Sermon Transcript
I want to say, go 49ers! Looking forward to today. I see— let’s see, Mike Ichiryu has a 49ers thing. I see Tom over here. I saw John Gale over there, and you have on like wide receiver gloves, it looks like, this morning.
So like you’re ready to get into the game. Anybody else wearing your 49ers? Oh yeah, I see over there, Sarah Sun. Yeah, so great. I dressed like this without thinking of the Super Bowl, and Shannon said, you look like you’re wearing 49er colors.
So There you go. It’s just sort of subconsciously in us. So I want to make a deal with you. If you all will cooperate with me this morning, I promise to get you out so that you’re home in time for the 4th quarter today. How about that?
What are you all laughing about? This is a really, really important text. So we’ll bring you water, we’ll bring you bread to just keep you nourished and stuff. But what you— no, I know that you all probably are looking forward to the game, and I know I am. I got a text before I came into the service this morning from Shannon, my wife, who is running in a race today over at Santana Row, which is her favorite place in the Bay Area to just sort of hang out.
They have an 8K race, and so she texted me a picture that she just finished, and she’s racing with other people. I don’t know that it’s so much racing as much as, you know, right, just sort of participating in a beautiful day and just racing with other people, running with other people. I don’t understand the concept of paying money to run, right? It doesn’t make sense. Like, you know that you can do this in your neighborhood for free.
But I shared with a few of you that last fall I ran in one of these kind of races. It was in downtown San Jose, and I took my youngest son CJ, who is 17 years old and very athletic. He hadn’t trained at all for the thing, and he beat me by 10 minutes or something like that. And by the time we got to the end, I had asked him, you know, did he have any trouble? And he said no, he— but he had stopped along the way, and I didn’t realize this, with— at some of the different vendors, um, that are around there, and he ended up eating 2 donuts on the race.
So he ate 2 donuts and he beat me by 10 minutes. I don’t— yeah, it doesn’t make any sense to me. One of the things I noticed at that race that I was in, and Shannon, I’m sure the same thing at this race that she was in, that it’s nice to know the one difference about paying to race in something like that is that you know that if there’s a situation that comes up and physically a person’s unable to finish or they’re not feeling great, that emergency personnel are on hand to be able to help you and to check your vital signs. And I’m calling this particular message today Vital Signs. We’re familiar with that idea of vital signs, of having objective measures to be able to check how we’re doing physically at any moment.
I read a story, actually an article not too long ago, about somebody who was really groundbreaking in her contributions to helping us understand this idea of vital signs. In the 1950s, you may not know this, even if you were alive during that time, that there were at that time in the 1950s, the birth rate or the rate of stillbirth at the time of delivery was really not that different than it had been in 1850. About 1 in every 30 births, uh, in 1950, at the beginning of the 1950s, ended in stillbirth. And people couldn’t really figure it out. But there was a woman who was an anesthesiologist, and you may know her name— Virginia Apgar, uh, was a person who— she was not an OB.
She had never delivered a baby. She didn’t have children of her own. She wasn’t a doctor. She was a female in a male-dominated world that she didn’t have the chance to challenge the conventions of the day, but she felt like the medical community could do better than 1 in every 30 births ending in a stillbirth. And so she developed, as many of you may know, a test that’s now known as the Apgar test that we still use even today to be able to measure the vital signs of a child once they’re born to give them the best possible chance of survival and measuring things like heart rate and breathing rate and the skin color and flexibility and reflexes and muscle tone, all that stuff that seems really, really basic.
