On The Winning Side?

This transcript has been automatically generated

Good. Well, good morning everyone. Please turn to 1 John. I’m going to read a big chunk from the beginning of the letter to start us off this morning. Let me pray as we come to God’s Word.

We thank you, Heavenly Father, for revealing yourself so clearly to us. Through the teaching of the Scriptures. And we pray, please, for attentive minds and soft hearts, that as we read and think, we would understand, and that as we understand, we would submit to what you have to say. Hear us, we pray, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the Word of life. The life was made manifest, and we have seen it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us. That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us And indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. This is the message we’ve heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all.

If we say we have darkness with him while we walk in— fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practise the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he’s faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

If we say— if we If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. My little children, I’m writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. And by this we know that we’ve come to know him, if we keep his commandments.

Whoever says, I know him, but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may be sure that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. Beloved, I’m writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you’ve had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word that you’ve heard.

At the same time, it is a new commandment that I’m writing to you. Which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. Whoever says he’s in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness and does not know where he’s going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.

I’m writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake. I’m writing to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I’m writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one. I write to you, children, because you know the Father. I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning.

I write to you, young men, because you are strong and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one.

Cast your mind back to the week that you’ve just had. On how many days this week did you think to yourself as you woke up, haha, hurrah, what a wonderful day this is! What a wonderful thing it is to be a Christian and to be confident that I am on the winning side. Did you find yourself rejoicing in the victory that you share in? Or was it just another week when things didn’t seem quite so victorious in your life?

And you shouted at your children and you were snappy with the spouse and you had a dreadful time at work and you didn’t read the Bible and you forgot to pray and you didn’t feel you were making any progress spiritually.

The truth is that much of the time the sense of being on the winning side is not that close to the experience of being a real Christian. Do you feel strong or weak? Do you feel confident or worried? Are you full of faith or wavering in faith? Standing in the battles or falling in the battle?

If you’re here this week just checking out Christianity for yourself, not yet in, what do you think of the Christians you know? Is it obvious to you that they are on the winning side? Do they look like the British lines of life?

My guess is that much of the time they look pretty normal, like you do, and their faults are just as obvious as anyone’s are. How obvious is it that the Christian is on the winning side? Now, this is a great tension that every real Christian and anyone who takes the Christian message seriously has to face. On the one hand, we’re told that to belong to Jesus, is to be on the winning side, to have a solid hope for the future, to be protected in the present. On the other, we experience a life where things, those things, seem not to be true, where difficulty is common and disappointments abound, and where other people with different takes on spirituality from Christians seem so much more on top of their game than you seem.

Welcome, then, to the world of 1 John, a world where those who are on the winning side don’t think they really are on the winning side. A world where those who trust Jesus properly are made to feel as though they don’t really know God at all.

Let me ask a fairly brutal question at the beginning of our week studying 1 John, is it really worth giving this letter a whole week of primetime mornings? And before you say, yes, of course it is, it’s in the Bible, let me ask you, did your heart skip a beat of joy when you learned we were studying 1 John this week? I didn’t think so. Last week somebody said, when I heard we were doing 1 John, I thought, hmm, I’m not sure I want to do that. And then I read it and I thought, I really want to do— I really don’t want to do that.

If you’ve had any previous exposure to 1 John, let me ask you, is it now on your list of top 10 places to turn in times of trouble? And I’ll bet it isn’t. Now, there’s no doubt that this letter is a great— a letter with some great favourite statements in it. There’s no doubt about that. Look, for example, at chapter 1, verse 8, the one we just read.

I mean, isn’t this a wonderfully encouraging and realistic statement? If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. It’s wonderfully realistic and marvellously encouraging. Or, for example, chapter 4, verse 10.

Chapter 4, verse 10: In this is love, not that we’ve loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. God has turned away his anger at our sins. That’s love. Again, it’s a wonderfully positive statement about who God is and what he has done, but Once you look beyond those standalone golden statements, most people find the content of this letter rather difficult. For a start, it’s difficult to read.

