Introduction:
A. How many of you like or liked taking tests at school?
B. There’s a story told about a college student who was taking the course in ornithology (or-nith-ology) which is a study of birds?
1. This class in ornithology had the reputation of being the most difficult class in the whole curriculum.
2. And the professor was an extremely difficult professor. Everybody feared him.
3. But it was a required course, and every student had to take it if they wanted a biology degree.
4. As the course began, the professor announced that the final would be a very difficult test and it would comprise a large portion of their grade. So you had better do well on that test.
5. Everybody studied. They took copious notes. They made sure they understood everything the professor said.
6. On the day of the final exam, the students filed into the lecture hall with sweaty palms, extremely nervous.
6. At the front of the classroom was a table with 5 cages on it.
7. Each cage had a cover and beneath the cover they could see the feet and spindly legs of a bird.
8. At the sound of the bell, the professor addressed the students, “Here’s the test. You can see there are 5 birds and they’re all covered except for their feet and legs. You must tell me the identity of each of those 5 birds by looking only at their feet and legs.”
9. Everyone had studied long and hard, but no one had anticipated such a test.
10. They were all straining, trying to remember something, anything, that could help them pass the test.
11. Finally, one student stood up and said, “This is ridiculous. This is the craziest test I have ever seen, and you’re the worst professor in this whole school.”
12. He continued, “I quit. I‘m out of here. I’m not going to take this test.” And he turned and walked toward the door.
13. “Just a minute young man.” said the professor. “Who are you? I demand your name right now.”
14. The young man stopped, took a long look at the professor, and then pulling up both of his pant legs said, “You tell me."
C. Indeed, some tests are very hard and some are unfair.
1. But tests are necessary.
2. We need to know how we are doing and we need to konw where we stand.
3. Spiritually we often wonder if we are on the right track.
4. We wonder if our faith and our spiritual life are pleasing to God.
D. If you have been here for most of the lessons in this series on 1 John, then you know the context of this letter.
1. You know that John is writing to a church that has gone through some hard times.
2. There has been a group that has left the church because of a doctrinal split, and John is trying to encourage and reassure those who are left that they are okay.
3. The group that remains in the church is wondering if they have the truth, and so John wrote to help them know that they are on the right course.
4. So, in this section, John gives them the objective criteria for testing their faith.
5. So, let’s use John’s tests to see how we are doing.
I. Test #1: Love for the Father’s Other Children
A. The first and perhaps most fundamental measure of Christian faith in John’s “to-do list for believers” is love for God great enough to cause believers to love one another.
1. “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome,” (1 John 5:1-3)
2. Having fellowship with God, abiding in Christ, and living in the power of the Spirit is not just a good, warm, fuzzy feeling.
3. It can never be reduced to an intellectual belief or verbal proclamation.
4. It is ultimately the daily experience of translating love for God into practical conformity to his will.
5. In a word, it is impossible to claim faith without living in obedience.
B. A person always seeks to please the one he loves, does he not?
1. Jesus both modeled and taught as much: “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.” (John 14:21).
2. The specific commandment John has in mind here is clear. He thinks it is reasonable and expected that “everyone who loves the parent loves the child.” So, if we love God we must love his Son, Jesus, and all his other children as well.
3. How do we know we are acting with love for one another?
4. “This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands.” (1 John 5:2)
5. This is no sloppy, touchy-feely love! Doing the loving thing, is obeying God’s commands.
6. What is the loving thing for a dad to do for his children? Doing the right thing in relation to their mother – honoring your marriage vows, nurturing her joy, protecting her from harm.
7. What is the loving thing for your Christian friends? Doing the right thing by telling the truth, keeping your promises, and helping them through hard times.
8. What is the loving thing to do in relation to a total stranger? The Good Samaritan refused to ignore a stranger’s plight, even though he was of another race and religion; he helped save his life, paid for his medical care, and got involved.
9. What is the loving thing to do in relation to an enemy? The commandment of Scripture is that Christians are supposed to look for ways to return good for evil – and never look to get even.
10. See how the commandments about how to treat people helps give substance to the “vague” notion of loving them?
C. Those of us who are a little older remember a time when there were no laws about seat belts, or child safety seats.
1. In those days we all loved our families. We loved our babies.
2. And yet many babies and loved ones died because they were not safely secured in their cars.
3. Today there are laws on the books about such things.
4. New parents leaving the hospital have to have a safety seat in their vehicles before taking them home the first time!
5. Intrusive, you say? Of course it is.
6. But a parent’s love for his or her baby isn’t always enough. He or she doesn’t always do what is best for the children.
7. The law is a practical boundary that makes love tangible, and obedience to it is hardly “burdensome.”
8. In the same way, the commandments in Scripture about how we should treat one another are channels for love that give it real substance.
9. Paul said that the commandments against adultery, murder, stealing, coveting, and the like “are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law” (Rom. 13:8-10).