But she wanted to give these babies the best possible chance of survival. And so in order to boost their Apgar scores, doctors began sort of adopting some of her practices, and consequently the birth rate or the The rate of stillbirth got better and better to where now it’s, according to the March of Dimes, 1 in every 100 births end in a stillbirth, which still is not good enough for me, from my standpoint, but it’s better than 1 in 30. The idea that something so simple as checking vital signs could help to be able to have healthier babies and people being able to think, huh, like, if we need to be able to jump in and be able to provide oxygen, to a child who’s struggling to breathe or to warm up that child or to be able to move from general anesthesia to— doctors started using epidurals and fetal heart monitors and ultrasound technology, and all of those things have really made things better for new moms and expectant parents and again for children just from checking vital signs. Vital signs are vital signs, signs of life that give us hope. If those vital signs are missing, if something’s off, there’s cause for great alarm, right?
And what John has been doing here throughout the book of 1 John is, whether you’ve realized it or not, been taking us through vital signs, evidence that you were alive spiritually speaking. And as we near to chapter 5 here, we’re in the concluding parts here these last couple weeks. Of this particular book, this letter 1 John wrote to a bunch of house churches in Asia Minor, I just want to remind us of why John is writing. I shared with you the very first week that we began looking at 1 John back in September, all the way back in September, all the way back in 2019, right? You remember 2019?
So long ago. We talked about that John has 2 purposes here. In writing. One is, is that he wants everybody to know how to have eternal life.
Physical life is great.
God wants us to have spiritual life, to be spiritually alive. And so John is writing so that we might have spiritual life, eternal life, not just in terms of quantity of life, but quality of life, a life with God, life forever. Abundant life. And then he’s also writing not only that you would have eternal life and know how to have eternal life, but that you would know that you know that you know and have assurance that you have eternal life. We all would love to be able to have assurance, and John’s been writing with those 2 things in mind throughout this letter.
And he’s been speaking about individual vital signs and evidence that you have eternal life, that you have spiritual life. But he’s been speaking and dealing with them really individually. And so, we’ve been looking at some of them. And here, as we come to chapter 5, he’s going to summarize them for us in just 5 verses. And I have the privilege of sharing these verses with you.
Nate read them earlier, and I want to read them again for you, because what we have here are the vital signs of spiritual life. If you’ve missed all the other messages that we’ve spoken about, or if you don’t remember any of them, You’re in luck today because we have 5 verses that tell us how to have eternal life and how to know that you have eternal life. And if this is a message that you’re like, well, you know, I know that I have eternal life, and you have assurance of that, that’s wonderful. I bet you’ve got people in your life who would love to be able to have that kind of assurance, and you can help them by taking what we share here today. And I can’t think of, you know, just the fact that we One week ago, we’re sitting in this room and we’re minutes away, a week ago, from hearing that Kobe Bryant had passed away.
And over this last week, you’ve heard different people sort of reflecting on not only his life but their own lives. And anytime you lose somebody like that, it kind of causes you to kind of sit up and take notice. You lose a loved one or you lose somebody in the public eye like that, causes us to want to be able to have assurance in our own life of our own standing with God. Shannon and I have a family friend who lost her husband a little over a week ago. We ended up going to his memorial service at a church in Sunnyvale, and they were a Catholic family and a wonderful family, but he died at like— I think he had a heart attack around 52.
And he died very early, and our friend is just heartbroken over this, understandably. And this was so unexpected, and still have children who are nearing young adulthood. It’s just tragic. And Shannon had a conversation with this woman just this last week and wanted to check in with her, and she said, you know, let’s pray for my husband, the one who had just passed. Let’s pray for him.
Let’s pray for him with the hope that he’s going to be in heaven one day. Just think about all that that means to a person. Even after a person passes, we want to know, right? We want to know for ourselves. We want to know for other people.
Where do I stand? Where does this person stand? And we grasp at different things that just can kind of give us any hope possible. John’s going to take us through that. I normally read in the New International Version.
I’m reading today in the English Standard Version because It brings out certain phraseology that I think I really wanna bring forth today that I really appreciate. Starting in verse 1 of chapter 5, he says, everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.
