By This We Know
TCF Sermon
9/17/00
Turn with me to 1 John, chapter 2 - this will be our primary text this morning. Beginning with verse 3, “We know that we have come to know Him if we obey His commands. The man who says I know Him but does not do what He commands is a liar and the truth is not in him. But if anyone obeys His word, God’s love is truly made complete in Him. This is how we know we are in Him. Whoever claims to live in Him must walk as Jesus did.”
You know, in the news today we hear a lot about litmus tests, don’t we? We hear it a lot in politics in this election year especially, in reference to the appointment of judges and whether or not a judge’s position on abortion is going to pass the litmus test, or whether it should be a litmus test at all for his/her appointment. Some of you may remember from science or chemistry class that litmus is a coloring matter. It’s obtained from lichens, moss-like plants, and a litmus test is a scientific test. Acids turn blue litmus red, and bases turn red litmus blue. It’s a simple and sure test to distinguish one from the other. Here in this passage, God gives us a litmus test regarding our relationship with Him, how we can know that we know Him.
The title of this morning’s message is By This We Know. That’s a phrase that’s used in several different ways throughout the book of 1 John. In the passage we just read, in 1 John 2:3 it says we know that we have come to know Him if we obey His commands. Later in the same chapter, 2:29 it says that if you know He is righteous you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of Him. In 1 John 3: 18-19 it says, “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. In chapter 3:24 it says “those who obey His commands live in Him and He in them. And this is how we know that He lives in us. We know it by the spirit He gave us.” In 1 John 5:2-4, there again, “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, for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith.”
The common denominator in each of these passages is - obedience. We see the phrases “everyone who does what is right” … we see love with actions and in truth, we see those who obey His commands, we see the phrase “carrying out His commands.” The common denominator is obedience. Obedience is a great theme throughout scriptures, from the Old Testament all the way through the New Testament. I think, however, we often think of obedience as primarily an emphasis that’s in the O.T. We don’t really think of it as a N.T. theme. I think the reason for that is because we want to be so careful to remember that we can’t earn salvation by what we do that we tend to throw the baby out with the bath water.
With that in mind, let’s start right there with that idea and deal with this aspect of obedience first. Yes, it is vital to remember - anytime we’re discussing obedience that we’re not talking about our obedience earning anything. We have to remember that; get it straight right up front. Let’s take the book of Romans for example. Many of you know that Martin Luther read this Epistle and it was in reading this Epistle that he came to a point where he realized that he was unable to earn God’s grace and that was the beginning of the Reformation, the Protestant Reformation. It was in reading the book of Romans. However, we see in Romans 2:13 “For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.” There it is. He read that in Romans 2. This is a good example of why we can’t build a theology around a single verse of scripture, because it also says in Romans 1:17 “For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written, ‘The righteous will live by faith.’” And then it says in Romans 3:20 “Therefore no one will be declared righteous by observing the law, rather through the law we become conscious of sin.”
We could cite many other examples from throughout the N.T. and from the O.T. of the great truth that we are saved by God’s grace, through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. So what are we to make of this seeming paradox; these things don’t seem to fit together somehow. Well, God does not give eternal life or justification to those who perform good works but to those who believe or trust in Him and whose conduct reveals their regenerated hearts. It’s important not to misunderstand this language from 1 John which uses some pretty tough language, doesn’t it? John does not suggest that relationship with God is established by obedience, rather that the relationship with God is demonstrated by our obedience. It’s demonstrated. So, with that understood at the outset, let’s move on and look at this theme of obedience that we see throughout scripture.
A.W. Tozer said that “Salvation apart from obedience is unknown in the sacred scriptures.” He also said that love and obedience are organically united, and that the final test of love is obedience. In our opening passage of scripture John was even stronger, wasn’t he? He said, “the man who says I know Him but does not do what He commands, is a liar and the truth is not in him.” Now when Jim Grinnell preached a few weeks ago on Honoring God, he made a statement that prompted my thinking about this subject. One of the things he said was, “Sometimes different churches honor, appreciate, respect different things. And one of the things that TCF honors is faithfulness.” I really think that is true. It got me to thinking that obedience and faithfulness go hand in hand, at least when we’re talking about our faithfulness to the things of God. We need faithfulness to be obedient, because obedience most often is not just a one-time action. Also, we need obedience to be faithful. So they are really entwined. Then, last week Jim Garrett preached on the question What Has God Said To Me? And once we determine what God has said to us, and we have a sure way of doing that through His revealed Word, the next step is obedience. Now, one striking think about obedience as seen in the Word of God is how often our obedience is very closely tied to the good things that God does in our lives. Just a sampling of verses makes this clear: Deuteronomy 6:3 says, “Hear, O Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the Lord, the God of your fathers promised you.” Deuteronomy 6:24-25, “The Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God so that we might always prosper and be kept alive as is the case today.”
