"If Our Hearts Do Not Condemn Us, We Have Confidence Before God"

From Gospel Translations

1 John 3:19-24

By this we shall know that we are of the truth, and reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. All who keep his commandments abide in him, and he in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit which he has given us.

I can't think of anything more important for an individual to know than whether he or she is "of the truth." To be of the truth means to be born of God, to be one who possess eternal life. The apostle John writes, "By this we shall know that we are of the truth, and reassure our hearts before him." What is the "this" of verse 19? By what will we know that we are of the truth? By what shall we reassure our hearts before God?

Two Reoccurring Themes in 1 John

The answer lies in the preceding verse which Pastor Steve made so clear to us last week. Verse 18 says, "Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth. By this we shall know that we are of the truth." It is by loving one another in deed and in truth that we can reassure our hearts before God. There are two themes which reoccur regularly throughout this letter.

1. Assurance before God.
2. Love for one another within the church.

Assurance that God is for us and that we are in a right relationship to him. And genuine visible practical love for our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Confidence Frees Us to Love Others

How these two themes relate is a major concern of John's. Confidence toward God and love for each other relate in two different ways. The first way is reflected most clearly later on in the letter in 4:19, "We love because he first loved us." The only way we can exercise Christian love—the kind of love that lays down its life for another—is if we are first confident that the almighty God loves us. That he is for us and not against us. This confidence is the most valuable thing, the most freeing thing that anyone could ever possess. Even in the secular realm, to have someone who is loving or powerful be for you is a very coveted source of confidence. Some people will stop at nothing to win the approval of a boss or a professor or perhaps a potential lover. They think that once they can be confident that this person is for them, then all will be well. Life will be wonderful, the future will be filled with nothing but happy tomorrows.

Of course those who have lived in the real world long enough know that the approval of a mere human being, no matter how loving or powerful that person is, is a very inadequate source of confidence. This loving or powerful person can die or change his or her mind in a blink of the eye—and all confidence is dashed to the ground.

But confidence that God is for you is a different story. To have God who is all-wise, all-powerful, and all-loving be for you, to be on your side, to be devoted to your welfare—well there can be no greater source of confidence anywhere.

And the apostle John makes this connection: "we love because he first loved us." Confidence in the love of God is the prerequisite for us to be loving toward others. The only way we can lay down our life for a brother or sister is if we are confident that God is for us and is working all things together for our good, even the most difficult acts of self denial.

So the first way in which confidence toward God relates to brotherly and sisterly love is the way of freedom. Confidence that God loves us frees us from any compulsion to use another person as a means to our end. Only when we are assured that God is for us do we become free to put another person's interest above our own; only then can we give, expecting nothing in return. Confidence in God frees us to be cheerful servants of other people.

Confidence Strengthened When We Love Others

But there is another way in which the two themes of assurance toward God and love toward each other fit together in 1 John. In fact, it is this second way which receives the most attention. Confidence toward God not only frees us to love one another, but this confidence toward God is built up, strengthened, reassured as a result of loving our fellow Christian. Let me say this again—both positively and negatively.

Positively: loving another person in deed and in truth is concrete, visible evidence that we are of the truth. This evidence reassures our heart before God that we do in fact know him. Negatively: when we consistently fail to love our brother or sister, any assurance that we had that we were right with God is called into question.

John's Aim to Strengthen Our Assurance

Our text this morning deals precisely with this issue. Last week we learned that an essential foundation stone of our assurance that we possess eternal life is our love for fellow Christians. Verse 14: "We know that we have passed out of death into life because we love the brethren." Brotherly love is the evidence that we have received eternal life. Without brotherly love John warns us that we may still abide in death. Love for one another is the eternal, visible evidence that a person is of the truth, that a person is born of God and knows God. On the other hand if a church-goer, upon a season of self-examination, realizes that he is not genuinely loving his brothers and sisters, then his assurance that he is right with God diminishes and his heart begins to condemn him. Or at least this is what John says should happen. But it is very hard for us in the 20th century American evangelical church to hear what John is saying in these verses because somehow many evangelicals have come to see that the essential human factor for having assurance of eternal life is the decision we made to accept Jesus as our savior. Then the corollary teaching comes in that how we live our lives has nothing to do with our assurance of salvation—it might have something to do with the number of jewels we get in our crown, but not with our assurance of salvation. Too many people are pinning their assurance on that yellowing decision card tucked away somewhere in their scrapbook. But don't get me wrong. John's overriding concern in his letter is spelled out explicitly in 5:13, "I write this to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life." John does want true believers to experience true and deep assurance of salvation. He wants those of us in this room who truly believe in Jesus to be able to answer a humble but resounding "yes" to the very important question: "If you were to die tonight, are you confident that you would go to heaven?"

