Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: 1 John 5:13 | Date: November 27, 2022 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

The Ground of Assurance

All right. Take your Bibles, if you will, and turn to 1 John chapter 5. We’re continuing our series of studies on the doctrine of salvation. Right now we are dealing with the specific doctrine of assurance of salvation. Our question here is, okay, we have seen what God has done to save us. We’ve seen the fullness of the work of Christ and the value of Christ to us, the sufficiency of Christ for us, that He is all that we need. We have seen that salvation comes to us through faith in Christ by grace alone. And we’ve seen that we have then in Jesus all that God requires of us. We have in Him the one who was born the curse of all of our sin. We have in Him the righteousness that God requires of us. We have in Him everything that we need. We believe that; we’ve trusted Christ for that.

The question now is, how can I know that that actually pertains to me? How can I have assurance of salvation? And we’ll look then, first of all, here at 1 John chapter 5. To begin, for sake of time, I think I will just read verses 10 and following: “Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne concerning his Son. And 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.”

Let’s bow together for prayer. Our Father, this is such an important doctrine for the hearts of all of Your people. We pray that You’ll give us an accurate understanding of it, and through that we pray that You would refresh our hearts and stir our souls with this wonderful assurance that we indeed belong to Jesus and are safe before a holy God. If there are those here who have not yet bowed the knee to Christ, we pray that You would enable them to see the joy of salvation in Christ that they are missing. For those of us who have come to Christ, we pray that You’ll help us to see that joy afresh and strengthen us in it, we pray in Jesus’ name, amen.

All right, we have begun this brief series on assurance, first of all, by looking at the ground of assurance. And I tried to emphasize, and I’ll emphasize it again today, that the sole ground of our assurance is Christ—the person and work of Christ and God’s promise of acceptance in Him. That is the ground of assurance. Now there’s more to be said about assurance than that, but that’s where we have to begin, and we cannot confuse the other things that we will have to say about assurance with this sole ground of assurance, which is Christ. I am safe before God, though I’m a sinner; I am safe before God because, and only because, Jesus Christ has stood in my place, and in Him I have everything that God requires of me. That’s the sole ground of our assurance.

We found, though, that there is also a confirmation, a confirming work of the Holy Spirit that ministers assurance to us as well. So although Christ and the work of Christ and God’s promise of acceptance in Christ is the sole ground of our assurance, there is a supplementary, a confirming assurance that comes by the work of the Spirit in our hearts. We saw that at length, particularly in Romans chapter 8, where God’s Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are His children. We saw it in Romans chapter 5, that the Spirit of God has come and His purpose in coming is to shed abroad in our hearts a sense of God’s fatherly love for us. So that now, not only do we have the black ink on a white page where God’s promise has been given to us, but we have the truth of that promise sealed in our hearts and confirmed that it does in fact pertain to us, and there is shed abroad in our souls a sense that we belong to God and that He loves us.

The Corroborating Evidence

So we have the ground of assurance, which is Christ. We have the confirmation of our salvation by the work of the Spirit in us. Today, now, we look at a third aspect of assurance, and that is what I’ll call the corroborating evidence, the observable evidence in the life of the believer that we do, in fact, belong to God. And here what I’m working on is what we’ve mentioned so many times throughout this series, that the gospel promises two things, basically: acceptance or justification, and transformation, commonly called sanctification. Acceptance and transformation. These are the two broad areas that the gospel promises.

Now when we look specifically at the transformation, the transformative promises of the gospel, there we find certain earmarks of genuine faith and what genuine faith looks like. And we can find then that the Spirit has in fact come to us in such a way not only to minister a sense of assurance in our heart, but to produce in us a life that is consistent with this promise of transformation. That then in turn becomes corroborating evidence that we do belong to God, and then in that sense serves to enhance our assurance before Him.

I’ll develop that at some length, but let’s begin by—and here you understand why last time I was in the pulpit on Sunday morning, we dealt with the new covenant promise. I wanted to deal with that; I didn’t have time to deal with that and this at the same time, so I dealt with that on its own. But you’ll remember in Jeremiah chapter 31, we saw at length that God makes this promise that He will, in this new covenant, write His law on our hearts, put it in our minds, or as Ezekiel says, He’ll take out the heart of stone and put in a heart of flesh, and He’ll make us people who want to serve Him and want to obey Him. So that the distinctive mark of a Christian is his “want to.” His “want to” has been transformed. He wants to serve God. He wants to obey.