We can see that the reverse is true. Even as obedience is tied to good things, disobedience is tied to bad things. “However”, it says in Deuteronomy 28:15, “if you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all His commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you.” In 1 Samuel 12:14-15, “If you fear the Lord and serve Him and obey Him and do not rebel against His commands, and if both you and the king who reigns over you follow the Lord your God, good. But if you do not obey the Lord, and if you rebel against His commands, His hand will be against you as it was against your fathers.”
And again, lest we think this idea of obedience being connected with the good or the bad things that come in our lives only applies to the O.T., let’s consider these verses from the N.T. Matthew 7:21, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my father Who is in heaven.” Romans 6:16 “Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves you are slaves to the one whom you obey, whether you are slaves to sin which leads to death, or to obedience which leads to righteousness.” 1 Peter 4:17, “For it is time for judgment to begin with the family of God, and if it begins with us what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God.”
Now, perhaps you could make a case that in the O.T. obedience is more often tied to material blessings and in the N.T. it is more often tied to spiritual blessings. However, beyond that there is really no significant distinction between how the O.T. and the N.T. view obedience. Obedience is very closely linked to consequences, good or bad. God makes it clear that obedience is a choice and when we choose to be obedient to His commands, or disobedient, the choice of the consequences is just as clear. There is a passage in Deuteronomy where God is laying this idea out for his people. He tells them of all the good things that he is going to bless them with if they obey, and then he lays out for them the striking contrast to the things that are going to happen to them if they disobey. Reading from Deuteronomy 30:13ff “See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. On the one hand life and prosperity, on the other hand death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways and to keep His commands, decrees and laws. Then you will live and increase and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away, and you are not obedience, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and to worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to His voice and hold fast to Him for the Lord is your life.”
There’s a guy by the name of Ron Ritchie who has a good comment on this passage. He says, “The point that Moses, who is speaking these words, is seeking to drive home to the Jews of his day is that the law has been given to them in the context of God’s love and grace. The land they are about to enter was promised to Abraham as a gift to his descendants. Nothing they’re receiving is the result of some self-effort or self-righteousness but only the grace, power and love of God. And the same way, true righteousness is by faith in Christ. Moses is saying, give your whole heart to the one and only living God who has loved and revealed himself, not only to your fathers, but to you as well. So, in response to that Divine love, that loyal love, what Moses says is first of all, love the Lord your God out of a heart full of appreciation for all He’s done. Secondly, walk in His revealed ways, and third, keep His commandments, His laws and His decrees by the power of the Holy Spirit. And know that as a result of that loyal love, you will taste life as God intended it to be enjoyed in the land you are entering to possess.”
Let’s return for a moment to our opening passage in 1 John, chapter 2. The Greek word used there for obedience is one of several words translated obey, obedience or obedient in the N.T. Here the word means to “watch over, to guard from loss or injury - to hold fast, to keep or to preserve”. It means to guard and keep safe as a precious thing, to guard and keep safe as a precious thing. So, it’s not just the act of obedience, which is certainly the important first step, but it’s the attitude of obedience that we have. A heart that desires to be obedient because we are preserving the commands of our Master as a precious thing. Another important distinction we have to make here reminds us of what we looked at just a few minutes ago - the idea that this obedience is not for the sake of earning anything. A sidebar of this, is that this passage is not saying that only those who never disobey know God. It simply refers to those whose lives are generally characterized by obedience. Now that’s clear from a verse in the previous chapter of 1 John. This is a verse that most of you know, 1 John 1:8-9 “If we claim to be without sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us of all unrighteousness.” So if our current life pattern is one of obedience, we’ve passed the litmus test. John is saying here that knowing Him leads to lives that are characterized more and more by obedience to His commands, to His Word, to His law, to His precepts, and the reverse is true as well. Matthew Henry said that “A disobedient life is the reputation and shame of pretended religious knowledge.” When John writes in chapter 1, verse 6 about fellowship with God, he talks about that. These verses in chapter two tell us that this fellowship has its down-to-earth expression in obedience. If we are obedient, we respond to His word, we respond to His commands. In John 10:27 Jesus said, “My sheep listen to my voice. I know them and they follow me.” We all know people who claim to know God yet their lives seem to show nothing of it. They don’t respond to His word, they claim to seek God’s will about some things, yet they disobey God’s already-revealed will in His Word about many things. Some of these people may even be able to debate some of the finer points of theology, they might have memorized much of the Bible, they might even attend church regularly, but you know what - they don’t pass the litmus test because they don’t make a habit of responding to God’s Word. They show that the claim that they know Him is false. John doesn’t mince words. He calls them liars. In the original language, verse 3 “we know that we have come to know Him if we obey His commands.” The original language says something like this - “By this we may know that we have known Him” (that’s the perfect tense, something done in the past) “because we are now keeping His commandments.” (That’s the present tense.) That means that our present willingness to keep His commandments is the litmus test of a valid relationship with Christ. We can’t live off of yesterday’s obedience. Our obedience today is proof that we’ve been born again, that we know Him, and that we follow Him. Our actions have changed and because they’ve changed, we don’t behave as we once did. But now we have a desire to obey Him and we do it. Again, the reverse is true. Ray Steadman notes that there is such a thing as a phony Christian. He says, “As John indicates, they say the right things. If you were to judge them by what they say you would never know they were phonies. They go to the right places, they mingle with the right crowds, and they say the right things. They say ‘I love Him.’ But as John indicates, there is something wrong with their lives. They disobey His commandments. They have no apparent desire to do what He says, to keep His Word. Their lives are unchanged and their actions are no different than they were before.”