John wants our assurance to be so deep and true and solid that he spends much of his time in this letter undercutting false assurance. The greatest enemy to the true assurance of salvation is a false, wrongly based assurance of salvation. For many church-goers will be surprised on judgment day when they say, "Lord, did we not do this and that in your name," and Jesus responds to them, "Depart from me, I never knew you."

What Happens If Love Is Lacking?

In our text this morning there are two interrelated foundations for a Christian's assurance that he or she is right with God. The first is the presence of genuine love for fellow Christians. The second is the gift of the Holy Spirit. Today we will discuss only the first one. The gift of the Spirit will be discussed next week, when Pastor John preaches on verses 1–6 of chapter 4. As I have already mentioned: vv. 18 and 19 teach that genuine love for one another is clear evidence that we are of the truth, that we have been born of God and are in a right relationship with him.

But what happens if that evidence is lacking? John tells us in v. 20 that our heart will condemn us. The word for condemn literally means to "know against." In other words our heart, or our conscience, is aware that there is a contradiction between what we say we believe about God and how we treat his children, who are supposed to be our brothers and sisters. Awareness of this contradiction brings an uneasiness, a sense of gloom about us, a gnawing at the core of our being. It is a humble feeling—and most of us have felt it and some are probably laboring under it right know.

What Is the Best Translation of These Verses?

The translations of vv. 19 and 20 differ. The most modern translation, I think, misses the boat when they begin v. 20 with "whenever." They take vv. 19 and 20 to mean something like this: Even though our heart may condemn us for failing to love in deed and truth, yet God is greater than our heart and knows all things. That is, God knows more than our heart does. Though our heart is consumed with our failure, God knows the positives as well. Things aren't as bad as they seem, therefore be reassured.

The KJV comes close to what I think is the best translation of the original language in v. 20. The reasons I think this is a better translation are because it takes less grammatical gymnastics with the text and it fits the flow of John's thought better. But it would take a seminary lecture to develop these reasons, so let me now just give the translation which I think is best. Maybe this will stimulate you to do more research on your own, which would be very gratifying to me. We should all be Bereans! I think the best translation of vv. 19 and 20 go like this: "By this we shall know that we are of the truth and shall assure our heart before him, because if our heart condemns us [it is] because God is greater than our heart and knows all things." The reason we must love one another in deed and truth and thereby reassure our hearts before God that we are of the truth is this: if our heart condemns us for lack of love, it is because God is greater than our heart and knows all things. In other words, our heart, or our conscience, is an echo of God's opinion of ourselves. If our conscience, imperfect as it is, can sense a contradiction between what we profess and what we practice, how much more God, who knows all things.

Clarifying the Condemning Conscience

Now this matter of the conscience condemning us needs some clarification. First of all, how do I know when my conscience is echoing the voice of God and when it is echoing the voice of Satan? How do I know that the uneasy gloomy feeling in the pit of my soul is the conviction of the Holy Spirit and not the accusation of our adversary the devil. This is an important question because Scripture teaches us in Revelation 12:10 that Satan is the accuser of the brethren who accuses us day and night before our God.

