now is the very end of the 5th chapter. Now just warn you as you listen, this has one of the most notoriously confusing, difficult verses in the whole Bible, which I hope I will help you a little bit with, though it's one of the disease, so to speak. That's what theologians call it. It's got one of the disease in there that we come across, and you'll probably know it when you hear it. But we're going to meditate on this together for a few minutes. This is Antopsim, it's going to read the scriptures for us, listen now to the Word of God. So reading from 1 John chapter 5 verses 13 to 21, I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life. This is the confidence we have in approaching God. If we ask anything according to his will, he hears it. And if we know that he hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have what we ask to him. If anyone sees his brother, commit a sin that does not lead to death, he should pray and God will give him life. I refer to those who sinned of not lead to death. There is a sin that leads to death. I am not saying that he should pray about that all along doing a sin, and there is sin that does not lead to death. We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin. The one who was born of God keeps him safe, and the evil one cannot harm him. We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one. We know also that the Son of God has come, and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true, and we are in him who is true, even in his Son he is described. He is the true God and eternal life. Dear children, keep yourselves from idle. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. We have been going through this letter of 1st John, and the theme we have been drawing out is the idea of becoming a person of spiritual competence. A person who knows what it is to be competent in spiritual things. And the challenge of that is the lust for certainty. Can be deceiving. It can lead people into all sorts of bizarre, newfangled experiments with spirituality. It is probably one of the narcotic effects of getting involved in a sect or a religious cult. And one of the great questions we have before us is, is it possible to have a relationship which uses Christ that truly leads to certainty that doesn't necessarily lead off into some area of religious strangeness or are we left with a deep uncertainty? Is it possible to move to a place of certainty and faith? One of our pastors, Joe Leard, I popped by his office this week, and he was reading a new book, an important theological work by John Crackauer, the guy who wrote into thin air. This new book is a look at a murder case within the Mormon sect, the books called Under the Banner of Heaven. I got to read you something. I knew he wasn't going to be preaching for a while, so I knew he wouldn't mind me using this in my sermon. Is that all right? But he said, he said, I've got to read you. He tells a story of how this religious extremist group justified murder. And at the end, he says, now let me read you what the author says about his own faith. And you write this, most of us yearn to comprehend how and why we got here, which is to say, most of us ache to know the love of our Creator. And we will no doubt feel that ache most of us for as long as we happen to be alive. I read that to me, and he said, how sad, how sad. That a person looks at certainty and says, this is for crazy extremists. And most of us, let's face it, all we ever really have is yearning and ache will never know. Well, John is writing as someone who knew and encountered the living Christ. And he's saying you can know him. You can know his life. He says, over and over again, in such a way that you're confident, so that you know where you stand with him. Now, while that is true, there was a religious cult that sprang up out of the early church. If you remember over the last several weeks, I've been telling you some of what church historians think. We have, through the writings of Irenaeus, who is one of the early church fathers, the story of what was going on in the great city of Ephesus, where John was the leader in the church. That there was a leader named Serenthus, sort of an early leader of what would later be known as Nosticism. Nosticism was sort of an early new age way of thinking that said that it was through the noces. That means knowledge, through special enlightenment, that it's possible for a special enlightenment to move up to the higher flame. In other words, these are people who had originally been gathered into the Christian community. They heard about Jesus. They heard about what they had done, and yet they were lured away by the lust for certainty. By people who said, a certain Serenthus, who said, what, it's possible to have an experience and if you come with us, if you move away from this Christian faith, you're hearing from the apostles, if you come with us, we'll take you through a higher experience. And what that's doing among those who are still not going is what? It's causing them to question their own confidence. The Christians to whom John is shepherd to whom he is ministering are beginning to question. Am I sure that the spirituality that I've brought into my life, am I sure that this is real? Am I confident of it? And that is why this letter has been written that we've been looking at. Now what we come to tonight at this morning, what time did I go to bed last night? What we come to this morning is this. John is coming into the final stretch of his letter. This is the heart of a shepherd who bleeds for his sheep who is deeply concerned about their spiritual condition because there are a lot of clever facts, semilays out there. We've talked about one of them that would say, try this. This will be more satisfying than this Jesus thing. In the midst of those clever facts, semilays, John comes into the final stretch and this is his final appeal. Now he's gone through all sorts of arguments. He's given biblical arguments about Jesus. He's given historical arguments about that. And over 45 times, in the short letter of just a few pages, he says, we know it's possible to know. However, when he comes into the last stretch, he moves into a different territory. Now