For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world— our faith. Isn’t that fun singing that song earlier about faith is the victory? I suggested that hymn to Nate earlier today, and I appreciate him including that victory And Jesus. And verse 5, who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
I want to talk about 2 large categories of sort of vital signs that are presented here. And again, he’s been talking about these things, John has, throughout this book, but he summarizes what he’s been writing in just these 5 verses. One is the entrance to eternal life. The entrance to eternal life. What is a Christian?
If you think about that, what is a Christian? I’ve been asking a lot of people over the last several weeks about how they define what it means to be a Christian, and ultimately we have a lot of confusion in our world. You ask 10 different people what it means to be a Christian, you’re gonna get 10 different answers, likely. You may find some overlap in some of that. I even asked my family ministries team this last week, and we wrote down our definitions of what we believe, biblically speaking, a Christian is.
And we had different nuances in our answer. And I remember when I was growing up in high school, I had friends of mine who said that they knew that I was a Christian, and there were 2 reasons why they knew that. One is I didn’t cuss, and 2, I went to church all the time. That was, in their mind, the litmus test of being a Christian. There are other people who say, well, I’m a Christian because I feel like I am.
I want to be, or I like God’s Word. I like reading God’s Word, and I love singing Christian songs, and I just love being at church, or I grew up in a Christian family, or I hope I am. All of these things are not assurance of eternal life. The only entrance to eternal life is a phrase that he gives us here in verse 1, and that is being born of God.
You can come up with all your definitions of what a Christian is or who a Christian is and what it means to be a Christian, but if it’s lacking this idea of being born of God, being born again, it’s lacking the most essential part of what makes a Christian distinct from a person who’s not a Christian. If you want to know if you have eternal life, the question is, have you been born again? Now, the way that it’s depicted in our world, that phrase born again seems out of favor in a lot of people’s eyes because of the connotations that come along with a phrase like that. Not really too many people use that term, and if they do hear the term presented, they usually think of a particular type of a person, as if it’s a type of Christian. You have Baptist Christians and Methodist Christians and Catholic Christians, and, well, you have born-again Christians.
As if it’s a specific type of person. And I have news for you, and John would agree with me on this: born again and Christian go together. It means the same thing. If you’re a Christian and you have not been born again, or you think that you’re a Christian and you haven’t been born again, you’re not a Christian. John says everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ— that’s faith.
Belief has been born of God. There was a point in their life when they received this inner conversion experience. That’s what it means to be born again. Charles Wesley described it as this transformation of heart and life from sin to holiness. He described it as a turning, and everybody needs to come to a place in their life where they have been Converted from the inside out.
We often try to, from the outside in, with our actions and with our words, try to convert ourselves and present ourselves as being morally better over a period of time, and hopefully that will get us into heaven. We are inwardly corrupt, though. Jesus said you must be born again. That’s what that phrase born of God means. You must receive new life.
Why? Because We are dead in our sins and our trespasses, the Word tells us. We’re enemies of God. We are morally corrupt, depraved, born into sin. Our mind, our will, our emotions, our flesh— every part of us is corrupt and incapable of pleasing God.
The phrase total depravity describes who we are, separated from God and unable to offer anything of worth to God.
So being born of God is recognizing, first of all, I need a work of God in my life. How does a person become born again? Well, first of all, it’s a work of God. Jesus said it’s a mystery, but it’s the Spirit of God coming into a person’s life and opening up their eyes in such a way to recognize, I need to be saved. I need a relationship with God.
I need to be rescued. Because at my current pace and state, I have nothing to be able to offer God. I’m not going to be able to have eternal life. We need God to open up our eyes. And when that— when God does that, simultaneously, He also causes us to recognize that Jesus has already done everything for us, and we need to put our hope and our trust in Him, what He did for us on the cross.
Rising again, taking our sins upon himself as our substitute, and putting our hope and trust in that. That’s what it means to be born again.
That’s the starting place of any relationship with God. That’s the starting place of eternal life. If John were here today, I think he would ask the question that I am asking: are you born again? Have you been born again? I’m not talking about a gradual evolution.
