Benefits of Loving One Another – Part 1

1 John 3:19-24

April 13, 2003

            Turn with me in your Bibles this morning to 1 John 3:19-24. 1 John 3:19-24. Follow along as I read the text this morning. Read text. Let’s pray.

            As John closes chapter three, it is important to bear in mind that he is still discussing the meaning of being a child of God. This is a subject that he will continue to discuss all the way through chapter five.

            What does it mean to be a child of God? John has put forward several practical doctrines to help us understand what it means that we are children of God. He began this theme at the end of chapter two. As he began this theme of being a child of God, he started by showing that one mark of the children of God is preparation for the second coming. The children of God live in light of Jesus’ second coming, and they constantly are trying to purify themselves and distance themselves from sin because they do not want to be ashamed at His coming. Children of God practice righteousness because they want to be pleasing to God when Jesus returns.

            Children of God also practice righteousness because of the cross. Jesus’ work on the cross was meant to take away sin and destroy the works of the devil, and the children of God live in light of that purpose. They don’t work against Jesus, they work for Jesus and try to further the aims of His kingdom. It is obvious, therefore, that those who do not live this way are children of the devil.

            At the end verse 10, however, John begins to discuss Christian love. How easy it is to appear holy and righteous in a vacuum! So John brings up the question of loving one another to test the claim we make to be children of God. And in this section he argues in this way. First, he argues that a lack of love demonstrates that a person is not a child of God. He argues against the person who would claim to be a child of God but who evidences no love for the brethren. He silences any objections to his doctrine of brotherly love. He argues using the example of Cain. The one who does not love is essentially a murderer, and no murderer has passed out of death and into life. So it is plain that love must be present in the life of a child of God.

            Yet it is not the type of love that is weak and merely sentimental. Love involves the whole person – intellect, emotions, and will – and the example of love is Jesus Christ. The type of love that must be present in the children of God is love that is Christlike, love that is willing to sacrifice to meet the needs of the brethren. Love must be in deed and in truth. It must demonstrate itself outwardly, and it must be felt inwardly. We must not outwardly demonstrate love to others and in our hearts be cursing them, hating them, feeling superior to them, or any other such hypocritical feeling. If we have these types of feelings in our hearts we could be loving in deed, but that is most certainly not loving in truth. It is hypocrisy. John therefore exhorts us to love as Jesus loved, in deed and in truth.

            Finally, John brings to bear the practical effects of this type of love for the believer. Why is this type of love so important in the life of the believer? What are the benefits of Christlike love in our daily walk with God, specifically, in our prayer lives? John does not argue that we should merely do the right thing because it is the right thing; no, he argues that we should do the right thing, and that we should see how beneficial it is for us to be obedient to God’s commands. He wants to motivate us to this type of love so that we will love ever-increasingly, and to do so, he shows us three practical reasons for loving the brethren. There are three practical reasons that we should love one another. John’s doctrinal teaching in this section is that the children of God love one another. It is a simple yet profound statement, and one that, when obeyed, results in a powerful Christian life because of its effects upon us.

Assurance of our Salvation (vv. 19-20)

            The first practical effect of loving the brethren is assurance of salvation. When we love the brethren as Jesus loves us, we have great assurance of salvation. Look at verse 19. John writes, We will know by this that we are of the truth. He says that we will know, we will be absolutely certain in our minds about our salvation. We will have the intellectual certainty of salvation. Once again John is discussing knowledge gained by experience. We will have a deep, personal, experiential knowledge that we are of the truth.

            This knowledge comes from the fact that we love the brethren. John says that it is by this that we will know that we are of the truth. The phrase by this is referring to loving the brethren as Jesus loves us. It refers back to what we studied last week. We will know that we are of the truth when we look at our lives and see something supernatural there. When we see the love of Jesus in our lives in deed and in truth, we know that that type of love is not something that we can produce in ourselves. It is something that God must produce in us. This type of love is the type of love of which God is the source, so when we see that type of love, we will know that we are children of God.