this would be, I think, true for anybody, really. If you're really trying to make that commitment to be a Christian, if you're deciding of responding to Jesus Christ in some way, what you've got to do is you better look at what your questions are. Questions about the accuracy of the Bible or the historicity of Jesus. Those kinds of arguments are very important to resolve if you're going to know if you're going to have spiritual confidence. But then he moves into something else and it is the actual experience of being a Christian and how that actual experience of the reality of the living Christ coming into your life so that you're actually can say that you're born again. You have the life of God born in you. He says that experience is one of the ways you know. And he shows us three ways that's true. This is amazing. Now there's three. He's always show up in sermons. There are actually three ways in the remainder here where he says there are three things you're going to see happen and in those three things you're going to know. You're going to know he's real and you're going to know you can trust him. So the first thing he says is this, answered prayer, answered prayer. Look at verse 14 and 15 where he says this, this is the confidence we have in approaching God that if we ask anything according to his will, he will hear us. And we know that he hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have what we have asked of him. Now John here is not just talking of knowing about God, all right, facts about God. He's saying that we have a confidence that it's more than that. I don't just know about God, I know God. And one of the ways I know him is that I have experienced him answering my prayers. That has become a reality for me. And of course my question to you is if you claim Christian faith, has that become a reality for you? Is that experience becoming part of your reference point for certainty? You know if you were to ask me, Scott are you married? I would say yes. And if you were to say, how do you know? I don't think my first response would be, well by golly, I've got a phone number to New York City and I can call, I can give you the number of the certificate that proves that I'm married. That's how I know I'm married. No, I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't say, I can tell you the minister's name and witnesses, give me a phone, right? I don't need to do that, all right? It's important, we needed the witnesses. It's good to have the paper, all right? But the way I know I'm married is there's this woman who wakes me up every morning with coffee. You know, if that doesn't do it for you, what will? You know, I experience love from my wife Catherine. I can't define anything in my life apart from her. You know, we're so interdependent. Everything about my experience tells me I am married to this woman. You know, there are four kids for crying, four boys, you know, there's just, I'm surrounded with experience that screams at me, you're married. All right, now John is saying, listen, if you begin to put your feet in your hands, if you begin to stand on that ladder that never fails you, one of the things you're going to experience is that as you begin to your heart, pour your heart out to them in prayer, you're going to find a response to you. This Pascal, the great French philosopher in Christian, put it this way, prayer is God's way of giving His creatures the dignity of causality. The God actually includes you and what He does. Now, there's a qualifier, and this is the qualifier that often causes people to have the immediate response of, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there you go. And it's this one, what does He say in verse 14, whatever we ask, according to His will. And let me just say two things about this, that I hope will help you realize that this is not a way to just justify whatever happens in your prayer life so that we can dilute ourselves that prayer is real somehow, actually, how could it be any other way and prayer be good? You see, what it's saying here is that there are two things you're going to learn when you pray as you come to know God, one, you're going to learn to trust Him and two, you're going to learn to believe Him. What do I mean by that? Oh, by trust. You know, the Zords are so similar. What I mean by trust is this, Jesus Christ taking on full humanity in the Garden of Gethsemane begins to break under the weight of going to the cross, and He lays everything out before His Father, Him, He trusts, and He says, can this cup, can this pass from me? Jesus Christ Himself models prayer for us, and what you see is Him saying, never the less, not my will, but thy will be done. And Jesus is saying, what matters most is that I trust you, that your will be done. Now, why is that important? If you're a parent, you understand this. If you have a true relationship with a loving parent, the parent is going to have greater wisdom than the child. Any child who really cares about the parent, who respects the parent, who respects the parent's wisdom, is going to have that sensibility developed within them to say, listen, this is what I see, this is what I want, but I am fully cognizant that you are wiser, and you're good. You're better than I am. So while I'm asking for this, I acknowledge who you are. And as you pray, according to His will, you see, you begin to learn His wisdom. You prayer will actually change you. You'll begin to pray for things according to His will because His will is becoming part of who you are. So you learn to trust Him. Jesus said, what parent when their child asks for bread gives them a stone? How much more will your Heavenly Father give you the Holy Spirit? That is, when you pray, whether you get your request or not, you will get more of God. You will get more of God in your life, opening your eyes, opening your faith to what He's doing. But also, you're going to learn to believe. And what I mean by belief here is very simply, you're going to see in very simple terms, God answering your prayers. Great Christian from the middle of the last century, William Temple, put it this way, and it's one of my favorite things about prayer I've ever heard. He says, when I pray, coincidence