibility, the one that I'm most lean towards besides that interpretation would be when Jesus is spirit at Calvary, and water and blood flows out, which I'm good with that. If you read this text and you're like, "Oh, I think that's what that's talking about." That's fine, I mean, it's not a huge issue, but the reason that I believe it's a reference to Jesus' baptism, crucifixion, and the corresponding testimony of the Holy Spirit at those events is what's being testified. If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has born concerning his Son. Let's keep going, 10. Whoever believes in the Son of God as this testimony in himself, whoever does not believe God has made him a liar because he's not believed the testimony that God has born concerning his Son. So it makes sense to me, Jesus comes up out of the water, his baptism. You hear a voice from heaven saying, "This is my Son in whom I'm well pleased." Remember corresponding testimony, Jesus being proclaimed as the Son of God, right? Then you have, at the crucifixion, blood shed in the moments leading up to, and while Jesus is on the cross dying, he breathes his last. The next thing that happens is tombs are opened up, and people that had died walk into the city and start saying hello to their relatives. That's pretty powerful testimony. Rocks split open, the earth shakes, there's darkness across the land for about six hours. And the veil and the temple that separated the holy of holies from the holy places torn into, that's pretty powerful testimony. And what's being testified is verse 11, this is the testimony that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life, whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. Pretty cut and dry, right? So let's draw this back to what we're trying to do as a congregation. I have, this year is 20 years, yeah, 20 years since I first entertained the possibility that I might be called to pastoral ministry, and I spent the first 17 years after that struggling because I kept seeing things happening that I couldn't reconcile with what I was reading. The things that I was seeing happening that I couldn't reconcile with the gospel that I was reading were happening, had their orientation in somebody who I had decided at a very young age was the most Christian, right? So when you're watching somebody that you believe in your heart of hearts is the most Christian, do things that don't line up and I don't mean like, oops, make mistakes. I mean like, do things to magnify themselves when the entire Bible is declaring loudly that God is the only one who much should be made of and that the church does not exist to benefit and serve the pastor but the inverse is true. When you're 14 and you get the sense that this is basically as close to God as you're going to get on earth as this person and then when you're 34 and you look at that person you're like, it just doesn't line up. It's very disorienting and it takes good men in your life to shake you awake and make you go sometimes what you thought when you're 14 wasn't right and you've got to reevaluate and reconsider and in my case, disconnect and redeploy, right? So I'm consumed with this sense of obligation to this body of believers that I'm not going to be perfect. I'm not even going to come close, right? So the pressure is off in that regard. I'm a mess and most of you know it. I'm not great at executing the mission of the church. I don't have much practice with it. What I have lots of practice with is glorifying the man of God. I don't have a lot of practice with executing the mission of the church. Like I'm figuring it out but I knew this. When we landed here I knew, draw to Jesus, develop in community, deploy to culture, display the glory of God. I knew that. I had between my mentors and my Bible at least figured that much out but I just have to admit I'm not really sure what it looks like or how to do it because I haven't really had it demonstrated for me. I can read about it. I can talk to other guys that are doing it but I don't have a good instinct, right? So one of the things that I've tried to do since we got here is just amputate as much as possible, amputate the desire to glorify myself. Now what has to happen? If you think you're doing that, if you think I'm doing a good job of cutting off my own ego, you're just deceived. You're not doing a good job. But if you pray and you ask God for help, Lord I need a decrease so that you can increase the most amazing thing happens. God will orchestrate events in your life which force you to constantly be like, oh I'm really not that great. Really stuff will happen in your life. And let me tell you, for the last three years, and that's how long it's been now, every time I start thinking, oh we're nailing it, we are nailing it, mainly me, but we're nailing it. What happens is something in my life occurs that clips my wings so to speak. So here's the temptation. I would like to quit, I would like to not be up here anymore on Sunday mornings. I would like to just go work my job and go home and freaking rest like the rest of us. I don't want to play worship, I don't want to preach, I don't want to lead the church into deploying to the culture. I don't want to, because it would be much easier for me to glorify myself if I didn't have to do this, that's the temptation. So what does the word say? This is the testimony. Who's it about? Who's it about? Where am I in there? Why don't I see me in there? That's weird, because the example that was set for me for 20 years made it all about the person who stands right here