We would not have a lifestyle of loving with the love of God if we were not children of God. When I was growing up my dad used to have a saying, “If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.” When we look at something and study something, we will be able to tell what it is by its characteristics. I think this is what John is saying. We can see the effects of being born of God in our lives when we love like Jesus loves, and when we see those effects, they put our mind at ease, and we know that we are truly children of God. So John argues that one benefit of loving the brethren is assurance of our salvation in our knowledge. We know that we are children of God because we love in this manner.

            The Christian, however, as assured of his salvation as he may be, still can have times of doubt, uncertainty, unrest, and uneasiness in his heart before God. The more spiritually mature a person becomes, the more he realizes his own sinfulness and wickedness. Perhaps the most spiritually mature person who ever lived besides our Lord Himself was the Apostle Paul. Yet Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 1:15 that he was the foremost of all sinners! He was acutely aware of his own sinfulness and his own flesh. In Galatians 5:17 he shows his own personal awareness of the spiritual battle that rages in every believer when he wrote, The flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please. There is an internal war going on in the Christian. The flesh is battling the Spirit, and the Spirit is battling the flesh, and for the true Christian there will be times, many times, when he does not do what he wants to do in his heart, but his flesh wins the battle. As we grow spiritually the struggle gets more intense as we become more aware of our flesh and our own sin, and we try to purify ourselves.

            As a new believer, perhaps a person deals with sins of an external nature at first, perhaps sins of swearing, drinking to the point of drunkenness, gluttony, sexual immorality. And these sins occupy the forefront of the new Christian’s mind because they are the ones that he deals with. But a day will come when those external sins are, for the most part, overcome, and he no longer is tempted to drink and get drunk, to swear, to overeat, or any of these other outward sins. But then he begins to deal with sins of the heart: covetousness, deceit, pride, anger, and lust. Perhaps he is no longer swearing, but the anger in his heart that used to produce the swearing still rears its ugly head. And it is much easier to close your mouth and not swear than to change your heart and never get angry for inappropriate reasons. Suddenly, the bar is raised. Just when he thought he had made progress in overcoming talk that was sinful, now his sinful heart comes to the forefront, and it must be dealt with. And when that battle is closing and that sin is mortified, yet another idol will appear, another area of sinfulness, another struggle, a deeper one, this time more difficult perhaps than the last. And how easy it would be for the believer to be discouraged, to think perhaps he is not a believer at all, for how could any believer be so utterly sinful?!

            With this overwhelming feeling of sinfulness, we come before God in prayer. Perhaps we are tempted to not pray until we feel more holy, but we must not shrink away from praying until we feel worthy! We must pray without ceasing. We must come to God in prayer! Oh how we as Christians long to pray, but there we are, before God, and our hearts begin to condemn us. We find ourselves feeling unworthy, unacceptable, dirty, unclean, and unrighteous before God. We feel that we are the foremost of sinners, and what right could we possibly have to be in the presence of almighty God?

It is at this time that loving the brethren is most effective in our lives. Look again at verse 19. John writes, and [we] will assure our heart before Him in whatever our heart condemns us. When we come before God and our heart condemns us, then is the time that we must begin to talk, as it were, to our heart. Then we must begin to preach to ourselves. Our hearts will most certainly condemn us. They will remind us of our old dirty sin and our present struggles, and perhaps sins we haven’t remembered in years will somehow make their way into the courtroom of our hearts when we come before God, and we will stand accused and condemned by our own hearts. A sense of unworthiness and shame will occupy our minds, and that sense may overwhelm to either keep us from prayer or to keep us from praying with faith and confidence. When we feel this way, we must begin to assure our heart before Him. The word assure has the idea of “persuade,” so it is as if we are arguing with our heart, we are wrestling with our heart to persuade it not to condemn us.

It is with our knowledge of assurance that we do this. We see the work of God in our lives clearly. We see that the life we are living we live by faith in the Son of God. We see that the love that works in us is not human love, but supernatural love that reaches out to our brethren in a way the world does not and cannot understand. And we begin to present our case to our heart, and we argue with it in order that we might persuade it to no longer condemn us before God.