It’s a single point in time. And some of you remember the specific moment when that might have happened for you. You remember the, the date or the time and the circumstances. You remember all the things surrounding that, and your life changed emphatically from that moment forward. Others of you may not precisely remember that specific moment in time.
The point is not so much whether, though, you remember exactly everything that happened that led you to that point, but whether you were believing in that today. What are you trusting in today? If your life ended today, what is your hope for eternal life? If it’s in anything other than what Jesus has done for you and his rescue of you, then you don’t have eternal life.
That’s the only place where we can put our hope and our trust. Think about a chair. You may not remember the specific moment that you came in and sat down this morning, and since I’m gonna have you for several hours today, 6 hours from now, you may not remember the specific moment that you sat down, but it doesn’t really matter as much as the fact that you’re sitting down. That’s the evidence that, that you sat in the first place. The evidence that you have been born again is, is that you are trusting and believing in that today.
You may have made a prior decision, and that’s awesome. Are you trusting in that today?
Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God. It’s the starting place. Jesus didn’t come to make us more moral, to make us more likable, to make us nicer than other people. He came so that you could be born again. Jesus did not come to condemn the world, but to save the world through giving his life and us putting our hope and our trust in what Jesus has done for us.
That’s the entrance to eternal life. It’s the only entrance to eternal life. There aren’t multiple entrances. You must be born again. If you want to be born again, or if you’re not sure that you’re born again, I would ask, what are you putting your trust in for eternity?
Put it in the only place where your hope is secure, and that’s in Jesus. Just tell God privately on your own, God, I want to be born again. Remake me from the inside out.
It’s not that and some good works along with it, but just— we need to be thoroughly remade from the inside out. You must be born again. It’s the only entrance to eternal life. And then he gives us 3 evidences that you have received eternal life. Again, been talking about these all throughout the book that we’ve been looking at, and he brings them all together in one paragraph here for us.
The evidence of eternal life. You have the entrance to eternal life, and now you have the evidence of eternal life. Look again at verse 1. Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ, has been born of God. He’s talking about what is it that causes a person to be born of God.
Well, it’s the new life that they have received, and one of the byproducts of that is genuine belief. Genuine belief, genuine faith. Where does that come from? It comes from being born of God. It doesn’t precede being born of God.
It’s a byproduct of that. It’s evidence that you have been born of God. It’s the fruit that you have eternal life. It’s a demonstration that you’ve placed your hope in someone else rather than in yourself, specifically that Jesus is the Christ and has been born of God. Verse 5, who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
Well, what does that mean? What do those verses mean? It means that you agree with God about everything that God says that Jesus is. That’s what it means. It means that you agree with God about everything that God says that Jesus is, that He is the Deliverer, that He is the Messiah, that He is the Son of God, that He is no ordinary man.
He is God in the flesh. And it’s not merely believing facts about Jesus, but trusting and relying, putting your own life at stake based upon those facts, not just believing the facts. You know, James chapter 2 tells us even the demons believe that Jesus is the Messiah. They have good theology. They understand that Jesus is the Son of God.
But are you trusting and relying upon that? That’s what John is talking about here. 2 things to note here as we talk about this idea of genuine belief. Putting your trust in those truths about who Jesus is, saying that he is sufficient to pay the price for your sins, to give you eternal life. One thing is that there’s only 2 options: you either believe or you don’t.
It’s not a 3rd option here. Everyone who believes, everyone who believes. And it speaks of a continuous, ongoing belief. Now, we’re going to waver at times, we’re going to have doubts at at times, but this is speaking about you either believe or you don’t. What are you believing in today?
What is your hope for eternal life? If it’s in Jesus and that’s your only place where you’re putting your hope for eternal life, then you have been born again. You have— you were giving evidence that you have received eternal life.