It seems to jump from one idea to another rather randomly and back again and goes round and round in circles. The second thing that’s difficult is some of the detail, the content. Let me start on a more positive note again. Look at 5:13. This letter has many purpose statements, and here is one that people often gravitate towards.

Chapter 5, verse 13: I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life. Well, that seems positive enough. It looks as though this is a letter written to help people be sure that they have eternal life. Well, Armed with that idea, people come to the letter and they read through and they say, well, how can I be sure that I have eternal life? And so you read through and then you get to a statement, for example, like chapter 3, verse 5.

Now I’m going to read this a bit more literally than our translation has it. The translation somewhat takes the edge off it. This is how it’s written: You know that he appeared to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins. No one who sins has either seen him or known him.

Now let me ask you, having read that, are you more confident now that you have eternal life than you were when you got up from the breakfast table this morning? No one who sins has seen him or known him. Feel good about that? Let me give you another. Look at 3:14.

We know that we have passed out of death into life because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. Does your quality of life for your fellow Christians make you confident that you have passed from death to life? Are you loving them well? Are you magnificently patient and kind with them?

Are you exceptionally self-sacrificing for them? Are you feeling confident about that?

I was talking to a minister friend a while ago who said, as I walk around the village I work in, I pass door after door behind which I know is a person I’ve disappointed in one way or another. How’s your love for Christians going?

The normal way of reading this letter is to say that this is a letter about Christian assurance, written so that Christians in every age can be assured that they’re real Christians. And according to that way of reading the letter, the letter contains certain tests, a bit like the kind of tests your doctor would run on you to cheque if your health is good. There are 3 tests: the belief test— do you believe the right sorts of things about Jesus? The moral test, do you obey God’s commands? The love test, do you love the brothers?

You’ll certainly meet those as we go through the letter. And, says that way of reading the letter, you have to apply these tests to yourself, and if you get on all right with the tests, you can be assured that you’re really on the right track and you do have eternal life. And my impression is that when people read the letter in that way, they come away from it confused and uncertain. They look at their lives and find that they do not do all that well on the tests. And they wonder how well they have to do to pass.

And they wonder if they’ll ever be able to be confident, based on those tests, whether they’re a real Christian or not. And I’m increasingly convinced that that is not quite the right way to read this letter. It is possible, you see, to have a good tool, and use it not in the right way. Let me illustrate. One of the things that has struck me about coming back home to Glasgow— it is home for me, despite my English accent.

I was brought up in Glasgow till I was 8. One of the things that has struck me about coming back to Glasgow is its rich cultural and social heritage. I was talking to a friend of mine who, before he was in Christian ministry, worked for a while in a sports shop in the city centre. One day, a big guy came into his sports shop. Can I get a baseball bat?

Let me translate. Can I get a in Glasgow means, please, I’d like to have one of. That’s what that means. Can I get a pint of heavy? Can I get a crème brûlée?

That kind of thing.

Can I get a baseball bat? So Phil takes him and shows him the baseball bats, and he tries a few, swings them around a bit, and then he chooses one and heads off in the direction of the checkout to pay. And my friend says to him, sir, would you like a ball to go with your bat? And he turns around, and he has the bat in his hand, he’s kind of slapping it gently into his hand, and he says, no, the bat will suffice.

You see, you can use a baseball bat to do a number of things. Welcome to Glasgow’s rich social heritage. It’s, it’s a good tool used rightly, but when you use it for whacking things other than baseballs, it can be damaging. The same is true with Bible books. Good tools, but we need to read them in line with the author’s intent.

And let me suggest to you that this is not a letter meant to produce uncertainty among the first hearers. Rather, it is a letter meant to be profoundly reassuring.

Let me introduce you to the situation into which this letter is written, because the situation is massively important in reading it rightly. Turn to chapter 2, verse 12. Now, as I mentioned earlier on, this letter has a good number of clear purpose statements. I’ve written to you so that… Statements.

And here they come thick and fast, 2 sets of 3 purpose statements. And for reasons that I’ll go into a little later on, I think this little section is a kind of boundary marker in the letter, a sort of mini climax where, after having introduced the main ideas in the letter, he, he sort of bursts into song, proclaiming the big ideas on his heart as he writes. And I want you to note, as I read it, the overwhelmingly positive note of this section. I am writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake. I’m writing to you, fathers, because you know him who’s from the beginning.