That’s what a Christian is. That’s what the new covenant promises. The new covenant promises also, “I will forgive their sins.” And here’s the ground of it, even as we saw in Jeremiah chapter 31, that God, having forgiven our sins, then transforms us to become what He calls us to be. We saw that that was in contrast to the old covenant, where God’s law was given, the commands were made—do this, don’t do the other—but there was no provision in that old covenant for enablement. There is no provision in that old covenant to make us “want to.” And so it failed, not because the covenant itself was bad or the law was somehow evil or anything like that—Paul takes that up in Romans chapter 7—the problem was not the law or the old covenant; the problem was the people. The people had no “want to.”

And so God says through Jeremiah, in Jeremiah chapter 31, that covenant failed, they broke it, they violated the terms, so I’m going to make a new covenant. And this is the one we find expounded throughout the New Testament, that in the New Covenant, God promises, “I’ll forgive their sins and I’ll change them from the inside out.” The old covenant commanded, and condemned if you don’t obey, but made no provision for compliance. The New Covenant just frankly forgives sins and makes provision for compliance. And that then becomes something of a definition of what salvation is. It entails both acceptance and transformation. Justification, the receiving of the Spirit of God to lead us.

You might remember Jeremiah chapter 32, verse 40, that I mentioned last time: “I will make an everlasting covenant that I will not turn away from doing good to them. I will put the fear of me in their hearts that they may not turn from me.” So God ensures in this new covenant a transformation of heart and life and even ensures continuance in that. And so this becomes, as I say, the distinctive mark of a Christian—his “want to,” his heart—and then from his heart, his life is oriented toward God, a new direction entirely. And as I say, all of this becomes in the New Testament now part of the definition of what salvation is.

You’ll see this in the book of Romans as we’ve explored it, particularly in chapters 3 and following, as we’ve seen so many times in this series. Romans chapters 3 to 5, Paul expounds the nature of justification—that it did not come through the law or from anything on our part, but it is a free, gratis gift to us from God in Jesus Christ received through faith alone. We get then to Romans chapter 6 and we find the transformative aspect of the gospel. That sin no longer has dominion over you. That’s the statement in Romans chapter 6. Romans 3 to 5 we have our acceptance in Christ. Now chapter 6 we have this promise of transformation. Sin no longer has dominion over you. We’re in a different world now. Having come to Christ, we’re no longer under the dominion of sin. We’re under the dominion of the Spirit of God. And that is how Paul picks it up, you remember, in Romans chapter 8. And that is the meaning of being led by the Spirit. We’re no longer dominated by sin. We’re under the influence now of the Spirit of God who directs us to live for God.

That in turn informs what we see in Matthew chapter 13 regarding the parable of the sower, that the good ground hearer was the one who bears fruit and continues. He bears fruit and he continues. He bears fruit and he continues. That’s part of the definition now of what salvation is. And this is what Paul means by being led by the Spirit. So what we have then is the net result of all of that: some characteristics, some earmarks of what a genuine believer is. And in that sense, it can be an aid to assurance because we can look and see that this, that God has promised in the gospel, has in fact become a reality in our own experience. And in that sense, it serves to corroborate that we are indeed safe in Christ.

The Doctrinal, Moral, and Social Tests

I think a little bit of a, just a brief mention of the history of the discussion of assurance in Christian theology might be helpful. Martin Luther and the Reformers generally emphasized the necessity of faith, of course. That was the point at issue in the Reformation. And they tended to define assurance in terms of faith itself. Faith is assurance. Christ is the objective ground. God makes a promise that He will accept us if we come by way of trusting in Christ. And so in our very coming to Christ in the first place, that faith is an expression of our assurance. And that was their emphasis, and it’s a very helpful emphasis.

Calvin, for example, also recognized the evidences of life that corroborate things as well, but he recognized that that is subordinate to this initial one, that Christ is the sole ground of assurance, and it is bound up with faith itself. Some groups of Christians have emphasized not that, but they have emphasized the inner work of the Spirit. And so assurance becomes grounded in more subjective considerations of what I feel. “And I sense the Spirit of God testifying with me that I am God’s child.” Some have emphasized that more than the others.

