How Will I Know?
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One of the hardest things for me during this time of quarantine has been coming to terms with the idea of not knowing.
We don’t know whether masks are effective in slowing the spread of the coronavirus, at least in part because of all the mixed messages we have heard from government and even from the world’s health experts.
We do not know whether it’s safe to open society back up. We thought it was, but then we have watched as many of the places that removed social restrictions first have now begun to see their highest levels of infection.
We don’t know whether the tests for covid-19 are reliable.
We don’t know whether the treatments for the disease are effective.
We don’t know whether our congregation will rejoin us when we re-open the church building.
We don’t know whether it’s safe to sing whenever we do go back into the building.
In fact, one of the worst things about this virus, is that we don’t know that we have it until enough time has passed that we have potentially and unknowingly infected loved ones and friends and business associates with it.
It is the 21st century. We have sent men to the moon. We have looked into the deepest corners of space and worked out some of the darkest secrets of physics. We have mapped the deepest ocean trenches and even the human genome.
There is so much that we DO know that we convinced ourselves that we can know everything there is to know if we were simply to apply ourselves to learning it.
And yet we come up against this tiny virus, and we find ourselves shattered by the fact that there are some things we do not know, some things we may never know — perhaps even some things we cannot know.
The psalms of David talk quite a bit about what we can know, and not all of what he concluded is encouraging.
“I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me,” he wrote after Nathan had pointed out David’s sin with Bathsheba.
In fact, when it came to his sins, David recognized that God knew even more than he did.
“O God, it is You who knows my folly, and my wrongs are not hidden from you,” he wrote in the 69th Psalm. “You know my reproach and my shame and my dishonor.”
David understood that he was praying to a God who knew him intimately.
“Even before there is a word on my tongue, behold, O Lord, You know it all,” he sang in Psalm 139, and so he could then pray, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my anxious thoughts.”
And recognizing that he served a God of perfect righteousness, David prayed in Psalm 119: “I know, O Lord, that Your judgments are righteous,” and “I am Your servant; give me understanding, that I may know Your testimonies.”
"Make me know Your ways, O Lord; teach me Your paths,” he wrote in the 25th Psalm.
And then, this, in Psalm 56: “This I know, that God is for me.”
In these times of such great unknowns, in these days of anxiety and disquiet and uncertainty, here is one thing that can anchor us: God is for us.
Now, let me qualify that statement before I move on.
There is a very real sense in which God is for all mankind.
This is the Father who loved the WORLD so much that He sent His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him would not perish but have eternal life.
This is the God who showed His love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
This is the God who in Christ was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their transgressions against them.
So clearly, there is a sense in which God is FOR all mankind.
It is in that sense that Jesus could say, “Come to Me, ALL who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”
The message of the gospel is for all mankind, because God loves each of His created beings, those made in His image.
But Jesus also said:
“My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand. “My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.
If there are sheep who know the Good Shepherd’s voice, then it stands to reason that there are sheep who do not. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. There are some who respond to the call of the Shepherd, and there are some who ignore that call.
Those who follow Jesus Christ are given to Him by the Father, and Jesus says here that they will be kept; nobody will be able to snatch them from the Father’s hand.
But how can you know if you’re one of those sheep? How can you know if you belong to the Father, if you are one of those He has given the Son as a special possession?
That’s what I want to talk about today as kind of a follow-up to our recent studies.
We talked for several weeks about Paul’s prayers for the church, and if you saw the video I posted on Facebook this week, you know that a pastor friend and I talked about what the church IS and what its purpose is.
Scripture calls the church both the body of Christ and the bride of Christ. The church comprises all those — past, present, and future — who have put their faith in Jesus Christ as their only means of being reconciled to God, of having their broken relationship restored with the creator of heaven and earth and all that is in them.
The church comprises all the believers who were redeemed from sin — bought from their enslavement to sin by the blood of Jesus Christ, shed on a cross at Calvary.
Having been bought by His blood, we now belong to Him and to His Father, and we who follow Jesus in faith now have a special sense in which God is for us.