I’m writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one. I write to you, children, because you know the Father. I write to you, fathers, because you know him who’s from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you are strong and the word of God abides in you and you have overcome the evil one. There is not a hint of negativity in those statements.

No suggestion of criticism or uncertainty. Nothing here that might lead his hearers to morbid introspection. The key is not minor but major, not anxious but confident, not so much asking questions of the readers as making statements about the readers. And I think that’s how we have to read this letter, not so much as a set of difficult tests, as a set of reassuring proofs. Think for a moment of 2 different but related documents.

Think, on the one hand, of an exam paper with lots of questions on. And now think of an examination certificate with a result on and your name on it. Now, we’ve all sat in front of both of those sets of documents. They’re clearly related to one another, aren’t they? Examination papers are related to examination certificates, but they are very different documents to sit in front of.

An examination paper is worrying, anxiety-provoking. An exam certificate is reassuring and encouraging. This letter is much more like an examination certificate. Than it is like an exam paper. Much more like that.

And it needs to be. And it needs to be because of the situation it’s written into. Let me introduce the situation. And let me introduce you to the people that I will call the departed. Chapter 2, verse 18.

A bunch of people have left the church or churches that John is writing to. Nothing unusual about that, you might think. People leave churches all the time. But John has particularly strong words to use of these people. I’m going to call them the departed because that’s what they’ve done, they’ve departed.

John uses much stronger language to describe them. 2:18, children, it is the last hour. And as you have heard that Antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us.

For if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out that it might become plain that they are all not of us. But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge.

Antichrists, he calls them. And they’ve left. They left because they weren’t really part of you, says John. However, there is no doubt as you read the letter that their departure was the cause of great confusion to those who were left behind, and upset and uncertainty. And though they are only mentioned directly in chapter 2, And I think there’s good reason for that, that we’ll explore during the week.

Their influence is seen in every corner of this letter.

This is a letter written because of them, because of their teaching and the impact of their departure. Why, you might ask, were they so significant? Why did they cause so much upset when they left? Well, I think, in one word, superiority. They claimed to be superior in many and various ways.

Let me give you a flavour of what we meet in this letter as we kind of read between the lines. It’s impossible to pin their teaching down precisely, though there are some things that will become clearer as the week progresses. But there are a number of general things that crop up again and again And they’re often marked by particular keywords, words that the departed probably used, I think. Let me give you just a flavour. I think these people claimed superior knowledge, and the keyword here is know.

These people claimed to know things, to be in the know, to know more than the regular believer in Jesus. Let me give you some examples. Look at 2:13, we’ve looked at this already. I’m writing to you, fathers, because you know him who’s from the beginning. Or at the end of that verse, I write to you, children, because you know the Father.

You really do. Were the departed saying that the regular believers didn’t really know God in the way that they did? Or that they, the departed, knew God in a bigger and better sort of way? Or look at 2:20.

You have been anointed by the Holy One, and you, literally, you all know. You guys who’ve left behind, you are the guys in the know.

When the people who claim superior knowledge of God leave your church, that is very unsettling for those who remain.

I think they claimed fuller spirituality. I think the keywords here are anointing and Spirit. We’ve seen one example already, 2:20, but you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all know.

Look on to 2:26, a similar example. I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you. But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. Do they need to learn a superior spirituality from those who departed? Well, no, says John, they don’t.

You’ve no need for anyone to teach you because you have the genuine anointing of the Spirit.

When the people who seem to be the spiritual-looking people leave your church, that’s going to be very unsettling for those that remain.

They may have claimed superior purity. Look again at 1:8.

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. Now, why on earth does that need to be said to a group of Christians? Isn’t it obvious that you can’t say that if you’re a real Christian? Isn’t it obvious? Christian, do you think you have no sin?

Of course you don’t. Why does it need to be said here? Well, I imagine because that is precisely what some people are claiming.

When people who claim greater victory over sin than you have leave your church, that is going to be very unsettling.

