What We Can Know

Yesterday, I was just kind of tired, still trying to get my energy completely back, and I was sitting down watching some basketball that I wasn’t really interested in, and I have an antenna, so I just started flipping through the channels like back in the old days, remember those days where you just flipped through, and there was a channel that showed all… Oh, I was watching this channel called Stories, and they started going through all these stories of the Bible, and then they started getting way off with who they were bringing in to talk about it, that you could tell they didn’t even have faith with some of the people, so I started flipping the channels, and I came across a show that may have inspired the title of our sermon series that we’re wrapping up today. It was a show that was clear back from the 80s called Different Strokes. Raise your hand if you have never seen Different Strokes.

Different Strokes was the story of two young African-American boys that were adopted by a rich man who, I don’t remember, was he a widow, divorced, had a daughter, and a lady there taking care of their house. This wasn’t the episode, but I remember when Arnold, the young one, the what you talking about Willis one, was struggling with something, and he was in his top bunk, and he decided when he was in his top bunk that he was going to start, he was going to say a prayer, and he started it with something like God, something like, hello God, it’s me Arnold Jackson, and he gave his address, and let him know where he was, and who he was, and what he was up to, but just to start that prayer with hello God, it’s me, that kind of inspired the title of this sermon series, hello God, how can I really know it’s you, how can I know it’s really you, and today we’re going to talk about specifically what we can know. As we have worked through 1 John 4 and 5, you know sermon series probably blessed me more than you, sorry about that, but man, just reading through and digging through the Bible is so powerful.

Next week we’re going to do the Transfiguration for Transfiguration Sunday, and the week after that we’ll start Lent, and I’m excited about that series, because it comes out of Psalm 22, I’ve done a good Friday sermon out of Psalm 22, but I’ve never done a whole series, so we can really break it down, and you’re thinking I’m making a mistake, I should be saying Psalm 23, but Psalm 22 is just as powerful, if not more powerful than Psalm 23, so that gets you excited to go home and read Psalm 22 now, right? As we have worked through 1 John 4 and 5, we started off with these verses, Beloved, 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, warning the churches even in the first century that everyone who comes and speaks in a church is not necessarily of God, you have to test the spirits, you have to find out if they are from God, and he goes on to say that every spirit who says that Jesus came in the flesh, every spirit that says Jesus is the Son of God, listen to those, but not every spirit confesses Jesus as their Lord and their Savior, even if they come in and they tell the church they know better, they don’t know all that. And then it goes into some of the attributes of God, especially that God is love, and the power that we have in God being love, and how we know what love is, and how closely love is connected to following the commandments of Jesus, and that love at the end drives out fear, perfect love drives out fear, and that fear can come because we are so tied and bogged down and connected with the world, and he went on to say that when it is of God, we can overcome the world. And then last week we talked about how there are three that testify, the spirits, the water, and the, do you remember the third one? The blood.

You just wanted to say blood out loud. The spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three testify on earth about Jesus, and about, they point to Jesus, every one of them, and today we’re just going to simply talk about, John closes the letter by saying over and over, here’s what we know. We know what we know what we know, and there are things we can know as followers of Jesus Christ, which is, that’s just pretty cool.

So will you stand as you are able? Today’s text comes from 1 John 5, starting in verse 14, go through 21. 1 John 5, verse 14. The Word of God, inspired by God, for the people of God.

Thanks be to God, amen, you may be seated. When I was in seminary, they taught us a lot of stuff. Some of the stuff helped me learn in a different way of, you know, previously hearing things on the radio, through different speakers, through other things that became ingrained in me, that not all of those things were of the Bible.

So just by studying and reading so many books, I had to relearn some stuff. And then they also tried to teach me some stuff that was not biblical, and you guys look shocked about that. When I was in seminary, I was at a church in Denton, Kansas, and it was a quarter time position, and they all would ask me on different Sundays, so how’s cemetery going? And they would go, that’s where your faith goes to die.

And they couldn’t believe by the end of the three years that my faith had not wavered in the midst of cemetery. Where was I? And they were pretty excited about that. One of the things that may demonstrate some of the false teachings that I learned and are in me, but have not overcome me, is that a good way to say it? That I know what they’re talking about was, they gave us a picture, they put a picture on the screen of an elephant, and they put six blind men around the elephant, and these blind guys were feeling different parts of the elephant.

And they were saying, here, six blind men were walking down a road in a small village in India. They were thirsty, so they decided to stop at a nearby river to quench their thirst. As they came near the river, they bumped into an elephant that was also drinking from the river.

They were surprised and confused about what they bumped into. One of the blind men touched the elephant’s trunk and told the others, this is something soft, thick, and long like a snake. The second man touched the elephant’s tusk and said, no way, it’s hard, long, smooth, and sharp like a spear.

The third man touched the elephant’s feet and said, you’re both wrong. The object is hard, wide, and rough like the trunk of a tree. Fourth man touched the elephant’s ears and said, actually, all three of you are wrong.