When we come to the Puritans, some of them have emphasized more the life evidences of salvation, that salvation entails a transformation of life. And so there was, with the Puritans, a strong concern for godly living, for faithfulness in that way, in a practical kind of way. Often today in discussions about assurance in the theology books and such, there’ll be an acknowledgement of all these various aspects, but the tendency seems to be more on—the emphasis seems to be more on these matters of practical Christian living. You can see that God has changed your life, you can see the good works, and in there you have evidence that you are saved.

Some Reformed groups that I have run into have so emphasized this reality of a transformed life as part of the promises of the gospel, and they so press the matter of transformation, that assurance on the part of their people who hear this continually—assurance becomes very rare. Many of them, and the members of their church, we’ve seen them, we’ve talked to them. Many of them rarely will take communion because they don’t feel that they’re worthy. “We have not lived up to what we ought to have lived. We’re not even sure that we’re in Christ, and so we dare not take the Lord’s Supper unworthily.” And so assurance in those groups, because they have pressed so much this reality that the gospel promises transformation, that assurance becomes very rare. I know of one very prominent Reformed Baptist preacher who preached a series of messages through 1 John, and many of his people remarked after the whole series that they had more doubts about their salvation afterwards than they did before. And here is a book, 1 John, that is given to minister assurance to God’s people. We’ll see more of that in a little bit.

We also have today another approach to all of this, and that’s just wide swaths of evangelicals who don’t lack assurance. In fact, they never doubt. They’ve made their decision, they’ve signed the decision card, and because they’ve made this decision, it doesn’t matter now what life is, because God said He would save me by grace, and they think that they are extolling grace. Meanwhile, we might wonder what happened to this promise that God will transform us by this gospel by which He accepts us. And so the question becomes, in dealing with this doctrine of assurance, to sort these matters out. These various emphases are all good and they’re all important, but we have to keep them in right perspective. And the distinctions that I’m making here, I hope you will see, are very important because they serve in a practical way at the end of it all to minister assurance in a way that is true and full and valuable to us.

All right, we’ve seen the ground of assurance is Christ alone, God’s promise of acceptance in Him. There’s confirmation of that in the Spirit’s work in us. Still now, viewed in its right place, the transformed life, the reality of Christian graces in the life, does provide cooperative evidence, and in that sense is an aid to assurance. Again, that’s part of what we learned from Matthew chapter 13 in the parable of the sower. The good ground hearer bears fruit and he lasts. He doesn’t fizzle. He lasts and he continues. We’ve seen in our expositions through the book of James that James is given almost entirely to press this very point: that the gospel promises transformation, and it ought to show up in the way you speak, in the way you talk to other people, the way you relate to God’s people, in helping your brother in need, and so on.

But in this discussion now of the transformed life and that serving as an aid to assurance, the discussion inevitably comes to 1 John. Because here in this letter, the Apostle John deals with it more pointedly and at more length than we have in any other single part of Scripture. And you’ll notice in chapter 5 that we have read verses 11 to 13. This is his theme. This is his reason for writing. Verse 11, “This is the testimony that God gave us eternal life. And this life is in His Son.” There’s the ground of assurance. This life is in His Son. “Whoever has the Son has life. Whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” There’s the ground of assurance. There’s the basic reality. If you have Christ, you’re safe in Him. 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.” There’s the language of assurance. “I write so that you may know that you have eternal life.” His purpose in his writing is explicitly stated: “I’m writing to minister to you a sense of assurance and how you can know.”

Now verse 13, “I write these things… to you,” has immediate reference back to verses 11 and 12, and that is trusting in Christ, having in Him eternal life that God has promised—that’s the ground of assurance; it has immediate reference to that. But yet his entire letter is marked by an emphasis on this cooperative evidence in the life of the believer. “By this you know.” And you’ll see that little formula throughout 1 John. And all we can do this morning—Pastor Boyd took us through 1 John a couple of years ago—all we can do this morning is just survey that. But notice this repeating formula in 1 John: “By this we know.”

And let me give you a few of them. We see it already in verse 13, “I write this, that you may know.” But now notice chapter 2. Go back to chapter 2, verse 3: “By this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commands.” Notice the emphasis on transformation of life. By this we know that we’re saved. How do you know? We keep His commands. Chapter 3, verse 14: “We know that we have passed out of death to life because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death.” So how do we know that we’ve passed from death to life? How do we know that we are saved? Answer: we love the brothers. God’s people, they’re the objects of our affection. This is cooperative evidence that he’s giving. Chapter 3, verse 24: “By this we know that he abides in us by the spirit whom he has given us.” Chapter 4, verse 13: “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his spirit.” Chapter 5 and verse 2: “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments.”