They may have claimed superior victory over evil powers. The key word here is overcome. 2:13 again, I’m writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one. And again, verse 14, you have overcome the evil one. Why does this need to be said?

Well, I imagine because Somebody is saying, you guys don’t have the victory, but we do. When people say that kind of thing and they’re leaving, it is going to be very unsettling for those that remain. Put that little package together, and you can find other examples of that sort of thing going on in the letter, and you get the picture. Here is a bunch of spiritually impressive-looking and big-talking people, and they’re leaving, and they’re leaving you in no doubt that they think you are not the real deal and they are, and if you had your head screwed on, you’d follow them and join up with them. That is going to be very unsettling for any church to deal with.

Imagine the anxiety. Look, these guys are going. These guys! This elder and his wife, and that home group leader, and the person who served so long in Sunday school, and Mr. Jones, he’s a surgeon, he’s no idiot. Actually, he might be an idiot.

Surgeons are like that. And Mrs. Johnson, she’s a lawyer. She must know what she’s talking about. And the guy who served in cypher camps so sacrificially every summer holiday. We know these people.

We love them. We trust them. They babysat our kids. They’re the backbone of our church. They’re nice people.

They’re leaving. And they don’t think we’re the real deal. Aren’t you going to be unsettled by that? Just imagine a representative people of— a representative group of this group did that. Would that not worry the rest of you?

Why are they going? Can they really all be wrong? Imagine the confusion. Who do we listen to? It’s precisely for that reason that John is writing.

And his aim, I think, is twofold all the way through the letter. First, to make clear what is not clear about those who’ve You see, they don’t look untrue, and they don’t look unspiritual, and they don’t look antichrist. But, says John, they are. And you must recognise them for what they are. And it’s a vital part of the reassurance of this letter that John’s readers are able to see them as they really are.

And we’ll see him doing that all the way through. And the other, the other part of this letter is to reassure and strengthen those who remain. They are not confident now that they know God. They are not confident that they are the ones who have victory over evil. They are not confident that they are the possessors of the Spirit.

So, unmasking the false and reassuring the true, that’s what goes on all the way through this letter. And of course, those two are tightly joined up with one another. For you cannot reassure the true. Unless you unmask the false. Now, before we get to some implications of this, let me just introduce you a little bit to the style.

How does this letter work? I don’t know how much you’ve looked at this letter, but I imagine if you’ve looked at it in any detail at all, you’ve found it difficult. And the reason you’ve found it difficult is that this is in a writing style that we are not familiar with. It is not like the Apostle Paul. If you’re used to reading the Apostle Paul’s letters, you’ll know that even though they may be long and complicated, his arguments go in relatively straight lines.

And there are all sorts of joining-up words in Paul’s letters that reassure you that you are in an argument. Words like but and because and therefore and that kind of thing. So Paul characteristically goes, A is true for B. For C, and therefore D and E and F, but not G and H and I, and you must avoid I and J and K at— with all your energies. In Paul, the argument is on the surface.

It’s obviously there. You might not understand it, but you know you’re in it. This does not look anything like that.

When we are writing things in our culture, we structure our own writings in very obvious ways. Imagine you’re writing a letter to somebody about an issue. What we usually do is we say hello, then we say why we’re writing, then we define precisely what we’re talking about, and then we say— we sometimes say in advance how we’re going to structure our argument. And then we go through our argument in an ordered way. Sometimes we use subheadings, sometimes we use numbers.

But this is not the only way to do things. It is not the only way to do things. John does not use headings or numbers or bullet points, but this is a very highly structured letter. Let me try to introduce you to one or two of John’s ways of marking out structural progression in this letter. I’ve already suggested to you that this is a letter of 2 parts, simply because it has this strange kind of poetic bit dumped in the middle at 2:12.

But there is much more to dividing it into 2 than just recognising this slightly odd bit in the middle. Let me show you how he divides it into 2 parts so that we get under the, under the skin of the method a little bit. Let me start by talking about verbs for a moment. Now, I know there may be some of you here who are saying to yourselves, what? Grammar on the first morning of Summer School?

For goodness’ sake! When I complain about things, my son uses this phrase, man up, Dad. Man up. So, brothers and sisters, can I respectfully encourage you to man up for a moment and get with the grammar? Because it’s the way the letter works.