There’s another thing to note here about this idea of genuine belief. The result of genuine belief, the result of faith, is that you are an overcomer. He uses that word there in verse 4, and John loves that word overcome, overcomer. We looked at it a couple weeks ago. Pastor Dave used that in his message.
Chapter 4, we’ve looked at. You find it throughout the book of Revelation, this idea of overcoming. And it’s a word that in the Greek we would be familiar with because it’s the word nike, or Nike, as we would say it. It means to conquer, to be victorious, victory in Jesus, to defeat. And it’s one thing to use that word overcome to describe someone like Jesus himself.
When Jesus in John 16 was about to leave and to be crucified, he told his disciples In this world you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the world. Yes, that makes sense. Jesus is an overcomer. But to be said about first-century Christians, to be said about you and I, if you have faith, you’re an overcomer. I don’t know.
If you follow me around, I don’t really feel too much like an overcomer sometimes.
But one of the things that he says here is it’s not a specific type of Christian in the same way that born-again and Christian go together. They’re not 2 different things. It’s not a type of Christian. Everyone who’s a genuine Christian is born of God, born again. Everyone who’s a Christian has eternal life.
The evidence of that is that you are an overcomer. It happened at the moment that you decided to place your trust in Jesus for your eternal security. You became an overcomer. You’re not a specific type of person. Well, what do we overcome?
He says you overcome the world. You overcome the world. What does that mean? Well, the world doesn’t describe here the earth and the physical universe. It describes anything that competes for the rule of God, anything that causes us to take our eyes off of God.
In chapter 2 here of 1 John, he talks about the lusts of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, and all of those things compete for our devotion and our attention and our affection. All those competing kingdoms in our world, the spiritual and physical kingdoms that exist that compete for our allegiance to God. John says you’ve overcome that by your genuine belief, by your faith. Everyone who has been— believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and you are an overcomer. You have overcome the world.
That doesn’t mean that the world doesn’t still entice you, but it means that you stand firm in your belief. You don’t waver in your belief. When you have moments of doubt, you continue to come back to belief. Your belief is steadfast. It’s describing the ability to be able to, with all of the things that this world offers us, to be able to have your eyes opened in the same way that your eyes were opened to recognize that God showed you you needed a Savior.
God opens up our eyes to show us that the world has nothing to offer us compared to what God has to offer us, and we need our eyes open to that reality.
Standing firm, not so that you can be born again, but because you have been born again. It’s evidence that you have been born again. You are an overcomer, and like the word Remember there in verse 1, this idea of everyone who continues to believe? It’s a continuous action. Same thing here in the original language with overcome.
We could say everyone who continually overcomes the world. So it’s a continuous overcoming. So as we did with this idea of being born again, are you born again? Do you— where’s your belief?
Where is your faith? It can only be placed in one person, Jesus Christ, for eternal security and assurance of salvation. The assurance that you’re looking for is not going to come from just hoping and hoping and hoping, but by having genuine belief that Jesus is the Son of God and that he is your Savior today.
Today. It’s one of the evidences of eternal life. A second vital sign, a second evidence of eternal life that we see here is genuine love. Talked about this the last couple weeks. It’s in that context that we get this idea that we need to love.
Again, verses 1 through 3, everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves The Father loves whoever has been born of Him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey His commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments, and His commandments are not burdensome. Many of you know the story of one of Jesus’ disciples, Peter, and Peter was the one who denied knowing Jesus. When Jesus was on trial, and Jesus had predicted this, that it would happen.
In fact, Peter would do it 3 times, and sure enough, that happened. And after Jesus rose from the dead, Peter needed to be restored. What do you say to somebody in that moment? What do you say to somebody like Peter? How would you and I counsel him?
Peter, do you really feel sorry for what you did?
Peter, do you still want to be on the team? Are you still serious about being a disciple? Peter, are you having your quiet time? You praying to God? Peter, are you using your spiritual gifts in some sort of ministry and serving other people?
What did Jesus say? He didn’t, he didn’t say any of that. He said, do you love me? Peter, do you love me?