10. For a renewed heart, these are not “burdensome” commandments.
11. So, that’s test #1 – Are we loving God’s other kids?
II. Test #2: Victory Over the World
A. The second thing John names that points to the fact that we are on the right track is our victory over the world.
1. “…for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.” (1 John 5:4-5).
2. John has already warned us in chapter 2 that “the world and its desire are passing away.”
3. And he has already warned Christians against loving this world because of its incompatibility with God. “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” (2:15b).
4. To conquer this world is to rise above it so that its money, sex, and power games no longer determine who we are.
B. But, we need to be careful about how we hear this statement concerning victory over the world.
1. It is not just some moralistic statement. It is gospel proclamation.
2. Back in his Gospel, John quoted Jesus on this point.
3. Shortly before his death, the Savior told his disciples this: “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33).
4. To interpret victory over the world as a moralism is to hear the gospel as just another challenge to do better, try harder, and stay purer.
5. Greek philosophy and Jewish legalism had been saying that for generations.
6. To hear it as gospel proclamation is to say that the key to victory over the world is in being born from above.
7. God has created a new reality through the Son, and participating in it is certainly more than “intellectual assent” to the identity of Jesus and quite different from just ethical struggle.
8. For, while there is both intellectual content to the gospel and continuing moral challenge to life on Planet Earth, victory over the world is a gift of grace that comes through new creation.
C. This is what the good news is all about.
1. We are in the world now as Jesus was in the world two millennia ago.
2. We have been born “from above” (John 3:5).
3. We are new-creation people for God. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.” (2 Cor. 5:17).
4. Our minds are fixed “on things above, not on earthly things, For you have died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:1-4).
5. Like Christ, we are still in the world but are no longer of it.
6. The key to all this, according to John, “is our faith” – not our subjective act of believing and trusting but the dynamic power of the person in whom we have put our trust.
7. That power is at work in all of us who believe and it gives us victory over the world.
8. So, how are we doing with test #2?
III. Test #3: Embracing the Truth About Jesus
A. So John makes even more explicit now what has been the main theme in the first five verses.
1. Authentic faith is that which embraces and acknowledges the truth about Jesus Christ and all he has done, is doing, and will do for those who believe in him.
2. In verse 1, John said, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.”
3. Now he expands the meaning of what it is to “believe that Jesus is the Christ” by tracing out a three-fold testimony about the Son of God.
4. “This is the one who came by water and blood - Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement. We accept man’s testimony, but God’s testimony is greater because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son.” (1 John 5:6-9)
B. It was their faith in Jesus as the Christ that brought about their birth from above and made them members of the family of God.
1. It was the dynamic power of that faith at work in them that brought transformation and renewal, and made them victors over the world.
2. So they owed everything to Christ. He was their everything.
3. And it was critical for John that his readers be reinforced in their faith – against the false view of Jesus that was being circulated at that time by the secessionists.
C. We have discussed several heresies about Jesus.
1. Do you remember the one promoted by Cerinthus?
2. He said that Jesus was a pious and good man, but only a man.
3. A divine emanation had come upon the human Jesus at his baptism by John, fitted him for a divine role as God’s Christ, and then departed him before the cross.
4. But John would not let false teaching like that take over the church.
5. Jesus is in his very nature the divine Christ – not a good man who was allowed briefly to be the Christ but fully the Christ of God at all times and under all circumstances.
D. John called to the witness stand three witnesses that supported the truth about Jesus. They are “the Spirit and the water and the blood, and the three are in agreement.” (verse 8)
1. There is the witness of “the Spirit.”
a. The Holy Spirit certainly had given authenticating witness to all the claims of Jesus – including his claim to be the Christ – through the prophesies he fulfilled and the signs he provided throughout his ministry.
2. There is the witness of “the water.”
a. The water referred to here is likely the baptismal experience of Jesus.
b. The Bible records that at Jesus’s baptism, the voice of the Father was heard from heaven saying, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well-pleased” (Mark 1:11).
3. There is the witness of “the blood.”
a. The blood was the life. In any sacrifice the blood was sacred to God and to God alone.
b. The death of Christ was the perfect sacrifice. In the Cross his blood was poured out to God.
c. It was this cross that Cerinthus and his ilk would not allow as a Christ experience.
d. But John not only was not offended – as the false teachers were then and continue even now to be – by the doctrine of blood atonement but saw it as a powerful affirmation of the love, grace, and redemptive work of God.
E. These three “witnesses” to Jesus Christ remain in the life of the church in both first and twenty-first centuries.
1. We continue to preach the Spirit-given testimony about him.
2. We continue to offer water baptism in the name of Christ to all those who respond to the gospel.
3. The reason we try to preach the simple gospel of the New Testament rather than the latest trends in pop psychology or religious culture is that we regard it still as the “power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom. 1:16).
