It doesn’t happen often, but it happened to my mom. She was 24 years old, working as a secretary in Kansas City and actively involved in the life of the First Church of the Nazarene. On this Sunday morning, a young man walked into her Sunday School class ... one she’d never seen before—a new move-in from Tulsa who’d come to Kansas City to attend dental school. When he walked in, she got the very distinct impression this was the man she was going to marry. Sure enough—the two of them celebrated their 69th wedding anniversary a couple of months ago.
You may have had something like this happen. Perhaps when looking for a house, after walking through numerous properties and beginning to get weary of the process, you entered a particular home and immediately sensed, “This is the one!” It may not have had everything on your checklist—in fact, it could have been a rather distressed property that was going to require a lot of work to bring it up to snuff. But you just knew you were standing in what would someday become your home. Maybe you intuitively sensed a certain person was not to be trusted. You couldn’t put a finger on why, but you just got an uneasy feeling whenever you were around them that caused you to be a bit wary and put up your guard. And sure enough, in time, something happened to where you were proven to be right. Or you just felt uneasy about making a major purchase only to need those funds for an unforeseen expense shortly thereafter—having not pulled the trigger so you had that money on hand was quite fortuitous. Regardless of the particulars, the feeling is unmistakable. If you were to ask us how we know, we wouldn’t be able to spell it out in a way that makes sense or point to anything that supplies quantitative proof. But we just know … as certainly as we know 1+1=2.
As the apostle John wraps up his first letter that made its way into the New Testament, he reminds us we can have that same sense of certainty and assurance as it relates to our standing with God.
We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one. (1 John 5:19, NIV)
John is saying we don’t have to navigate our way through life wondering about our eternal destiny … or merely hope that we’re in God’s good graces … or live under a cloud of presumption when it comes to the hereafter. We can have an absolute sense of certainty that we belong to God and are destined to spend eternity with Him.
This is the second of three triumphant certainties John shares with his readers as he closes his letter—three things he believes every person who’s come into relationship with God is entitled to know is available to them. In the previous post, we looked at the first one—the certainty of our victory over sin. When we invite Jesus to live within us, His very essence—the thing that enabled Him to live a sinless life—takes up residence to where the compulsion to sin becomes less and less pronounced and the ability to live a victorious life becomes more and more established. Though we may slip up and occasionally lose some battles along the way, we won’t lose the war. We can have the certainty we’ll ultimately be victorious over sin.
In this post I want to look at the second of these statements, which has to do with a sense of certainty as it relates to our standing with God. We can know beyond a shadow of a doubt—even though we can’t prove it ... even though we can’t run any tests that will authenticate or substantiate it—that we’ve been accepted by God, belong to Him, are part of his family, and destined to spend eternity with Him.
“We know that we are children of God”. As that phrase rings in your ears, we hark back to Jesus’ words and realize this phrase wasn’t original with John; it was something he picked up from the lips of His Master. Jesus frequently referred to His followers as “children of God”. Probably the most familiar is Matthew 5:9 where he said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” The term “children of God” is one Jesus used often.
And the meaning of the phrase is that of “life derived” or “life emanating from”. In an earthly sense I’m the child of Don and Eleanor because it was their union that conveyed life to me. Because that Sunday School encounter morphed into a life-long relationship, I came to be. Their relationship as husband and wife is the source of my life—it is derived from and emanates from them. Children of God, then, are those who’ve entered into a personal relationship with Jesus and come to experience the life of God—the life Jesus was talking about when he said, “I have come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10, NIV).
But there’s an incredibly important difference between the life my parents gave me and the life Jesus offers. While you and I came into this world fragile, defenseless, and vulnerable, we aren’t dependent upon those who gave us life to sustain it. We are made in such a way to where, as we grow, we no longer require the nurture and support of our parents. We are able to function and carry independently of them. But the life which we draw from God doesn’t work that way. The only way it is sustained is by maintaining the connection. So, the phrase “children of God” not only contains the idea of life being drawn from God, but also life which depends upon ongoing contact with God for its sustenance. We can no more possess the life of God apart from ongoing contact with Him than a sunbeam can display its brilliance apart from the sun itself. It was the same truth Jesus was alluding to in John 15:4 when he said, “No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.” For the life of God to remain in us, we must remain in Him.
But if we’ve come to possess this life, John is saying we can know it: “We know that we are children of God ...”. Not “we trust ...”, not “we hope ...”, not “we believe ...”. We “know”! There is a sense of absolute certainty and complete assurance. As people who’ve come into relationship with God, you and I have just as much right to lay hold of the words “I know” as it applies to our experience of God as any scientist who, in the wake of an experiment with carefully monitored environs and meticulously recorded data, can say “I know” regarding the findings of his work.
Now, many people have deceived themselves into a profession of being a Christian when, in fact, they’re not. Many people assume Christianity is about morality, and because they’re for the most part moral, then they, by extension, are Christian. Or they have some vague, nebulous belief in God, or a higher power, and have assumed that’s what it means to be a Christian and as a result have categorized themselves as one. One of the things I like about John’s letter is that it addresses this issue and guards against the presumption of entertaining erroneous thoughts about ourselves in this regard. Listen to what he says in 3:10: Anyone who does not do what is right is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister.” Christian people have a habit of doing not just what’s right, but the caring and loving thing. Their life bears fruit consistent with the character of Jesus Christ. This is the test to use when assessing the genuineness of someone’s profession of Christianity.
But just as there are some people who think they are a Christian and aren’t, there are some people who are Christians and lack the assurance of such. They have lingering questions of uncertainty—doubts that hang around—and have more or less contented themselves with the fact that’s the way the Christian life is and there’s nothing they can do about it. Many people have not experienced the fullness of God’s peace or realized the sum of their spiritual potential because of these nagging issues.