Why do we do this? John says in verse 20, for God is greater than our heart and knows all things. I think what he is saying is this: Our heart is not the ultimate judge before God, but God is greater than our heart. Our heart only knows some things, but God knows all things. There is, in this statement, both comfort and conviction. The conviction is that if our heart condemns us, and it only knows some of our sinfulness, then how much more does God see our sin! How much more dirty are we before God than our hearts make us feel! If God knows all of our motives and all of our thoughts and all of our works, and we are not aware of them because our hearts are deceitful and wicked, then if our heart condemns us, certainly God knows our sin all the more! But in the midst of this there is comfort because God, who knows all things, also stands ready to forgive us because of the cross. Although God is fully aware of more of our sin than we are, He does not reject us if we are His children.

We must persuade our hearts of this fact, but we must use the proper evidence to persuade it. If your heart condemns you, the appropriate response is not to just quiet your heart and conscience. The appropriate response is to bring the evidence that John tells us to bring, which is the fact that we love with the love of Christ. We do not persuade our hearts with some decision we made years ago. We do not persuade our hearts with our church membership or attendance. We do not persuade our hearts even with the cross. Do not misunderstand me. If it was not for the cross, we would have no grounds to persuade our hearts. The cross is essential. But we cannot persuade our hearts with the cross if our lives show that the cross has not impacted us at all. It does no good for an atheist to persuade his heart with the cross when he rejects the cross and the cross has not changed him. The cross is only for those who believe in Jesus with saving faith, and no one can use it in and of itself to persuade his or her heart. If the cross was able to be used that way, then we would be Universalists, and we would have to confess that everyone is saved in the end. But we do not believe that. We believe that those who reject the Gospel perish eternally in hell, and the cross does not save them or atone for their sins.

We must bring the evidence to the courtroom of our hearts, but that evidence must be the pattern and direction and course of our lives in relation to our love for the brethren. If our heart condemns us, which it will from time to time, we persuade it not to condemn us because we see that we love one another with supernatural, God-produced love.

We must also not deny the condemnation of our hearts if that condemnation is just. We must not silence the voice of conscience and deny our sin. No, when we persuade our hearts we do not deny or negate our own sinfulness; rather, we recognize it. We pray with the Psalmist, Who can discern his errors? Acquit me of hidden faults (Ps 19:12). We willingly come before God fully acknowledging our unworthiness and utter sinfulness. When our hearts condemn us, they often do not wrongly condemn us. Our response, however, is not to ignore the condemnation, but acknowledge how we are more unworthy than even our hearts tell us we are. When we acknowledge that, we also acknowledge that although we are unworthy, we still have the right to be before our Lord in prayer because we are His children. We persuade ourselves of that right and privilege as His children by recognizing God’s supernatural work in our hearts and lives in relation to loving the brethren. When we persuade our hearts, we do not deny our sin, we do not silence our conscience; rather, we readily acknowledge that God knows more than we ourselves know, and we are far more guilty than even our hearts claim we are, yet we still have the right to come to God in prayer for help in our weaknesses because we are truly His children. Thus, the first benefit of obeying the doctrine that the children of God love one another is that we will have assurance of our salvation.

Answered Prayer (vv. 21-22)

            The second benefit of heeding John’s doctrine concerning brotherly love is answered prayer. If we follow John’s teaching about loving one another we can be assured of answered prayer. This is a topic that could exhaust many, many sermons, and this morning we will certainly not answer all the questions we find ourselves asking in the presence of great texts like these, but we must face these texts and try to understand them as fully as we can. So we will try to begin to understand this concept, and then later in 1 John we will come across this same teaching in another form, and we will deal with it from that perspective as well.

            Look at verses 21 and 22. John writes, Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and whatever we ask we receive from Him, because we keep His commandments and do the things that are pleasing in His sight. The whole focus of these two verses is prayer, our relationship to God in prayer. This is one of the most vital elements of the Christian life, and it is essential that our prayer lives be vibrant and we are able to pray. So John takes up this theme, and one of the benefits of loving the brethren is answered prayer.