But this special relationship doesn’t come as a result of growing up in the church. It doesn’t come from owning a Bible — or even reading it, for that matter. It doesn’t come from having been a faithful member of a Sunday school class or being someone who regularly tithes to the church or, quite frankly, from anything we might do.
This special relationship with God the Father comes by His grace, through faith in Jesus, and even our faith is God’s gift to us.
It’s God’s work and the work of Jesus and of the Holy Spirit.
This can be hard for us, because we like to think we are in control of our destinies. When I was in the newspaper business, I used to get a spreadsheet each January that listed a number of goals for the year; if I accomplished those goals, then I knew I would get a bonus in December.
But that’s not how it works with our salvation. There is nothing any of us can do to make our salvation more sure.
So how can you KNOW that you belong to God? How can you KNOW that you are part of the true church for which Paul prayed such mighty prayers? How can you KNOW that you are part of the body of Christ?
This matter of the assurance of salvation is one of the main themes of the Book of 1 John, and I want to spend the rest of this message talking about five pieces of evidence that can give you assurance that you belong to God.
Turn with me to 1 John 2:20.
Now John had written about the fact that there were some who had been with Jesus and His disciples who were not really followers, and he said that it became evident that those people were not people of true faith because they fell away, and in fact they began teaching false doctrines. He called those people antichrists, because they were opposed to the true Christ.
And then, in verses 20 and 21, John gives these believers the first piece of evidence that they belong to God.
But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you all know. I have not written to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it, and because no lie is of the truth.
You can know that you belong to God because the Bible comes alive for you through the guidance of the Holy Spirit within you.
I can assure you that there are atheists who know the Bible better than many Christians. Sadly, they have read it more closely and studied it more carefully.
But one of the hallmarks of someone who truly belongs to God is both a desire to know and understand Scripture and a sensitivity to the Spirit’s unveiling of it.
We who have followed Christ have been established in the truth. In His High Priestly Prayer at the Last Supper, Jesus prayed that God would sanctify us in the truth, and then He clarified for us that God’s Word is truth.
Speaking to the Jews who had believed in Him as He taught in the temple, Jesus said “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
God’s word should not be a burden for Christians. God’s word helps us to know His Son, who declared Himself the Way, the TRUTH and the Life, and in knowing this Truth, we have freedom — we become fully alive.
So those who belong to God find that His word comes alive for them and that they are fully alive as they rest in its Truth.
Now, life is the opposite of death, and God’s word tells us that death is the curse brought on this world by sin, by mankind’s rebellion against God.
So the second evidence that you belong to God should be a conscience that has been sensitized to sin.
Note that I didn’t say that the evidence you belong to God is sinlessness.
John says in this letter that “If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.”
Even as followers of Christ, we all still sin and fall short of the glory of God. But “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
The point is that if you are a follower of Christ, if you are one who belongs to God, then you will have a new sensitivity, by the Holy Spirit, to recognize your sinfulness and to turn from it.
Look at chapter 3, verse 9.
No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.
Nelson’s New Illustrated Bible Commentary Commentary
Habitually sinful conduct indicates an absence of fellowship with Christ. Thus, if we claim to be a Christian but sin is our way of life, our status as children of God can legitimately be questioned
If you belong to God through faith in Jesus Christ, then you will have a new attitude about sin, and you will strive to eradicate it from your life whenever you see it.
We are all either children of God or children of the devil, and John says in the next verse that our attitude about sin is one of the things that reveals who our real father is.
By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother.
So those who belong to God find that the Bible comes alive for them, and they experience a sensitivity to sin that they did not know when they were lost.
But we see in verse 10 another evidence: Love.
John says that anyone who does not love his brother is not of God.
Look at verse 11:
For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another;
And verse 14:
We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love abides in death.
And verse 16:
We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.
Jesus said:
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.
The new commandment was not that we should love one another. That came right out of the Old Testament. The new commandment was that we should love one another, EVEN AS Jesus has loved us.
Jesus loved us to the point of sacrificing Himself on a cross for us. His love wasn’t expressed simply in words, but in self-sacrificial action.
God’s love is a self-sacrificing love, and if you belong to Him, then your love will be that kind of love, too — not simply expressed in words, but in sacrificial actions.