One of the great promises of God’s Word speaks to this issue; it’s found in Romans 8:16 which says: The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.” In other words, when God does a work in our life, He lets us know it.
One of the most dramatic displays of this was borne out in the life of a lady in the church I pastored in California named Linda. She was a ‘spiritual widow’—a Christian whose spouse was not a believer—and her family had a somewhat difficult and turbulent background. As a result Linda had often turned to alcohol as a means of escape and developed an addiction. Shortly before she started attending our church she’d sought treatment at a facility to help her kick the habit and cleaned all the alcohol out of their home.
On this particular Sunday morning, she had been to church. But apparently something had happened that afternoon that set her off and made her tense and anxious. So to settle her nerves, she decided to go for a drive—and next thing she knew, she found herself in a liquor store purchasing some gin. Suffice it to say, she fell off the bandwagon. When she got home, not only was her husband upset, but they were both thinking everything she’d been through was down the drain because of her failure. However, she convinced him to bring her to church. It was the first Sunday night of the month, and on the first Sunday night of the month we typically gathered for corporate prayer.
A few minutes before we started, Linda and Paul walked in. I could immediately tell something was wrong. For one thing, Paul was with her—he normally came only on Easter or Christmas. Linda’s eyes were bloodshot and the aroma of alcohol on her breath was quite noticeable. I had Paul walk her down to the front of the church and briefed those gathered on the situation. I told them we were going to come around Linda and pray—ask God to do a work in her life and release her from the bondage that had been fueling her addiction. I asked her to kneel at the altar—her husband sat back and watched—and I said, “We’re going to pray and ask God to do something in your life that treatment and willpower hasn’t been able to accomplish. What I want you to do is to let us know when He does it. But we’re just going to pray until He does.”
We prayed for probably thirty or forty minutes when, all of a sudden, Linda looked up and said, “It’s gone. I’m free. I know it, I know it, I know it. I’m free.” So we continued to pray, thanking God for what He’d done and asking Him to give her the strength to walk in the victory He’d provided. And, indeed, she’d been walking in victory for almost two years when we left California to move to North Carolina.
But it all stems back to the fact God, when He did a work in her life, confirmed it. He gave her an absolute sense of certainty that, by His grace, He had done something in her that rehab programs and Twelve Step groups had not been able to accomplish. And what God did for her in relation to her addiction to alcohol—providing an unshakable sense of certainty—He longs to do for each of us in relation to our standing with Him. He wants us to know we’re his children. If we don’t have that assurance, it isn’t because He gets a kick out of watching us struggle and grope around in the dark. God wants us to have the joyous confidence and buoyant energy that accompanies a triumphant certainty as to our spiritual standing with Him.
One other note—the verse touches on it briefly: “We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.” If I understand this verse, it would seem that when we become sure of our standing with God, we’ll have an increasingly keen sense of the fallenness and evil of the world around us. I don’t know if we can make it a hard and fast rule, but generally the measure of our conscious belonging to God is the measure of our perception of the contrast between us and the ways of the world. In other words, when we become aware of the fact we are God’s child, we become, in a proportional way, aware of the fact the world stands in opposition to Him ... that the world is under the control of One who is contrary to, and at odds with, God.
We live in a country whose laws and principles are, largely, informed by the truth of God’s Word. Our basic ideas of morality stem from Christian thought—the ideas of freedom, liberty, equality, justice, etc. But at the same time, if we live lives that are true to the life of God that dwells within us, it won’t take us very long to realize that a huge gulf exists between the principles that rule within us and the principles that hold sway in the world. When we’re sure of our standing as a child of God and live a life congruent with that understanding, our senses will be tuned to notice this disparity. We will detect that “the whole world is under the control of the evil one”.
So—what are we to do? Three suggestions:
(1) Cultivate our sense of belonging to God and live on the basis of that instinct. Just as a person living in a foreign land would, over time, lose touch with their native land without periodic news and reports from home, so we, living in a world under the control of the evil one can lose touch with our connectedness with God if we don’t make an effort to maintain that bond. In fact, that’s one of the real geniuses of the church—it reminds us we are exiles … aliens … sojourners … pilgrims—people whose true citizenship is found in heaven.
(2) View the world as Christ viewed it. One of the most gripping of images of the New Testament is the scene, as Jesus is making His way to Jerusalem for the last time, when he pauses at a bluff overlooking the city and breaks down and cries. This city—Jerusalem—represented everything that was near and dear to Him. It was the holy city—the home of the Temple … the very dwelling place of God. But it had turned its back on God and to where it waiting to kill him the moment he arrived. But Jesus viewed the city, not with contempt, but with sorrow. We, too, when confronted with the evils of the world, should respond that same way.
(3) Work for the deliverance of those caught in the world’s web. One additional thing we should notice in this verse. It says we are “children of God”—that word “of” implying something of a permanent relation. However, regarding the world, it says it is “under the control of the evil one”—i.e., the world is not of the evil one; it’s merely under his control … which implies that it can come out from under his sphere of influence. In many ways, that’s what we’re here for. As a friend of mine said, “The are only two things we can do here on earth that we can’t do in heaven: Sin and tell other people about Jesus. Which of these two do you suppose is God’s reason for having us here?” In 1 John 3:8 says, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.” His calling on our lives is that we might be servants of that purpose—thwarting and frustrating the devil’s work.
And where do we begin in carrying out that purpose? I can’t think of anything better to help the world escape the clutches of Satan than a people who walk in the midst of a fallen world with an aura of joyful confidence—not a boastful arrogance ... or a pretentious egotism ... or a patronizing narcissism ... but a confident assurance and triumphant certainty that they are children of God and “Greater is He that is in them than He that is in the world”.