            One element to answered prayer is confidence before God. If our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God. When we go to God in prayer confidence is absolutely necessary. We must not come without faith, without confidence that God will hear us because we are His children. We must be like Jacob in Genesis 32 who, when he wrestled with Christ, boldly proclaimed, “I will not let you go unless you bless me” (Gen 32:26). We must have in our prayer lives confidence before God.

            Throughout the Bible we read of praying with confidence. The Christian position is such that we always should be praying confidently to our Father in heaven. Jesus has promised that if we ask, we shall receive; if we knock, it shall be opened. Paul also spoke of this confidence that we have because of Christ when he said that in Christ we have boldness and confident access through faith in Him (Eph 3:12). The writer of Hebrews wanted his readers to have confidence in their praying, so he wrote to them saying, Let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need (Heb 4:16), and since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus…let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience (Heb 10:19, 22). Confidence is vital to a powerful life of prayer, and all over the New Testament we are taught that we should, we must, have confidence when we come before God – confidence that He hears us, confidence that He loves us, and confidence that when we pray according to His will He answers us.

So John starts with this vital aspect of confidence, and he says that if we come before God with a heart that does not condemn us, we will have confidence when we pray. That is one reason why we must endeavor to love the brethren. We gain assurance and thereby quiet our heart’s judgment against us, and when we have done so we have confident access to our Father in heaven as we pray.

            This confidence, notice, results in receiving whatever we ask from Him. Our heavenly Father grants our requests. This is not, however, a blank check to ask of God whatever we want. Built into John’s statement is the assumption that we have confidence, and we have confidence through obedience to the command to love one another. We do not live according to the flesh, and we do not have fleshly desires that rule our hearts when we love the brethren this way. So John can truthfully say to the person who is only seeking God’s will that when he or she prays, God will grant the request.

            Again I must emphasize that this is not a blank check. I must emphasize it because John emphasizes it. He makes that plain in verse 22, saying that we receive what we ask because we keep His commandments and do the things that are pleasing in His sight. The picture here is of a person whose whole life and will is focused on pleasing God. When our entire life is focused on pleasing God, and all of our desire is to please Him, we can be sure that He will always answer our prayers that stem from this desire.

            A perfect illustration of this is Jesus Christ Himself. Our Lord Himself had every prayer He ever prayed answered exactly as He prayed it. Why? Why was Jesus so successful in receiving from the Father answers to His prayers? In John 5:30 we see why. Jesus said, “I do not seek My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me.” Everything in Jesus’ life was centered on and focused around doing the will of the Father. Everything He ever prayed was always and only to that end. Even in the Garden of Gethsemane before His death He prayed, “Not my will, but Yours be done.” Even though He dreaded the agony of separation from His Father on the cross because of sin, His desire that was over all of His prayers was for the will of the Father to be accomplished. Because of Jesus’ perfection, because of His holiness, because of His perfect understanding of the will of God, He could pray the will of God perfectly every time. Since He was Himself God in human flesh, He knew what God’s will was, and thus He prayed.

            I believe that the more righteous a person is, the more a person keep[s] His commandments and do[es] the things that are pleasing in His sight the more powerful that person will be in prayer. The more glorious answers to prayer that person will see. The reason for that is because the more our wills are conformed to His will, and the more our desires are His desires, the more we will pray what is His will and what is His desire. The more my will gets lost in His will, the more effective my praying will become. I believe that is why James said in James 5:16, The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much. The righteous man is seeking God’s will fully, and when our lives are seeking God’s will fully, then our prayer lives will seek God’s will fully.

            John wants us to be effective in our prayers. He wants us to be mighty in prayer. But prayer and righteousness are two elements that cannot exist apart from each other. The more righteous we become, the more we keep His commandments and do the things that please Him, the more powerful our prayers will become because we will be praying in accordance with God’s will.