Paul also warns about this in his letter to Titus. He speaks of some, who he says in Titus 1:16 “They claim to know God but by their actions they deny Him. They are detestable, disobedient, and unfit for doing anything good.” Paul didn’t mince words either, did he?
Charles Spurgeon once said, “An unchanged life is the sign of an uncleansed heart.” Now, part of us cringes when we hear admonitions about obedience, doesn’t it, because some of this just seems so hard to do. Some of this obedience seems so hard to live up to, some of these standards. But if we can return to the passage in Deuteronomy 30 for a moment, we’ll see that even in the O.T. God’s grace is at work. Deuteronomy 30:11ff “Now what I am commanding you today is not difficult for you, or beyond your reach. It’s not up in heaven so that you have to ask who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so that we might obey it; nor is it beyond the sea so that you have to ask who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so that we might obey it. No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so that you may obey it.” Now, Paul quotes this passage from Deuteronomy in Romans 10:5-8 and there he contrasts the righteousness of the law with the righteousness that comes by faith. But the point of Moses’ exhortation here in Deuteronomy 30 is that the generation to whom he was speaking the message, had the message. It’s very near you, he said. It’s in your mouth. And they could respond by faith. He also said, It’s in your heart. They could respond by faith and walk with God in obedience. They didn’t need some kind of special experience from God that enabled them to be obedient. In effect, Paul indicates in Romans that the same truth applied to his generation as applied to Moses’ generation with the added fact that Christ had come in the flesh and had been resurrected. So, there’s where he made the distinction. He said there’s no need for anyone to ask to bring Christ down in his incarnation. He had already come. Or to bring Christ up from the dead. He had already come. He had already been resurrected. The message of righteousness by faith in Paul’s day was near his readers just like it was for the people who were listening to Moses. In other words, it’s near them. It’s available to them. This was the word of faith he was proclaiming. So the gospel, the word or message of faith, is available. It’s accessible. It was in Moses’ day. It was in Paul’s day. And it is today. Look again at the passage from 1 John, chapter 5 that we read earlier beginning with verse 3. This reiterates the same theme - “This is love for God, to obey His commands and His commands are not burdensome. For everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victor that has overcome the world, even our faith.” So, even obedience still comes down to receiving God’s grace through our faith. Even the ability to obey God. More often than not it isn’t huge individual acts of obedience that we’re talking about, it’s day-to-day, it’s moment-by-moment responding to God’s Word, responding to His love. A guy by the name of Fred Cradduck was addressing some ministers one day and he caught the practical implications of obedience that we’re talking about. He said, “To give my life for Christ appears glorious; to pour myself out for others, to pay the ultimate price of martyrdom. I’ll do it. I’m ready, Lord, to go out in a blaze of glory. We think giving our all to the Lord is like taking a $1000 bill and laying it on the table and saying here’s my life, Lord, I’m giving it all. But the reality for most of us is that He sends us to the bank and He has us cash that $1000 bill in for quarters. We go through life putting out twenty-five cents here and fifty cents there. We’re not very often asked to lay down the $1000 bill.” We have to do things like listen to the neighbor’s kids tell us their troubles instead of saying “get lost.” We have to do things like go to a committee meeting, give a cup of water to somebody. How about serving in the medical van on Monday nights? Or serving week after week in the tape room like Dave and Debi Mason do? Or serving in the kitchen whenever we have a church meal like Doris does? Or serving in Children’s Church? Or serving in the nursery? All of these are acts of obedience. These are the nickels, dimes and quarters of that $1000 that we cashed in for change earlier. Usually giving our life to Christ isn’t a big glorious thing. It’s done in all those little acts of love; those little acts of obedience; twenty-five cents, maybe a nickel or a dime at a time. It would be easy to go out in a flash of glory. It’s a lot harder to live the Christian life little by little over the long haul. Real spirituality takes a lifetime of consistent, faithful obedience to God. Heroic spiritual lives are built by stacking days of obedience one on top of the other. They’re like bricks - each obedient act is small in itself, but once you start piling those bricks up, a huge wall