Play

How do you know that you know God?  How do you know that you have eternal life?  How can you be sure that what you call belief is really belief, or that what you call faith is really saving faith?  Those are the questions we’ve been asking in this series that we’re calling Test Yourself, after Paul’s exhortation in 2 Corinthians 13:5 that the church test themselves in order to see whether they are actually in the faith.  We are going through the letter of 1 John, and this morning we will read from 3:19 to the end of chapter 4:

  ¹⁹ This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence  ²⁰ whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.  ²¹ Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God  ²² and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him.  ²³ And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us.  ²⁴ Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.

^NIV 1 John 4:1 Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.  ² This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God,  ³ but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.  ⁴ You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.  ⁵ They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them.  ⁶ We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.  ⁷ Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.  ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.  ⁹ This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.  ¹⁰ This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  ¹¹ Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.  ¹² No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.  ¹³ We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.  ¹⁴ And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.  ¹⁵ If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God.  ¹⁶ And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.  ¹⁷ In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him.  ¹⁸ There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.  ¹⁹ We love because he first loved us.  ²⁰ If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.  ²¹ And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.

You will hear a lot of the same tests that John has given over  the first three chapters, like loving your brother and walking as Jesus walked.  But in this section John also gives more of an emphasis on the Spirit.  We have given a lot of focus to the Father, and rightly so, and on Jesus for the salvation He gives us and for how He reveals the character and will of the Father to us.  But the Holy Spirit is often overlooked, when in fact the Holy Spirit is the active presence of God in the world and in the church today.  In this section of his letter, John begins to emphasize that one of the ways we know that we know God and that our faith is genuine saving faith is that we have the Holy Spirit in us: 4:13 - We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.  And so Test #5, which we will unpack in this sermon, is this:  Does God’s Holy Spirit dwell in you, giving you life, empowering you for service, purifying you, directing you, and giving you assurance that you belong to God?

We know our faith is genuine and that we belong to God because His Spirit lives in us.  The question is, is there evidence that the Holy Spirit lives in you?  What does that even mean?  In order to understand that, I want to give you a crash course in soteriology, the study of what happens when an individual is saved, at the moment of conversion.