All of these statements, “By this we know,” point to things about us and our experience and our behavior and our affections that indicate that God has indeed been at work in us. And John writes to his people and says, “This is how you know. Don’t you see God’s work? God is at work in you.” So his goal is to minister assurance to them, partially at least, and I think in a larger way than is generally recognized. He wants to say this to them in light of the false teachers who have come into the church. Now, that’s a whole other area of study with regard to 1 John, and that is: who are the false teachers that he’s opposing at certain times? But there must be some kind of discussion of that. It used to be called, when I was in school, it was called Gnosticism that had come into the early church. Scholars have since recognized that it really isn’t Gnosticism yet because Gnosticism was something that came a little bit later. But I think we can say that, and most would agree to this, I think that this is a proto-Gnosticism of some sort. These false teachers coming into the church and they’re influenced by Platonic philosophies and things like that—matter is evil and spirit is good, and because of that you question the incarnation. Did Jesus really come in the flesh? And that’s why John deals with that.

And because of this dualism that they have, there’s often an indifference with regard to morality. Things of behavior were not of great concern. And because of this superior knowledge—that’s what gnosticism means, this gnosis, this knowledge that they have—there’s a superiority on their part among the riffraff of the people and they know better because they have the spiritual insight that has come. And John is reflecting a lot of that in his letter. These people have the superior wisdom, the superior insight, a disregard for morality, an indifference toward the people of God, a denial of certain doctrines of the faith with regard to the person and work of Jesus. And John writes, in light of that then, to show who a real Christian is.

Now, in addition to these “by this you know” passages that you have in 1 John, we also have something related and that’s what’s sometimes called the exclusionary clauses. And I want you to see those. That is the negative, the flip side of those “by this you know” passages. So look back at chapter 2. “Whoever says he is…” this is verse 9, “Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness.” There’s an exclusionary clause. Some people are excluded from salvation. Here, it is those who hate the brother. Whoever says he’s in the light and hates his brother, no, he’s still in darkness. Chapter 3, verse 6, here’s another exclusion: “No one who abides in him keeps on sinning.” So here he excludes those who are marked by sin.

Chapter 3, verse 9: “No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him and he cannot keep sinning because he has been born of God.” Here he makes a broad and a bold statement: Christians are people who don’t sin. I’ll talk about that a little bit. Christians are those who don’t sin. It’s the unbeliever who sins, and those who live in sin, they know by that that they don’t belong to Christ. Chapter 3, verse 10: “By this it is evident who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil. Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.” There’s another exclusion. Those who sin, those who don’t love the brother, they’re not Christians. You know, the flip side of that: “By this we know” that you are a believer, because you do love the brother, and you do forsake sin.

Chapter 3, verse 15: “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” So there’s another exclusion, again with regard to the affections for the brother. Chapter 4 in verse 3, we have a doctrinal test: “Every spirit that does not confess that Jesus… does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of antichrist which you’ve heard is coming and now is in the world already.” So here we have those who have proven by their doctrinal confession that they are not genuine believers.

Now, here we have then with John all of this emphasis on the evidences of eternal life. How can we know? And here’s a practical way to look. A Christian is one who does this and does that, but he does not do the other. Now John has plenty to say about the objective value of Christ’s death. We find that back in chapter 1 in verse 7: “The blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanses us from all sin.” Chapter 2, verse 2, He’s the propitiation for our sins. Chapter 4, verse 10, He’s the advocate for us. Chapter 3 and verse 5, Jesus came to take away sin. Chapter 3, verse 16, He laid down His life for us. And what we saw already at the beginning in chapter 5, verses 11 to 13: “Whoever has the Son has life.” It’s that simple.

So John has a lot to say about the objective value of Christ’s death. But he does give a series of tests by which you can see if that profession is real. And they’ve generally been narrowed down to three in 1 John. Number one, the doctrinal test: what we believe. We have the Jesus that John taught, that Paul taught, and we have the Jesus of the false teachers. Specifically, they deny that Jesus has come from God. They deny the incarnation. They deny that, as he says it in chapter 4, they deny that Jesus has come in the flesh. So this is not God become man. John says by that confession you can tell these people are not saved. So there’s the doctrinal test.