The evidence of genuine being— genuinely being born of God is the genuine love relationship with God, being in love with God and recognizing that He Himself is love.
This idea of love is something that we can sort of think about in an abstract way, but what does it mean to love God? I’m going to give you 4 quick things that I think we could just draw out in terms of application for us. What does it mean to love God? If I want that to be evidence that I’ve been born again, the first 2 are not specifically found in this passage, but they’re found throughout Scripture. One is to put God first.
If you love Him, you’ll put Him first. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your strength, your mind. You seek Him first and His kingdom. You delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. The Scripture is full of the fact that we have the opportunity to have not just an interaction with God, but that it’s an ongoing love relationship, that we love God by placing Him first.
You cannot serve both God and man. Putting Him first, prioritizing Him. Another way that we see in Scripture that we love God is by desiring Him. As the deer longs and pants for streams of water, so my soul, God, longs for You. I desire You, God.
If you love God, there should be a desire to know Him more. It’s one of the evidences that you love God is that you are increasingly desiring Him. Yes, there will be moments when that desire may wane, but you come back to it. You come back to it. It’s a sign of genuine love.
And then we see a third thing that is specifically here in the Scripture. If you love God, you’ll love His kids. You love his family. That makes sense to us. It says if you love God, everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him.
That makes sense to us. If you say that you care about me, if you say that you love me, then I would expect that you would feel the same way about Shannon and each of my children. One of the ways that you all expressed love to me and very tangible ways was when Shannon got her cancer diagnosis a couple years ago. I felt very loved. I wasn’t the one with the cancer diagnosis, but the way that you all loved Shannon through that process and continue to love her and to express your kindnesses to her, that really makes me feel incredible.
And different ones of you have invested in various ways in my children’s life. Thank you for that. It’s a really meaningful thing that causes me to feel that you love me too. We understand that. And this is not just simply a, again, a theoretical love.
He uses the term here agape love to describe our love for God and our love for other people. This self-sacrificing love that prioritizes others and values others. Shannon and I occasionally will watch a show that just seems to just pop up on our DVR because she loves recording it. It’s this show called Married at First Sight. Are you familiar with this show?
No? This is not to be confused with, uh, the, the, the, the, uh, 90-day engagement show that’s on at the same channel. You seen that one? No? Nobody’s seen that where people get a K-1 visa and they come here and they have like 90 days to marry their loved one?
You’ve not seen that? Same channel as Love After Lockup. Have you seen this one? You all are laughing. It’s a show.
I can neither confirm nor deny that we have seen portions of this show. I don’t like those shows. I like Married at First Sight, where these people say, I will allow some marriage experts to arrange my marriage. I will have never seen this person until I walk down the aisle. And it’s fascinating to watch.
Now, arranged marriages have been happening for centuries, right? In other countries, but here in the United States, it’s sort of an interesting phenomenon, and it’s fun to kind of watch how this is going to work. It’s also super scary, but one of the things that you notice is literally, I mean, couples on their honeymoon, like you hear about the honeymoon stage, they’re really getting to know each other for the first time, and it’s kind of awkward because many of them have very rudimentary ideas of what love is. And occasionally, though, you see certain couples that get it. When it comes to love is if I’m going to learn to love this person, I’m going to serve this person.
I’m going to put them first. Those who aren’t able to put feelings into action really, really struggle on this show. It doesn’t really work very well. We all understand that. Whenever you get married, you care about another person, you want to prioritize them.
Don’t just talk about it, you put it into action. That’s what agape love means. You’re not just talking about this theoretical abstract idea, you’re putting it into practice. That’s what genuine love is.
So if you love God, you’ll put him first, you’ll desire him, you’ll love other people. And then the 4th thing that we see here, and it leads into our next point, is that if you love God, you’ll do what he says. You’ll obey his commands. It says, by this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.