and I'm being unkind, I shouldn't speak in such absolute terms. It too much made it about the person who stands right here, that's the truth. Verse 9, "If we receive the testimony of men, oh, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God, that he has born or carried or given, word to concerning his son, whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself, whoever does not believe God has made him a liar, because he's not believed the testimony that God is born concerning his son, and this is the testimony that God gave us eternal life and this life is in his son, and whoever has the son has life and whoever does not have the son of God does not have life. Are we really supposed to just take that out there? Is that what we're supposed to do? Are we really supposed to just go out there and do the things that we've practiced doing on one another, loving each other, dying to self? Are we really supposed to go out there and do that with them? And then be like, "If you'd like to know more, come to the weird blue dilapidated building on Locust Street in Springfield on a Sunday, because if nothing else, there will be somebody standing up in the front, clearly and concisely explaining the gospel to you." That doesn't sound that hard. We're already doing it here, and think about this with me, love the brethren means be like Jesus to people who should be being like Jesus. It's not that hard. And when it is hard, guess what? You got the benefit of being like, "You ought to know better, Denise. You ought to know better. You claim to be a Christian." We at least get to do that. We can exhort and reproduce. Out in the world, you can't. You just got to take it. They do whatever they're going to do. You just got to take it, because you're, well, how do they treat the master? You think you're better than him? You just got to take it. So we practice it in here where we at least get to stomp our feet every now and then it goes straighten up. Then you go out there and you do the same thing, and people will be like, "Somebody, believe me. You'll be like, 'That's wild. That's wild that Kevin doesn't cuss me out when I do it to him at work or whatever it is." And then Kevin can be like, "Well, if you'd like to find out more, come to the dilapidated building on Locust Street. There'll at least be somebody up there with a clear, concise gospel presentation Sunday by Sunday." And then what happens is we grow deeper roots in the gospel, get sustained in our spiritual walk, and then maybe we grow this way. And maybe someday the building's not dilapidated. We knock it down, put something back here in the back corner that's a little bit nicer and more attractive to the folks that roll up and doesn't look like a haunted house anymore. Those things could happen. It's not that hard is my point. It's just not. I don't know how to do it. I don't have any instinct for it being on mission with the gospel. But it can be that difficult if you can be fluent in it, draw to Jesus, develop in community. So know Him and then practice loving. How hard can it be to go out there in the world and do it? Folks, I do it as much as I can already. I just don't invite people because I'm like, "Where are we going to put them? Where are we going to put them?" There's room right now, right? This is a bad Sunday to make that point. But we're almost done with 1 John, and what happens when we get done is we've got to deploy the culture. We've got to go out into the world and tell them the truth about Jesus. That's kind of scary. 13, I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know you have eternal life. Three points, you can know that you're saved, how you can know you're saved, and you might still not be sure. That's what we said. You struggle with knowing that you're a Christian. You can know that's first, I write these things that you may know. You can know. How can you know? Everything we just talked about this morning, all of it. There's two diagnostics, commandment, keeping love of the brethren, right? Those are diagnostics. Those are tools you can use to check. Do I know God? Do you keep commandments? Not perfectly, but really? Do you love the brethren? Not perfectly, but really, right? And then, are you in relationship with Jesus Christ would be a third question you could ask. That's how you can know that you're saved. If you're not in relationship with Jesus Christ, you're not saved. You won't be able to love the brethren. You won't be able to keep the commandments, just have a fear of judgment that drives you in terror to, like, attend church and do religious stuff. You may still not know. So, 14 and 15, and what this will be done. This is the confidence that we have toward Him. If we ask anything, according to His will, he hears us, and if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we've asked of Him. The idea here is that John has just got done saying you can know that you have eternal life. If you struggle with knowing that, maybe you should ask Him for help knowing that. I would like assurance of my salvation. You pray and you ask God, can I have assurance of my salvation? What the Bible is suggesting is that it would be awfully sadistic for God to say, you may know. I'm writing this that you may know that you have eternal life and then go, except for you, Nikki, except for you, except for you, Leah. What? Why would He do that? God may, four times out of season, withdraw the comfort of His presence, the assurance that corresponds with that. But if you want to know that you're saved, ask Him. Let's pray. [BLANK_AUDIO]