You may never be called to give your life for a brother or sister in Christ, but you ARE called to set aside your rights and your privileges and your entitlements as necessary to meet the needs of fellow believers.
It breaks my heart to see so many Christians today asserting their rights to the detriment of others. We who are called to be humble and meek, as our Savior was humble and meek, are so often better known for our self-righteousness, for our anger and for our obstinance.
We can do better. We must do better.
Look at verse 18.
Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth.
When we love with word, we speak words of love and perhaps even feel love, but we stop short of doing loving things. To love with tongue is even worse. That means saying we love someone when we do not. The opposite of loving with word is loving in deeds. And the opposite of loving with tongue is loving in truth.
We are called to “love from the heart and with actions.” (NNIBC, 1712)
And as John says in the next verse, that kind of love gives assurance “that we are of the truth,” that we belong to God.
And we for whom the Bible has come alive, we who have had our conscience sensitized to sin, we who have a special affinity — love from the heart with actions — for one another can also know that we belong to God because we experience His love in our lives.
Look at verse 24.
The one who keeps His commandments abides in Him, and He in him. We know by this that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us.
You can know that you belong to God because of the testimony of the Holy Spirit within you, the Spirit you received at the moment you believed.
Paul wrote about this to the believers in Rome.
The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God,
If you belong to God, then you have hope, he wrote in that same letter.
and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.
There may be times in your Christian life when you do not feel particularly close to God. David certainly wrote about times when it seemed that God was far from him.
But even in his darkest moments, David knew that God loved him. This Spirit-filled king of Israel always had hope, because the love of God had been poured out within his heart through the Holy Spirit. David knew that he belonged to God.
And knowing that he belonged to God, David wanted to share the joy and the hope that came from that relationship.
In the 9th Psalm, he wrote:
I will give thanks to the Lord with all my heart; I will tell of all Your wonders. I will be glad and exult in You; I will sing praise to Your name, O Most High.
This is the fifth hallmark of someone who belongs to God: the desire to share that blessing with others.
As I have said many times before, we are blessed so that we can bless others.
The blessing of salvation through Jesus Christ should manifest itself in your life through a desire to tell others about the one who brought you from death into life, the one whose death, burial, resurrection and ascension into heaven has reconciled you to the Father who created you and through whom you have been made a new creation in Christ.
Look at verses 14 and 15 of chapter 4.
We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.
Do you see those two words: testify and confess?
To testify to something means to be a witness about it. Someone who testifies in court is giving evidence as a witness.
The Greek word that’s translated here as “confess” has the sense of declaring something openly, of speaking out about it.
If you belong to God through His Son, Jesus Christ, then you will want to declare it. You’re going to want to speak out about it.
You have not been given the light of Christ to hide it under a bushel. The light can only dispel the darkness if it is uncovered.
So how can you know that you belong to God?
The Bible will come alive for you — you will desire to abide in its truth.
You will find your conscience to be sensitive to sin in your life, and you will seek to eradicate it from your life whenever you encounter it.
You will find yourself looking for ways to demonstrate your heartfelt love for others in your actions and not just your words.
You will feel the love of God poured into your life through the Holy Spirit.
And you will seek opportunities to tell others about Jesus.
This letter from John was written to give its Christian recipients assurance about their salvation in the midst of those who were telling them that they didn’t have the whole story, that there was some special knowledge they lacked that was the real key to salvation.
And if you are a true follower of Christ, then these things should give you similar assurance that you belong to God and that no one can snatch you from His hand.
But there is another side of this coin. Are these things missing from your life? If so, then this assurance may not be yours to have.
But it can be yours.
Admit that you are a sinner. Agree with God that you have failed to meet His perfect standard of righteousness and that there is nothing you can do to make amends for your rebellion against His rightful demands as Creator and King.
Then believe in Jesus Christ, the sinless Son of God, who was sent to offer Himself as the payment for the debt your sins have incurred.
If you will confess that Jesus is the only way by which you can be saved from the penalty of your sins — that only His righteousness can save you, and not your own — then you can have assurance that you will have eternal life with Him and with the Father in heaven.
Oh, how I wish that we all could have that assurance of salvation. Oh, how I pray that it will be yours.