And so what we’re talking about here is we have genuine belief, we have genuine love. The 3rd vital sign that you have been born of God is genuine obedience.
Several weeks ago I shared with you from chapter 3 You don’t have to flip there about what love looks like and what it means to live a life of obedience that honors God. And just want to remind you of verse 9 in chapter 3 here of 1 John. No one who is born of God, there’s that phrase again, no one who is born again, no one who has been regenerated from the inside out, no one who is born of God, who is a genuine believer, will continue to sin.
Because God’s seed remains in them. They cannot go on sinning. Not just that they don’t go on sinning, they can’t go on sinning. Why? Because they have been born of God.
That’s a pretty incredible standard there. And what we talked about is he’s not saying that you’re going to be sinless, but you will, if you were born of God, will begin to sin less and less.
We saw in chapter 1, if we confess our sins, so, you know, he’s faithful and just to forgive us our sins. We’re going to stumble, but we have an advocate who’s with the Father. But one of the signs that you love God is that you will do what he says and that that will be your heart’s desire. And when you stumble, you’ll come back to him. This idea of doing what God commands, and it’s not just keeping his commands.
We see here it’s It’s also gladly doing it. It says here that in today’s passage that God’s commands are not burdensome. Our world hates God’s commands. People who are not born again, who are not genuine believers, hate God’s Word. Like, who is God to tell us what to do?
We struggle against that. John is reminding us God’s commands are not burdensome. One of the evidences that you— been born again is that you, rather than hating God’s law and God’s commands, that you gladly keep God’s laws and his commands. You look at them and they’re not burdensome. That word burdensome there describes something that’s heavy and oppressive and weighing us down.
And Jesus called out the Pharisees and the teachers of the law for putting oppressive and burdensome— he used that word there— loads on other people’s backs with all their laws and regulations and All these things that you have to do to be made right with God, and yet Jesus called them out because he said, you’re not willing to apply those things to your own life. You’re not even willing to lift a finger to be able to help ease those burdens. Jesus said, come to me, I’ll give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. My yoke is easy, my burden is light.
The reason why God’s commands are not burdensome is because God’s love lifts that burden from us. Now, they’d be burdensome, God’s commands would be burdensome if they were the means to our salvation. That would be really, really hard. You have to do all these things just in order to be made right with God. But that’s not the case.
They would be burdensome if God’s commands were harmful to us, but they’re not. He’s a good Father. God’s commands would be burdensome to us if we couldn’t actually keep them, And He expected us to do something that we’re not able to do. But we already saw here that through our faith, we are overcomers. And He’s given us a divine inner enablement through His Holy Spirit to be able to want to do and to be able to do, Philippians 2 says, what pleases Him.
He equips us. Not only He gives us His commands, but He equips us so that we are able to do and want to do what pleases Him. It’s evidence that you’ve been born again. It’s genuine obedience that you follow through and keep his commands, not viewing them as burdensome but gladly doing so. It’s the evidence that you have been born of God.
If there’s an absence of any one of these 3 vital signs in your life, then you go back to whether or not you’re actually born of God. This is meant to be a letter to encourage us to have assurance, but it also may be a scary thought to think through. You know, I don’t— beginning to kind of doubt. It’s not meant to make people doubt. It’s just caused— supposed to cause us to, as 2 Corinthians says to do, to examine ourselves whether we’re in the faith.
While we have breath, while we have life, we have the opportunity to do that, to examine ourselves, to see whether or not we’re in the faith. John belabors these 3 points again and again and again throughout this letter. Genuine belief, genuine love, genuine obedience. Belief, love, obedience— all 3 things, vital signs. If you’re here today, though, and maybe this is causing you some consternation and you’re not sure if these things are evident in your life, we tend to sometimes be really hard on ourselves.
Sometimes I think the devil likes to discourage us, and I think he likes to deceive us. And if you are a genuine believer, you can have moments where you begin to sort of doubt. Who can actually believe in this way? Who can actually love enough in the way that’s being described here? I don’t always love other people.