4. The reason we preach the necessity of baptism in water in the name of Jesus Christ is because of its theological value both for confessing the atonement and for marking our initiation into newness of life (Rom. 6:1-4).
6. The reason we eat the bread and drink the wine of Communion is to join with our brothers and sisters in bearing joyful witness to the fulfillment of God’s redemptive purposes at Calvary (Heb. 10:1-10).
7. Preaching the gospel and practicing baptism and the Lord’s Supper – these are all means by which the church perpetuates the divine witness until Christ’s return.
IV. Test #4: Eternal Life
A. John’s final test for authenticity in the faith is exhibition of what he calls “eternal life” by those in the church.
1. “Anyone who believes in the Son of God has this testimony in his heart. Anyone who does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because he has not believed the testimony God has given about his Son. And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.” (1 John 5:10-12)
2. “Eternal life” is an elusive and imprecise concept for most of us.
3. Those of us who are supposed to teach people the meaning of redemption often struggle to do so.
4. This is what one person wrote, “We think of Eternal Life, if we think of it at all, as what happens when life ends. We would do better to think of it as what happens when life begins…In other words to live Eternal Life in the full and final sense is to be with God as Christ is with him, and with each other as Christ is with us.” (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, New York: Harper & Row, 1973, p. 22, 23)
B. Eternal life is the final goal toward which salvation as a process moves.
1. It is what happens when all that God has done in history and that is contained in the gospel intersects everything that is my personality, my life, and my goals.
2. Eternal life is nothing other than new-creation life in Christ by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
3. It is being renewed from above, being conformed to the image of God’s Son, and being united in loving community with all those who belong to Christ.
4. Eternal life is the essence of what John talks about as “abiding” in Christ.
5. Eternal life is God’s gift to those who have been born from above and abide in His grace.
6. Eternal life isn’t an aspect of our life; it is your life.
7. And to pass the test, we must exhibit this eternal life in our lives in the family of God.
8. Can our family and friends see eternal life living in us?
Conclusion:
A. Let me end with this story:
1. Many years ago, there was a wealthy man who shared a passion for art collecting with his son.
2. They had priceless works adorning the walls of their family estate.
3. One day, the nation was at war and the young man left to serve his country.
4. After only a short time, his father received a telegram. His son had died.
5. Distraught and lonely, the old man faced the upcoming Christmas holidays with sadness.
6. The joy of the season had vanished with the death of his son.
7. On Christmas morning, a knock on the door awakened the depressed old man.
8. He opened the door and a soldier, with a large package in his hands greeted him, “I was a friend of your son. I was the one he was rescuing when he died. May I come in for a few moments? I have something to show you.”
9. The soldier mentioned that he was an artist and then gave the old man the package. It was a portrait of the man’s son.
10. Though the world would never consider it the work of a genius, the painting featured the young man’s face in striking detail.
11. Overcome with emotion, the man hung the portrait over the fireplace, pushing aside millions of dollars worth of art.
12. His task completed, the old man sat in his chair and spent Christmas gazing at the gift he had been given.
13. The painting of his son soon became his most prized possession, far eclipsing any interest in the pieces of art for which museums around the world clamored.
14. Six months later, the old man died.
15. The art world waited with anticipation for the upcoming auction.
16. According to the will of the old man, all the art works would be auctioned on Christmas Day, the day he had received the greatest gift.
17. The day soon arrived and art collectors from around the world gathered to bid on some of the world’s most spectacular paintings. Dreams would be fulfilled that day.
18. The auction began with a painting that was not on anyone’s museum list. It was the painting of the man’s son.
19. The auctioneer asked for an opening bid, but the room was silent. “Who will open the bidding with $100?” No one spoke.
20. Finally someone said, “Who cares about that painting. It’s just a picture of his son. Let’s move on to the good stuff.”
21. The auctioneer responded, “No, we have to sell this one first. Now, who will take the son?”
22. Finally, old man’s gardener offered $50 dollars. “That’s all I have. I knew the boy, so I’d like to have it.”
23. The auctioneer said, “Going once, going twice…gone.” The gavel fell.
24. Cheers filled the room and someone exclaimed, “Now we can bid on the real treasures!”
25. The auctioneer looked at the room filled with people and announced that the auction was over.
26. Everyone was stunned.
27. Someone spoke up and said, “What do you mean, it’s over? We didn’t come here for a painting of someone’s son. There are millions of dollars worth of art here! What’s going on?”
28. The auctioneer replied, “It’s very simple. According to the will of the Father, whoever takes the son…gets it all.”
B. And so it is with us…“He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.”
1. How are you doing with John’s tests? Do you have the Son? Have you embraced the truth about Jesus? Are you loving the Father’s children? Are you experiencing victory?
(Resource: Sermon by Rubel Shelly, "Confessing The Son)