has happened, and when I don't, they don't. And this is what John is saying. Listen. When you pray, if you pray about everything, you're going to begin to find that God is responding to you. He is giving you the dignity of causality, and that's part of the reality of the relationship you live in. I think the reason a lot of us don't pray is because, A, we're afraid He will say no to us, or B, and I hear this a lot with people who come to talk to me. At some level, you don't know God loves you yet, and the way that translates is, you don't think He's interested in what's going on in your life. You don't pray, because either you'll pray and you'll say no, so therefore, somehow not praying makes your chances better. We don't all think rationally, do we? At some level, you think this will make my chances better. Why pray? I know He's not going to do it. Or, you think He just doesn't care. Why bother Him with me? My favorite example of this in the book, the Gospel, according to the Stempsons, comes from the prayer of Homer Simpson, which I shared with you on the reflection stage, which goes like this. Dear Lord, the gods have been very good to me. For the first time in my life, everything is absolutely perfect just the way it is. So here's the deal. You freeze everything the way it is, and I won't ask for anything else, anything more. If that is okay, please give me absolutely no sign, okay, deal. In gratitude, I present you this offering of cookies and milk. If you want me to eat them for you, give me no sign, I will be done. Homer Simpson. At some level, I think this is kind of where a lot of us actually live, we actually live there. I don't really want to have any kind of dynamic relationship with you, but would you just kind of make everything go okay, that I will be done. No. John is describing a deep love of God's wisdom and God's ways and an experience of beginning to see God engage with you so that you're a part of what he's doing in the world. Listen, it's a two-way relationship of trust, and notice how he describes what will happen in your life, what will be there, verse 15, we know that we have what we ask of him, according to his will, but we know that we have what we ask. Is that your experience? Now, John pushes this into an area, and this is the doozy I was talking about, okay. He pushes this into a specific application of what was going on in their church, because remember, you've got a number of people who said they were Christians, who have abandoned the faith, and they've gone off with this seething group with syrenthus, all right? But you've got a lot of people who are also struggling because remember, they were saying that spirituality is all in the mind and in this spiritual enlightenment, and one of the other things that went with it was a life of immorality. You don't have to live like Jesus lived, live like the pagans lived. This is an opportunity to be more spiritual and have more fun. That was, you know, it was a sec that had a little edge to it, and so there were people still in the church who were still sort of struggling with the challenge of this new cult that emerged. Now, what John says is listen, think of it in context, look at what he says in verse 16. He's talking about prayer, and he says, if anyone sees his brother commit a sin that does not lead to death, he should pray, and God will give him life. Now, one of the things he is promising to Christians here is this. What does he mean? Let me interject. What does he mean when he says a sin that does not lead to death? You must remember that in the Bible, physical death is, you know, as I say in the mummy, death is just the beginning. Well, in the Bible, death is just the movie, the mummy, everyone. Death is just the beginning, but if you don't know Christ, death is the beginning of death, of deep spiritual death, of deep separation from God. And what he's saying is people who know Christ still sin, and so there are people who are sinning, but they are going to know Christ. They're going to be forgiven of those sins, and they're going to be restored. And so what's being held out here, and this is what you don't want to miss because of all the oddness, maybe, of the way it's written to our ears, is he saying, listen, one of the ways you have a confident relationship with God is that he hears you. You have a vibrant prayer relationship going back and forth, all right? And please know, that's why you can pray for your brothers who are being tested by this and see God bring them to life. You can see this really happen. That's an incredible promise as we know of one another struggles with sin and struggles and living in this world, all right? But then he moves on to say something that's a little more challenging. And that's where he says in verse 17 and 18, all wrongdoing is sin, and there is sin that is not lead to death. Now, I'm just trying to explain to you what I meant by that. It is there a sin a person can repent of in coming to the life which is in Christ, but then verse 18. We know, wait a minute, sorry, I'm in the wrong place, let me back up, back up the verse 16. If anyone sees his brother commit a sin that does not lead to death, he should pray and God will give him life. I refer to those who sin does not lead to death. There is a sin that leads to death. I am not saying he should pray about that. That's the doozy. That's what people say. What does he mean? And I'm going to say this is what I think he means because there's red rings on this. And it's just one of those things because of language and culture and all sorts of things, it's kind of difficult for us. But I think what he's saying is this, listen, there are people who have gone out and by their actions, they are utterly renouncing everything God has offered them in Jesus. They're definitively rejecting Jesus and moving into deep apostasy. Now, he doesn't forbid them from praying for those people. He doesn't actually say that. What he does is acknowledge at some level, I'm not saying you should pray because there is theoretic, in other words, he doesn't know exactly where any individual is, but what he's saying, there is sin unto death. There is moving into death in such a way that you can't turn back. Now, what