Satan Can Sear Our Conscience

Satan loves to distort our conscience. He does it in two ways: first of all, he loves to silence it, to sear it so that it can lie quiet no matter what you're doing (1 Timothy 4:2). Has your conscience ever gotten to the point where you feel indifferent about doing evil? I got to that point when I was sixteen, right before my conversion to Christ. I grew up with a very tender conscience, that slayed me whenever I willingly violated it. Then I learned to deceive my conscience, or so I thought. For example, there were times when I wanted to go to a party which I knew my parents wouldn't let me go to. I knew I couldn't outright lie and say I was really going somewhere else because then when I went to the party, I would feel so guilty I wouldn't have any fun. So I found a loophole in my conscience. I would tell my parent's I was going to my friend Richard's house. That is exactly what I would do. I would drive over to Richard's, get out, walk around the yard, get in the car, and go to the party with my conscience appeased. The next day when my mom asked me if I had a good time at Richard's, I could look her in the eye and say, "Yea, it was OK," with a clear but deceived conscience. But the more I did that kind of stuff, the less my conscience needed such elaborate deceiving. I finally got to the point where I could not only lie but also steal without any pangs of conscience.

It was frightening how I had changed. Once, when I was a little boy, I accidentally walked out of the Ben Franklin with a piece of gum without paying for it. Halfway home I realized I forgot to pay. I was horrified. My conscience was stricken. So I went back to the store and secretly slid a penny underneath the cash register. I then skipped home a free little boy. But several years later on March 18, 1971, the night of the great Joe Frazier-Muhammad Ali fight my friend and I got caught shoplifting. The undercover policeman called my folks and said, "Your son has been arrested for shoplifting." I could hear my dad on the other end of the line saying the classic statement, "I'm sorry, but you must be making some mistake. My son would never steal." When I got home, I walked into the living room where my parents were sitting; my mother was crying softly, my dad was staring into space. Can you guess what I said when my dad asked me if what the policeman said was true? I said, "Dad, I didn't do anything wrong! I shop at these stores and they charge me more than what they pay for it themselves. It's not wrong for me to take something on occasion." The fact that I stole was hard enough on my folks, but the fact that I said it wasn't wrong must have been devastating to them.

At that moment I honestly believed it wasn't wrong to steal, though my parents and my church and my school had taught me and modeled for me a life of honesty and integrity. But my conscience was silent! God used this episode to wake me up. As I reflected on it in the days to follow, I began to learn what evil was all about. For the first time I realized how someone could be a thief or murderer—that, even for me, little Tommy Steller, no evil was beyond my reach. O how thankful I am that God used that diabolical event to intensify my quest for him. In a matter of months he would remove my heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh. Praise God for his mercy!

Satan Can Turn Our Conscience to a Distorted View of God

Yes, Satan can sear a conscience, but there's another way that Satan can destroy our conscience. Scripture calls him in Revelation 12:10 the accuser of the brethren who accuses us day and night before our God. If he can't sear our conscience, he will seek to fine tune our conscience to a perverted view of God. He will paint for us a caricature of God—a God who is impatient and who really is not for us but against us. A God who is just looking for a slip-up so that he can pounce on us. A God who is not slow to anger, not abounding in loving kindness, but rather a perfectionistic taskmaster who will hound us, and ridicule us, and torment us until we do every thing just perfect.

Three Experiences with Conscience Among People

My guess is that there are three types of people represented in this room right now. Some whose conscience have long since been seared or are in the process of being repressed into silence. Then there are some whose consciences are very lively but are attuned to a taskmaster God who is impatient. You labor under a blanket of guilt, that never goes away. You are depressed and broken and defeated. You confess your sins, but never feel like you did it well enough to actually be forgiven; you look at how you love your brothers and sisters and you feel that its never perfect enough to please God. And the third type of people are some of you whose conscience is lively, but attuned to a God who is holy and also compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness. When you fail to love as you should, your conscience condemns you, informing you that God is against your sin. But you thank God for your conscience. It is like those nerve endings that mercifully scream out in pain when something is wrong in your body and needs attention. When your conscience condemns you, you turn to God in confession and you trust the promise that God will forgive you and cleanse you from all unrighteousness. If the harm you did is something that can be restored through a word or a deed, you will rely on God's help to be reconciled to the person you hurt. And then your conscience will be quieted, and you will be free to love and to pray once again.