This object is thin and flat like a hand fan. Fifth man touched the tail and said, it’s definitely not all of that. The object is actually thin and delicate like a rope.

The sixth man touched the body of the elephant and said, you must all be out of your minds. It’s some kind of wall, hard and wide. Now they were even more confused.

What could it be, they all wondered. What could possibly be like a wall, a fan, a rope, a spear, a tree trunk, and a snake? They were unable to make sense of what they had come across. And then they said, this is what faith is like.

We all see different things, and we don’t really know what God is like. But each religion, each world religion, adds things and has different insights. And it’s only, we can only know partially.

We can’t know God completely. And then it went on to talk about how we cannot be so arrogant as to think Jesus is the way and the truth and the life. And I was like, why not? We can be.

And I wanted to say, did you read the Bible? But it didn’t do any good because the ones teaching that may have read the Bible, but they didn’t believe it. But they were forming the minds of leaders in the church. And there was something that was pervasive that said, we cannot be sure.

So that opens the door that we could never put a, everything is a question mark when it comes to God. We cannot put a period on it and say, this is it. It may be a question mark.

It may be a comma. We’re going to add more later because we don’t know what we need to know about God. Now, in case you haven’t read it, the Bible says otherwise.

Did you know that? John is very clear. And it was my emphasis, but I kept saying, and we know, and he kept saying, and we know. He didn’t say, and we think, or he didn’t say, and we hope.

And he didn’t say, and we may know. He said, we know. And I love that it starts off in this section with, and this is the confidence we have.

We can have confidence. Now they would say that confidence is more like arrogance. You’re arrogant if you think Jesus is the only way to heaven.

You’re arrogant if you think Christianity is the only true faith. You’re arrogant if somebody’s saying, hello, God, how can we really know it? If they connect to God, that they can’t know God, and they can’t know who God is. And they can’t know and have assurance of their faith.

Wesley must have been told some of the same things in seminary because he was doubting his faith a lot when he came to this strange warming experience at Aldersgate. I mean, the man was a seminary-trained, ordained elder in the Church of England, in the Anglican Church. And he said, after the Aldersgate experience, he said, I wasn’t even saved before that.

I had no assurance of my faith. I remember one time walking down the street in Salina, Kansas, before I even went into ministry, and somebody grabbed me. There was three people doing their street corner ministry.

And they said these words to me, which you’ve probably heard now. They said, do you know where you’re going to go if you die tonight? And I remember thinking, I thought for a minute, going, do I know? And then this boldness came inside of me, and I said, yeah, I know where I’m going to go. I know.

But there’s something wishy-washy in the world, when the world has control of us, that keeps saying those words. You can’t know when you’ve seen God. You can’t know if God is real.

Why does all this junk happen to you in your life? Has anybody faced any junk, any junk, any stuff, where without faith, you might have serious doubts of who God was? John says in this over and over that we can know. Now, if we go back one verse, and we look at the verse preceding, verse 14, which we ended last week’s with, this is kind of a transitional verse. So it goes along with this week.

So I’m going to cheat and use it. It says, I’ve written you this so that you believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life. Now, that’s impressive.

She pulled that up from last week. Dana, you should be proud. First thing we can know is that we have eternal life.

If any doubt comes in your mind that you do not have eternal life in Jesus, if any doubt comes in your mind that we can, you know, the slightest thing we do, we lose our faith, that says that we have something within us. All of these say that we have something within us that if we do not have that confidence, that we haven’t turned it over to God, that we haven’t given it over to God, that we haven’t repented of that thing and been born into a new life in Jesus Christ because those things, that’s what Wesley, he had confidence for the first time of his eternal life. And we have that.

I’m just going to let that sink in a little bit. All the hurt, all the pain, all the struggles, all the junk, there’s something better out there for us. It’s not a legend.

It’s not an idea. It’s a fact. It is a fact of life that in Jesus you have eternal life.

And because we know that in Jesus we have eternal life, all God’s people can say, amen, amen, so be it. It’s the way it is. We have eternal life.

You’re stuck with it. Deal with it. Move on.

It’s there. In verse 14, he says that he listens to us and he hears us. And we have the confidence that when our desire is his desire, he acts.

Okay, people twist stuff in the Bible a lot that they say, you know, they take it and they say, whatever you want, it’s already done for you. Well, the whole point is that if it’s according to God’s will, if it is God’s desire, and the goal of Christianity in one sense is to discover God’s desire and make it our desire so that when we pray from the heart, we’re praying the same desire that comes from the Holy Spirit in God so that we have that desire. We have confidence that when we pray in the name of Jesus, God hears us.

And we also know that if we pray according to his will, he’s got this. We don’t always know why or why not something, God’s will is what it is, but we know God’s got this. In Luke 11, Jesus is saying, ask and it will be given to you.

Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be open to you. And then he says, you being evil, could you imagine being a preacher and saying, hey, you being evil, just so you know where you come from, you being evil will still give your kids good gifts.