do you do with that? In other words, rejecting Christ at deep, deep, deep levels and you're never going to turn. You're never going to turn back. What are we supposed to do with that? Let me make two pastoral applications and we're going to move quickly to finish. Two pastoral applications. Number one, it means at the very least, don't play around with God. I think these kinds of texts are there to get our attention to say, when it comes to responding to God, to the truth of what you hear in Christ, don't play around. As though time were your friend or as though it was not an urgent matter, he's saying, listen, this is very serious. The way people act and decide and the choices they make. However, it doesn't mean you should have an irrational fear that you yourself have somehow committed this offense and are beyond the help of prayer or anything else. And unfortunately, this is how this verse has often been twisted. I remember so sadly, my own grandfather was convinced he had committed the unpardonable sin because he had not responded to someone's invitation to become a Christian when he was 20 years old. And the rest of his life, he would never respond because some weird teacher had convinced him. He was beyond hope. And I just want to say to you, I pray God in his mercy changed his mind. And I want to say to you, please know that if you're even cognizant of this issue, you haven't moved to that place. If there is any desire in you at all to respond to God, please know, that's from God, you're loving Heavenly Father. But don't mess around, don't play around with God. But secondly, please know that if you have any desire at all to respond to him, that is from God. And you should act on that, all right? The reality of prayer quickly, he gives two more realities. The second is this, deliverance from the power of sin. Look at verse 18, we know he's coming into the final stretch here of the we knows and he says, we know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin. The one who was born of God keeps him safe. We know that we are children of God and the whole world is under the control of the evil one. What are you saying here? And I dealt, this is another difficult construction, you know, when he says we don't sin because he says in the same letter, you do sin, but you don't. What are you saying is this, it's not that a Christian is someone who is sinless, but if you're a person who is who divide the words, you sinless. That is, Christ's life is coming to you in such a way you can actually say there's been a break, there's been a change. You see this in the stories of the Bible, salt used to be someone who sought the murder of the Christians and when the Christ comes into his life, he immediately begins to stick their fellowship. Zacchaeus was a man who stole from people and when Christ comes into his life, immediately at that point in his life, he begins to desire to give his money away to the poor and to make restitution to those he's stolen from. The Philippian jailer was a jailer, he was a man who was cruel to his prisoners and as soon as Christ comes into his life, what happens? He starts to bathe their wounds and what he's saying is one of the ways you're going to know you're in Christ is that that is the reality of your life. You're beginning to have an active prayer relationship and not only that, but the actual patterns of stand you're beginning to experience his life there. And then finally he says you're going to have fellowship with the one who is true. Look at verse 20, this is just one of the most beautifully written verses I think in the whole Bible. He closes and says this, we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true and we are in him who is true. And in his Son Jesus Christ, he is the true God and eternal life. Now what I love about this, the way John concludes here, is that he isn't just saying, by the way he has the truth, he will give you the answers you seek, he has the truth. That's true. Again, I say there may be some of you, when it comes to Christianity, you have questions that need answering, please do your study. Let us help you as you search and as you seek. But at the end of the day what he's saying is, know this, if you entrust your life to him, whatever comes in your life, if you are in him and he is in you, you're going to find that he's true. Not just truth, he's true. You can depend on him. Listen, you give your life to Christ, there's going to come a day when you're afraid and you're going to need to find a place of safety, he's true. He will make you safe. There's going to be a time in your life where you're confused and you're going to need guidance. He's true. And he's going to open the door that you need, he's going to make the path you need clear to you. There's going to come a time in your life when you're deeply hurt by something and you need healing and you're incapable of manufacturing it yourself. But John is saying, trust him, he's true, give yourself to him. He will give you the healing you need. He will never fail you. He closes with the Senate and I'm going to close with the Senate. He closes with the Senate that may seem very strange to us, but it actually flows out of everything he's just said. He says, little children, keep yourself from idols. Do you know what that means? American Express said it so well except no substitutes. He's saying, listen, this is the real life. The life Jesus offers, there are so many clever facts, similarities, there are so many places we'd rather turn except no substitutes. Don't give yourself to an idol, give yourself to him. Let's pray. Now Father, my prayer is I pray this letter into this congregation, may it be part of our DNA, may it be part of our spiritual consciousness as a people, that we would be people who are deeply confident, settled into, standing on and in, the new eternal life that's offered us in Christ. Would you give us a rich experience of relationship and prayer? Lord, would you give us a change in our lives over the sins that would try to control us? Lord, would you give an experience to us of finding you true and every trial and circumstance that comes into our lives? We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.