There’s secondly the moral test: how we behave. The doctrinal test, what we believe; the moral test, how we behave. A Christian is someone who is marked by practical godliness. And then we have the social test. The doctrinal test, what we believe; the moral test, how we behave; and now the social test, the nature of our affections, particularly with reference to the people of God. The leading emphasis in 1 John is these transforming effects of the gospel. It shapes the way we live and behave, and it shapes even our affections toward the people of God.

Resolving the Tension in 1 John

Now, I’ve said enough about that to have to address a certain tension that is built into 1 John and has been difficult for many people reading it. On the one hand, John emphasizes very strongly that a Christian—a mark of a believer—is that he does not sin. You can’t miss that. John says it over and again. Chapter 1 in verse 6: “If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another.” So here we have on the one hand, a Christian is one who does not sin. Let me press this a little bit more before I relieve the tension. Chapter 2 in verse 3: “By this we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands.” So a Christian is one who’s obedient. Chapter 3 in verse 6: “No one who abides in him keeps on sinning.” Now there, the translation we put in our version, “keeps on sinning”—there’s interpretive reason for rendering it that way. Very simply, no one who abides in Him sins. Chapter 3, verse 9: “No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him and he cannot keep on sinning because he’s been born of God.” Verse 10 of chapter 3: “By this it is evident that who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil, whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.”

So the first mark, the first emphasis here, this tension, is that the Christian, the genuine believer, is one who does not sin. And yet, look at chapter 1 again. Let’s start with verse 6 and read further: “If we say that we have fellowship with him and while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another.” Okay, so there the mark of a believer is that he does not sin, right? He walks—he doesn’t walk in darkness; he walks in the light. And yet, verse 7 again: “if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his son cleanses us from all sin.” If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

So on the one hand, the Christian is one who does not sin, and yet the Christian is also one who never says that he has no sin. You have both. How do you resolve that? And the only way to resolve it that I know of is to take it in broad terms as our translations reflect, and that is the mark of a Christian is that he’s transformed. On the one hand, he is transformed. A genuine work has been done and his life now is oriented toward God. And any sin on the part of a Christian, it is and it ought to be a very surprising thing. Christians don’t do that. And John wants to press that. But then on the other hand, caught where we are between the “now” and the “not yet,” sin is inevitable. And so John, like Paul, calls us to live up to who we are in Christ. Live up to what we are. We are transformed people. And yet after all of that, we still have to say the Christian is marked by godliness. The Christian is marked by Christian graces. He bears fruit and he continues. Whatever interruptions there are in his sins—interruptions there are in godliness because of his sins—the direction of his life, the mark of his life, is that he pursues God and wants to obey and live for Him. I think that relieves the tension that we have in 1 John, and I think it’s important to see both sides of that in order to understand it.

Now, some have suggested there’s actually a fourth test in the Gospel of John—I mean, in the Epistle of John—and that is the witness of the Spirit, and you have several passages that speak of that. “By this we know that we belong to Him because of the Spirit that He has given to us.” I don’t think that’s a separate test. I think in context, each of those speak of the Spirit’s work in bringing about these things, these traits of life that are evident in us. And I think that’s the point of the ministry of the Spirit in 1 John. Some people have also suggested that perseverance—remember, we’ve talked about the matter of perseverance—he not only bears fruit, but he lasts. Some have suggested that in 1 John, the perseverance is a fourth test or fourth evidence. They have to continue with us. They have to abide in Christ, and so on. I don’t think that’s a fourth test. I think that’s just a continuance in the other three that John has emphasized.

All right. I wanted to work through all of that, but I really want you to see this, and we have to be careful here. The terminology is important, and I hope you’ll see why. All of this that we see then regarding transformed life is not the ground of assurance. It’s cooperative evidence of our salvation. The Bible never says, “Well, you can never know really that you’re a Christian until finally you’ve persevered to the end.” Never quite says that. The ground of assurance is still Christ. And we can know that we have eternal life because we have the Son, because in Him there is eternal life. And we have assurance because we have Him.

And in fact, it is commonplace for 1 John to be described as giving us these tests of life: the doctrinal tests, the moral tests, the social tests. Don Carson suggested, and I found this very helpful, that that term “tests” here in this context is more negative than it ought to be. What we don’t have in 1 John—John is not writing to test his people so much as he is writing positively to give evidences. It’s a positive kind of thing. The problem in the background is these proto-gnostics, these false teachers; they have a spiritual insight and they have the superior knowledge. They have an indifference regarding the normal riffraff of the people of God because they don’t have the superior insights that they have obtained by their knowledge of God. And because of all of this, they have understood that morals don’t matter as much and they’re indifferent with regard to morals as well.