The verbs are seriously interesting. Look at 2:12-14. If you’re in the ESV, you’ll note it— well, if you’re in any translation, you’ll notice we’ve got 2 sets of 3, I am writing to you. Children, young men, fathers. 2 threes.

If you’re in the ESV, you’ll notice that the writing verb is translated slightly differently. In the first set and the second set. If you’re in the NIV, you won’t, because it doesn’t do any different. I am writing, I’m writing, I’m writing, I write, I write, I write, says the ESV.

Now, that is a significant translational difference because it reflects a change in tense. The first 3 are present tense.

The second 3 are in a past tense, which in the Greek is called the aorist tense. If we were translating it more literally, it would read, I have written to you. I’m writing, I’m writing, I’m writing, I’ve written, I’ve written, I’ve written. 3 presents, 3 aorists. Now when he says, I have written, he’s not talking now about a previous letter that he’s written.

He’s talking about this letter, however, he changes the tense. We don’t notice it because it’s— because of the way it’s translated, but if you were hearing this letter read out in public, you would notice the difference between those. Now here’s the interesting bit. This pattern, 3 presents, 3 aorists, is reflected in the letter as a whole, because before 2:13, all the purpose statements are present tense statements. And after 2:13, all the purpose statements are aorist tense statements.

In other words, that little division that’s there in the middle bit reflects the 2 halves of the letter. Before 2:13, all of the I writes are present. After 2:13, of the aorites are aorist. And I think he uses this change of tenses a bit like we’d use a numbered subheading. It indicates that we’re in a different part of the letter now.

So perhaps the letter is really divided into 2 parts: a first part up to 2:11, then a bit in the middle, then a second part from 2:15. He also does other stuff with verbs. There’s an example on your handout you can follow up. At bedtime reading if you want. The verb I say occurs 6 times in the first part of the letter, 2 times 3.

This time the first 3 are aorist tense and the second 3 present tense. He plays around with his tenses. He just does that. And if you were listening, you’d notice that. It’s not just the verbs that change, however, it’s the content.

Let me give you the biggest example of this, the one that I think divides the letter into 2. There are lots of smaller ones. The language of light and darkness occurs only in the first half of the letter. It crops up in 1:5, this is the message we’ve heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. It vanishes for a bit, then it crops up towards the end of the first section of the letter.

In 2:8, and then 2:8, 9, 10, 11 are full of light and darkness language. Light and darkness language tops and tails the first block of this letter. However, it doesn’t occur at all in the second half of the letter, not at all. Is there a second half image or word? Well, there is.

The second half image or word is the word world. 23 times in this letter, John mentions the world, and all but one of them are in the second half of the letter.

In addition, as you read through this letter, you’ll find that 2 things are described as passing away.

Chapter 2, verse 8, The darkness is passing away. Chapter 2, verse 17, now we’re in the second half of the letter, the world is passing away. Isn’t that striking? The first half of the letter dominated by light-dark language, we’re told the darkness is passing away. The second half of the letter dominated by world language, and we’re told the world is passing away.

Now, there’s plenty more of that sort of stuff going on, and I won’t bore you with the detail, but I wanted to get you into that so that you believe that this is actually highly structured, even though it doesn’t look highly structured on the surface. Why I mentioned that? It’s the way John writes. It’s just the way he does it. The Apostle Paul goes in straightish lines and puts in lots of joining-up words so you know where you are.

The Apostle John, well, he does things in threes, and he goes around in circles, and he jiggles with his tenses, and he jiggles with his language to show you that you’re in a slightly new section.

It is no less ordered than a Pauline argument, it’s just different. And I think it makes sense to go with that rather than pretending it’s not there. And at different points in the week, I’ll point you to one or two structural bits just to try and convince you that we’re going with it rather than ignoring it.

Now, I hope I haven’t put you to sleep and you’re still sort of awake. Good. Now, let’s just reflect on one or two things before the end of this. Let me draw out some conclusions as we go to coffee.