of strong character is built. We should strive for consistent, obedience day by day. Obedience to God’s Word is proof of our love for Him. There are three motives that I could come up with for obedience. We can obey because we have to, we can obey because we need to, or we can obey because we want to. If you think of slavery - a slave obeys because he has to. If he doesn’t obey, he’s going to be punished, isn’t he? An employee on the job obeys because he needs to. He may not enjoy the work too much, but you do enjoy getting that paycheck, don’t you. You need to obey because you have a family to feed and to clothe. But a Christian is to obey his Heavenly Father because he wants to, for the relationship between him and God is one of love. “If you love me,” Jesus said in John 14:15, “keep my commandments.” This is the way we learned obedience when we were children. First, when we were real young, we obeyed because we had to. If we didn’t obey we probably got spanked. But as we grew up, we discovered that obedience meant enjoyment and reward. So we started obeying because it met certain needs in our lives. And it was a mark of real maturity when we started to obey because of love. Simply in response to God’s love for us. Baby Christians have to be constantly warned or rewarded. Let’s be mature Christians who listen to God’s Word and obey it simply because we love Him.
But if we’re not there yet, or even if we’re there in some areas of our lives and not in others, it still doesn’t excuse us from obedience. Phillip Yancey said, “It’s easier to act your way into feelings than to feel your way into actions.” Isn’t that true. He quotes Jesus in John 7:17 , “My teaching is not my own, it comes from Him Who sent me. If anyone chooses to do God’s will he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.” And then Phillip Yancey writes, “Note the sequence: choose to do God’s will and the confidence will later follow. Something similar works in our relationship with God. I wish all obedience sprang from an instinctive desire to please God, but alas, it doesn’t. For me, the life of faith sometimes consists in acting as if the whole thing is true. I assume that God loves me infinitely, that good will conquer evil, that I can triumph in any adversity.” He says, “I seldom run into visual clues that remind me of God unless I am looking. The act of looking, the pursuit itself makes possible the encounter.” “For this reason,” writes Yancey, “Christianity has always insisted that trust and obedience come first and knowledge follows. Because of that difference I persevere at spiritual disciplines no matter how I feel.” Isn’t that good? Great victories are won when ordinary people execute their assigned tasks. When ordinary people like you and me are obedient to God. A faithful obedient person does not debate each day whether he/she is in the mood to follow orders or go to a boring job, or take care of wild kids, or maybe even to go to church when you wake up tired. We exercise faith by responding to the task that lies before us. For we have control only over our actions at this present moment. The same is true of our obedience. Choose to be obedient. Trust God’s grace to help you be obedient. Obedience reveals a changed heart, a life that’s surrendered to Christ. Obedience reveals that we have true faith. Faith is always validated by works. In other words, the works that we do reveal that the faith we say we have is genuine faith. We can know that we know Him if we obey Him.
The last verse of our passage of 1 John 2:6 says, “Whoever claims to live in Him must walk as Jesus did.” There’s a high standard. How did Jesus walk. In John’s gospel, we see that Jesus lived His life in total dependence upon the Father and in total obedience to His will. Listen to the words of Jesus in John 4:34, “My food is to do the will of Him Who sent me and to finish His work.” In John 5:15 he said, “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can only do what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does, the Son does also.” In John 5:30 he says, “By myself I can do nothing. I judge only as I hear, and my judgment is just for I seek not to please myself, but Him Who sent me.” And again in John 6:38, Jesus said, “For I have come down from heaven, not to do my will, but to do the will of Him Who sent me.” Even Jesus walked in obedience to the Father. And even Jesus, in that obedience, expressed his dependence on God as our model of obedience. So as John says, “If we claim to live in Him, let us walk as Jesus walked.” Let’s not be counterfeits, let’s not be phonies, let’s not be what John called them, “Liars,” denying the faith by an unchanged life, saying we know Him but living lives that are characterized by disobedience. Let us rather be reflectors, reflecting the character, the quality and the principle by which our Lord Jesus himself lived his life. Let us walk as Jesus walked in ever increasing attitudes of whole-hearted obedience to His will.