And John takes that in the background and now writes to his people and says, “This is how you know that you belong to God. You are not indifferent to the people of God. You are not indifferent with regard to morals. And you have not denied the essential doctrines regarding the person of Christ. Don’t be jealous or envious of what they claim to have. You have all of the evidence you need that you belong to God.” John’s intent then is to minister assurance, not doubt, and that’s why I’m just so appalled when I hear of those who have gone through studies of 1 John and they come out doubting because the preacher has pressed the tests so hard. It just misses, I think, misses John’s point altogether. He’s not testing people. He’s providing evidence that they belong to God.

And so this terminology, I think, is important. We have the ground of assurance, and that’s Christ. It’s the same ground as our faith. I belong to God because I’m trusting and resting in Jesus Christ alone. That’s the sole ground of my assurance. And yet there’s more. The Holy Spirit bears witness in my heart of my acceptance and gives me a sense of God’s acceptance as His son. And so there’s confirmation. And yet there’s more. There’s observable evidence in life that God truly has been at work in me because the bent of my life has been changed. And I want—I want from my heart—I want to live for Him.

And all three of those now—the ground of our assurance, the confirmation, and the cooperation—all three are essential, but don’t reverse the order. The ground of our assurance must never be our performance. The ground of our assurance is Christ. And yet, God in His mercy has sent His Spirit to testify in our hearts that we belong to Him and to produce in us just exactly what He promised He would. And so, both the witness of the Spirit and the evidences are subordinate to the sole ground of assurance, which is Christ.

God sent His Son and promises that He will have all who come to Him by way of His Son. We respond in faith; we’re believing and resting in Christ with assurance that Christ is enough. And then God sends His Spirit to testify in our hearts to the same. He is enough and you have Him, and with Him you are the son of God. And He also shores up in us, as we’ve seen in Romans chapter 8, a sense of the anticipation of glory and the inheritance of God’s sons. And then the Holy Spirit works further and produces in us evidences that He has begun this work.

And again, these distinctions are important, not just for theological accuracy, but in the practical interests of assurance. John Calvin wrote—I think this is an insightful statement, it’s one we all need to recognize—”conscience derives from works more fear and alarm than security.” Our evidences of life, important as they are, essential as they are, if they are somehow twisted to become the ground of our assurance, we will always wonder: have we done well enough? Our conscience will never be satisfied. These evidences serve as an aid to assurance only in such a way that it evidences that our faith in Christ has been real and that God has done what He promised. Robert Murray McCheyne, a couple hundred years ago, I think said it so right when he advised people in this regard: you take one look at yourself, ten looks to Christ. You reverse that, you’ll never have assurance.

And yet, and yet, the presence of Christian graces does serve as real cooperation and ought to serve as an aid to assurance, and that’s John’s purpose. Of course, these evidences of life can be counterfeited. A person can be brought up in a culture and a family or an environment where these graces are cultivated and they can be honest and they can be loving and caring and kind and lots of good things and patient. But John writes to say, in effect, that we affirm certain biblical teachings about Jesus really does say something about us. And he writes to say that that we don’t find His commands burdensome, but joyful, says something about us. That we want to serve God from our hearts. We want to serve God. And the direction of our life has been to please Him. That says something about us. That we love the people of God and are not indifferent toward them in their needs. That says something about us. And that our sin bothers us. And when we sin, we want to go back before God in humble confession and asking for forgiveness. That says something about us.

And John writes to say, it says that God is at work in you just the way He promised He would be. And in that sense, it serves as cooperative evidence that we belong to Him. So a familiarity with 1 John is essential to our practical assurance. The tendency is to look at ourselves, look at our sins, and we come away with doubts. John writes and says, “Yes, look at the evidences. Look at what God has begun.” God promised that He would save you if you come by way of Christ. God promised He would send you His Spirit, confirm in your hearts that you belong to Him, and He promised that He would transform you from the inside out. Look at those evidences, and you’ll see that that work is well underway. And in fact, John tells us in chapter 3 and verse 1 that one day that work will be completed and we’ll see Him as He is and we will be like Him. Amen.