We had Dale Ralph Davis with us in Scotland earlier in the year, and if you’ve heard him speak, he’s, he’s kind of larger than life. And at the end of one of his sermons, his first application was this: God is not boring. Well, I want to say that as my first application. God is not boring. All the richness of human personality, and ways of doing things and ways of speaking have been employed by God to make Himself known to us.

It is possible that you may have come here this morning slightly bored with the Bible. You kind of know what you’re likely to find in there. Well, let me reassure you that there is a lifetime, much more than a lifetime, of happy discovery in these pages of just how amazingly complex and rich and exciting is the way God has made himself known to us. God is not boring. Don’t get bored with the Bible.

If you are, dig deeper. There’s more to find out. Second, and more particularly, at time of error in church life, The situation is rarely clear on the ground.

All the way through the New Testament, and not least in this letter, the presence of false teaching is associated with confusion and lack of clarity. We must stop thinking that the false teacher— let’s use John’s term, the Antichrist teacher— we must stop thinking that that sort of person is easy to spot. I mean, when you hear the term Antichrist, what do you expect to hear, see? You expect to see a kind of dark stranger with a vampire cloak and 666 tattooed somewhere secret in his body. Well, you might expect that, but that is not what you’re going to see.

What you’re going to see is a normal-looking guy who everybody’s known for ages. Someone’s husband, someone’s brother, someone’s father, someone who looks plausible, sounds credible, someone who looks very spiritual, is all too believable therefore. And knowing this letter will be very helpful indeed in enabling you to see more clearly what is really going on.

This person is often very close to home. Known, trusted, and therefore dangerous, and unsettling. Who do we listen to? If you’ve had great turmoil in your church, you’ll know that things were less clear on the ground than you thought they might have been in advance.

The situation is rarely clear when error is gaining ground.

Third, therefore, the true people of God often need reassurance that they are on the winning side. You wouldn’t think that was the case on paper, would you? You would think that belonging to the King of Kings meant that you would know that you were on the winning side. How could you belong to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords and not really be sure of it?

How could you belong to Him and have any doubts ever?

Well, it’s not the case. It isn’t like that. In this dark world that is passing away, in this world that is passing away, while it remains, the true people of God need reassurance that they’re on the winning side all the time. Because the light that has begun to shine is not fully shining. And the world to come is not yet visible.

And one of the main reasons they need reassurance is they have to deal with people who look superior and talk superior and seem superior.

The regular believer who’s put their trust in Jesus is always wondering, have I got it right? Look at them. Have I got it right? Look at what they say.

What John will go on to show in this letter is that those who look spiritually superior in this dark world do so because they have a dark worldly spirituality, not a true one. They look good in this world, says John, because they belong to this world and they play this world’s game. The true people of God often need great reassurance that they’re on the winning side. So, if you are one who often feels that you need reassurance, don’t lose heart, for this is the right letter for you.

Let me read again 2:12-14 as we close. John says these things are true of the regular person who trusts and holds on to Jesus Christ.

I’m writing to you, little children. That’s his characteristic term for believers. I’m writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake.

I’m writing to you, fathers, because you know him who’s from the beginning. Why would it need to be said if it wasn’t obvious, if it was obvious to them? I’m writing to you, young men, because you have a overcome the evil one. Would they need reassurance about that if they felt they had? I write to you, children, because you know the Father.

I write to you, fathers, because you know him who’s from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you are strong, though you don’t feel it, and the Word of God abides in you, though other people are questioning that, and you have overcome the evil one. Though they might be saying that you haven’t. Do you see the force of this letter? Let’s pray together.

These things are true of the regular person who’s put their trust in Jesus.

Your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake.

You know the eternal God.

You have the Word of God abiding in you. You have responded rightly to the Word of God.

You have overcome the evil one. You are on the winning side.

We thank you, gracious God, for these tremendously reassuring statements. We pray that as we read this letter this week, substance would be filled in behind those statements. We pray that we might grow in confidence in you and in what we have in Christ, and we pray that we might grow in confidence in resisting things that are not true. Help us to be a great encouragement to one another this week as we read these words together, and please bring about in us what is good for us and glorifying to you. For we ask it in Jesus’ name.

Amen.