I don’t always love God. Who can actually carry out God’s commands consistently? Who can do that? I just want to give you 3 quick words. Just some pastoral counsel.
One is the word trajectory. To not just look at the short term here and how you felt yesterday and how you feel today, but over the course of time.
Trajectory matters, especially for those who maybe made a prior decision to, to follow Jesus and to put your hope and trust in him. Has there been growth over time? Don’t be so hard on yourself that you miss the evidence of that. And maybe you’re in a season right now where you’re struggling, and come back to God and ask Him to confirm in your spirit by His Spirit that you indeed can have assurance. Trajectory.
Community is a second word that I would offer to you. I think assurance of salvation is a community project. This is one of the reasons why we encourage people to be in a group. With other Christ followers and not to isolate yourself or to be unwilling to be vulnerable with other people. We can help each other and spur each other on to speak the truth in love to one another, and to not just tell people what we think that they want to hear, but what they need to hear, offering that truth but also with grace and compassion.
Listen, it’s hard to admit that we struggle with salvation, Especially if people know you. Gosh, like, if people really knew that about me, they’d reject me and they’d condemn me. Just what an offer to you that there is safety in community with other Christ followers who are journeying in the same place. Don’t forsake the assembling together, as some are in the habit of doing, Hebrews tells us to do. But continue to encourage one another and to spur each other on to love and to good deeds so that we can have that assurance That God places people in our lives to be able to speak encouragement and truth into our lives when we struggle with assurance.
Community. The third word is repentance.
When you stumble, when you sin, and you will, just the main question is, do you bring that stuff to the light or do you hide it from God? Do you acknowledge it and then turn? Repentance is One of the ways that we can just recognize that we have a forgiving and gracious Father, and when we stumble, we can come back to him.
This has been a message that I think can be really, really helpful in a lot of ways, but it can also be really discouraging. But these 3 vital signs are really just signposts if you think about it. How do you know you’re heading in the right direction on the right road? Helps to have a sign or 2 along the way that is evidence that you’re moving in the right direction. In a couple weeks, I’m going to be taking a team of— there’s 23 of us going down to Baja on our Baja mission trip to build some houses.
And every time I’m in Mexico, I get turned around at some point. GPS doesn’t always seem to work reliably there. Sometimes use that as a default. And the other thing about driving on the highways in some of the places where we are in Mexico to get to our work sites and to things like that is there aren’t a whole lot of signs, I’ll just tell you. So I don’t always know if I’m heading in the right direction.
Can somebody please show me a sign? Signs are helpful, and these are really just signposts, vital signs to help you know if you’re on track or not. If you’re not on track, get on track today. Just confess that to God. God, my belief has not been what it should be.
My love has not been what it should be. My obedience has not been what it should be. But renew a right spirit within me, God, so that these vital signs can be evidence of the work that you’ve already done in my heart, that I’ve been born of God.
Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you for not wanting us to just be in the dark about this. Our heart grieves over the loss of life when somebody like Kobe Bryant, or maybe a family friend, or another person goes through an experience with death that causes us to just open up our eyes and to recognize that we all long for assurance. And I pray that today that today’s message would bring encouragement and help. I pray that we would not get false assurance, but that we would recognize, Lord, that you have everything that we need.
May we repent, may we turn to you, may we love you more and more. For anyone here today, God, who’s not been born again or is not sure that they’ve been born again, would today be that day that they turn to You, and from the heart, just ask You to regenerate them from the inside out. God, would You do that? Thank You for sending Jesus. Thank You for offering us assurance.
And thank You that You save us by Your grace, not by the fact that these things are present in our life, but they’re indicators and fruit, evidence that You have done a special work in our lives, and we’re grateful for that. So, Lord, as we leave here today, may we take this word and be encouraged this week and help other people that you place in our lives to have assurance. I pray all these things in your Son’s name. Amen.