Those of you who know that your conscience has been inappropriately quiet for too long, or inappropriately condemning for quite awhile, and you feel stuck, no matter how much you pray or read Scripture; my admonition to you is to seek out help from a trusted friend, or a pastor or a professional Christian counselor. Because God is in the business of reclaiming and rehabilitating our conscience. There is nothing more valuable than a conscience that condemns us when we are wrong, and there is nothing sweeter than a conscience that is at rest once we've repented. God wants us to have free and responsive hearts, "Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God."

Verses 21 and 22 teach us what is true for those whose hearts are free in God. "Beloved if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God, and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him." These verses are a goldmine in and of themselves. But since they are virtually repeated later on in 5:14, 15, we will wait to mine most of the gold until the middle of June when we focus on that passage.

Obedience to One Commandment

But what needs to be emphasized here is that again our confidence toward God is determined in large measure by our obedience to his commandments. The reason we can have confidence before God in prayer according to v. 22 is because "we keep his commandments and do what pleases him." And what are his commandments? John could have listed them: "You shall have no other gods before me, you shall not take the Lord's name in vain, honor your father and mother, don't steal, kill, covet," and so forth. But instead he summarizes all the commandments of God in one commandment. What is that one commandment? Verse 23 tells us: "And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he commanded us." John says the one commandment is believe in Jesus and love one another. But you say, "That's two commandments." Not in God's mind—trust in him and love for each other are so necessarily connected that one cannot exist for long without the other, which is the very point John is trying drive home in paragraph after paragraph of this letter. The apostle Paul puts it this way in Galatians 5:6 when he says that the only thing that really means anything to God is "faith expressing itself through love." Believing in Jesus and loving one another is the grand summary of the Bible. And they must hang together.

That's why I was both encouraged and troubled by a statement made by a former member of Bethlehem who visited again a few weeks ago. He said that he has never been at a church that fulfilled the first commandment—love God with all your heart, soul, and mind—better than Bethlehem. That was encouraging. Then he said, "But I've never been at a church that fulfilled the second commandment—love your neighbor as yourself—better than the church I am now attending." This was troubling. I wasn't troubled because there was another church better than Bethlehem—I'm sure there are many churches "better" than Bethlehem, and the whole comparison thing between churches can be a real snare—but what troubled me was that love for God and love for neighbor weren't perceived as equal strengths at Bethlehem. They must be equal strengths. The measure of the genuineness of our worship is the fervency of our love for one another. To the degree that our love for one another is shallow or superficial, to that degree our worship of God is shallow or superficial—no matter what form it takes or what level of energy is invested. For John says in 4:20, "He who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen." It's as simple as that. My prayer for Bethlehem is that our worship of God will grow more and more intense and our love for each other will grow more and more practical and become more and more visible. Jesus said: "By this shall all people know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13:35).

Do We Earn Answers to Prayer Through Obedience?

But we must not gloss over what appears at first glance as a huge theological problem in v. 22. God will give us whatever we ask in prayer on the condition that we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. I thought God gave us things freely? But doesn't this verse teach us that we have to earn the mercy of answered prayer through obedience? I thought mercy was unconditional?

A crucial thing for us to learn is the difference between unconditional and unmerited. The mercy of answered prayer like every other mercy is totally unmerited—but according to this verse it is not unconditional. The condition for our receiving from God whatever we ask for in prayer is that we keep his commandments. Our obedience does not earn answers to prayer; it simply puts us in the position to receive his mercy through answered prayer. Verse 24 says that all who keep his commandments abide in him and he abides in them. Remember that the commandments which we much obey are really only one commandment. "Believe in Jesus and love one another." We normally don't have a problem seeing faith as a prerequisite for answered prayer. But we do have a problem seeing love for one another as a prerequisite. But this problem should disappear once we realize that genuine faith necessarily expresses itself in deeds of love. Therefore God can say both, "I will answer the prayers of those who trust me," and, "I will answer the prayers of those who love their brother or sister."

So in summary, confidence in God frees us to love each other. And loving each other is the reassuring evidence that we are of the truth.