You, if they ask for a fish, you won’t give them a rock. If they ask for, you know, you’re not going to do the bait and switch and mess with their lives and anything to hurt them, even if we have this sin nature within us. But then he says, which in the other synoptics when they do this, they say, ask and it will be given to you.

Luke gives us a little more detail. That’s why I love in Luke’s detail. He says, ask for more of the Holy Spirit and it will be given to you.

When we ask for things, the greatest thing to ask for with God that you can plead for with God every day, that Jesus even said, ask for this. Ask for more of the Holy Spirit. The more of the Holy Spirit you have, the more you know God’s will, the more your desire will match God’s desire and the more God will answer the prayers you have that you petition before God day after day after day.

Let my will be his will and he will make it happen. So what else can we know? We know we can be forgiven. Wesley said this and one of my friends who loved this quote so much, always focused on the fact when he says, my sins are forgiven, even mine.

You know, when we are, the Bible asks us to forgive others and asks us to forgive no matter what somebody else does and psychologically the hardest person to forgive. I mean, even harder than someone who hurts you or hurts your family or hurts someone close to you. The hardest person to forgive is who? Ourselves.

Psychologically, we just want to carry that load and Jesus said, that’s not your burden to carry. But we, like the Wesleys found out, know we can be forgiven. We know that we can ask and it will be forgiven.

Now John talks about in here another step with forgiveness and that’s, do you remember the parable, not the parable, but the account of when Jesus was preaching in somebody’s house and the crowd was so big you couldn’t get in there and the four friends who came with their paralyzed friends decided they would go up on the roof, chop a hole through the roof. We don’t know what happened to them for doing such a dastardly thing. And they dropped their friend down and Jesus sees him and he says, because of their faith, he is forgiven.

Do we pray for people we care for, for God to forgive them? John is saying that when we do that, they can be forgiven like this paralyzed man, that it is important. And I often haven’t thought about this in prayer. Instead of saying just God help them, say God forgive them.

Jesus from the cross, what did he say? God forgive them for they know not what they do. We can’t be intercessors in prayer. We can stand between our brothers and sisters or the other people even outside the church in the world, stand between them and God and ask God to forgive them.

But John says, unless it’s the sin that cannot be forgiven. And commentators are all over the place when they look at John’s words in here. When he says, sin not leading to death.

And then he says, I’m not even telling you, you should even ask for this. He’s not saying don’t pray for this. But he’s not saying I’m not even telling you, you should ask for this.

Because what is the sin that leads to death? That’s kind of tough. You know, Jesus said you can blaspheme the father, you can blaspheme the son. But if you blaspheme the Holy Spirit, you will not be forgiven.

Which is so tough to wrap our minds around. How do you blaspheme the Holy Spirit? I mean, people make fun of the Holy Spirit. But how do you blaspheme the Holy Spirit? Jesus said this in the context of the Pharisees not believing who he was.

Okay? So there is a point where someone’s heart may be so hard. They just constantly reject the nudging and pushing of the Holy Spirit. And then there comes a point in time where you nudge and you push back.

And ignore and resist the Holy Spirit. And you won’t accept who Jesus is. The Bible says there’s ramifications for that.

Another way the Bible puts that is there is a hardening of heart. When you think of hardening of heart, you think of Pharaoh. Where Pharaoh hardened his heart.

So in the end, it finally says, and God hardened his heart. If a heart is hardened towards Jesus, the prayer is not necessarily God forgive them. I would pray something more like God soften their heart.

So they would be in more of a position where they can be forgiven. But once we have friends who may seem like their heart is hardened. Or they just don’t get the Jesus thing.

We can pray for their forgiveness. And we can know within that that we are forgiven. Even my sins are forgiven.

Some of you are looking at me like no, not yours. Maybe mine, but not yours. What else can we know? Jesus says, we know we are born of God.

When we are born of God, the devil cannot touch us. We know that no one born of God sins. Who he who has been born of God keeps him.

And the evil one does not touch them. Of course, the not sinning thing comes with perfection. And we probably have stuff.

If we have not reached perfection that we sin with. And we have not turned that over to God. We have not died to self and lived to God with certain things.

And those are the things that we need to give over to God. But the cool thing is just like in John 8. When Jesus was arguing with the crowd. And they were saying, you know, they were arguing that there’s no way.

He said before Abraham was, I am. And there’s no way you can be older than Abraham. He actually is.

And then Jesus said, and they also argued that we’ve never been slaves. And Jesus said, anyone who sins is a slave to sin. But the son can set you free indeed.

Meaning that sin does not have a hold of you anymore. That sin does not control you. Those things are not who you are identified by.

The world wants to identify everybody with their sin. But your sin does not identify you. Your identification in Jesus Christ is simply that you are a child of God.

Simply that you are saved by grace through faith. Not that you have never done anything wrong. For John says if you say that, you’re a liar.

But it says that when we are born of God, the devil can’t touch us. Anything that we are connected to God in, the devil can’t touch us. You can know that.

That if you’re walking in faith, the devil can’t touch you. He’s going to try. And he’s probably going to try harder the closer you are to God.