            The question will arise, “What about areas where I don’t know God’s will? What about cancer? What about choosing a job? What about where my kids should go to school? What about…” whatever the contingent future event might be? Should we pray about these things? Can we have any confidence at all about these types of things when we pray? Or should we not pray for these types of things?

            Because we are in the flesh, we will never fully comprehend God’s will, and we will always face future decisions that are uncertain. Perhaps we will desire one option more than another, but because we are still in these mortal bodies with limited knowledge of God’s specific will for our lives, we may not know which direction we ought to pray. And many times it may appear that we have many unanswered prayers. There are two things I would like to say with reference to these situations.

            One is that the Bible says that there will be times when we will not know what to pray. We will encounter decisions and face choices, and we will simply not know God’s will. The Bible says that this is normal Christianity. This is life in this fallen body. Romans 8:26 says, For we do not know how to pray as we should. Could there be a clearer statement that since we dwell in a world subjected to futility (Rom 8:20) we do not know how to pray as we ought? This was normal even for Paul. He includes himself in that. Even the great apostle did not always know how to pray as he should pray. We see this most clearly in 2 Corinthians 12 where Paul prays for the messenger of Satan to be taken away from him. God’s response was that the thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan, would remain and Paul needed to rely on God’s grace for strength. Facing the thorn in the flesh Paul did not know how to pray as he should. In fact, he prayed something that clearly was not God’s will for his life, and God did not answer the prayer the way that Paul has asked for it to be answered. Paul received an answer, but it wasn’t the answer he had requested.

            We face decisions and situations like this daily. Everyone does. The person suffering from cancer does not know how to pray as he should. Should he pray for healing so that he can be fruitful for the Gospel, or should he pray for strength to die so that he can glorify God with his death? Both are good requests. Neither is wrong. The person suffering persecution. Should he pray for release from suffering and relief from the physical pain, or should he pray for more strength and grace to endure? He simply does not know what God’s will is for him in his persecution. How should he pray? He does not know how to pray as he should. And we don’t always know how to pray as we should. But there is one Person who does.

            Not only is it normal that we will not always know how to pray as we should, but we also must realize when those times come, that the Holy Spirit prays on our behalf according to the will of God, and what He prays for He receives. Notice Romans 8:26: In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness. Not only that, but also the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. The Spirit Himself prays for us when we are too weak to know how to pray as we should. When we are stuck in between a choice – healing or strength to die, release from prison or grace to endure suffering – and we just don’t know what to pray, the Holy Spirit intercedes on our behalf. And He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. When you don’t know how to pray, the Spirit does, and He intercedes for you according to the will of God. His prayer is for God’s will to be done, He prays for it specifically, and it is always answered.

            Because of our condition of being in a world subjected to futility, our lack of knowledge, our selfish desires, and our flesh, we will not always know how to pray as we should pray. But that should never diminish our confidence. It should diminish our pride. When are to have humble confidence. We are to come before God assured that He hears us, and we are to submit all our requests to His will. When we don’t know how to pray as we should, we can have confidence that the Spirit is praying on our behalf making sure that God’s will is accomplished in our lives.

            So when we face situations where we don’t know what God’s specific will is, we are not to lose heart and stop praying. We are never to give up praying because we don’t know how to pray as we should. We are to pray with confidence for our desires, yet with humility so that all of our requests are submitted to the will of God. Our confidence is not that God will grant us our every wish and want, but that God will accomplish His will through our prayers, and ultimately that is our prayer. Our desire is to see God use our prayers to glorify Himself and advance His kingdom, and so we come with confidence knowing that He will do that, even if it means we don’t get the specific answer that we desire. Even if He does not take away our thorn in the flesh, and the answer is, “My grace is sufficient for you.”

            Those are two of the three reasons why it is essential for our daily Christian lives that we love the brethren. Loving the brethren results in assurance of our salvation and answered prayers. There is one more practical implication to obeying this doctrine, and we will examine that implication, and it is a profound implication that is truly beyond human description, the Sunday after Resurrection Sunday. Let’s pray.

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