Scanning everything from the Mountain Peak of
Propitiation (Part III)
A Lifestyle of Assurance; 1 John 4:13-18
INTRODUCTION: the pinnacle of God’s love is expressed in the following words: “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10). Propitiation in Christ is the foundation of God’s love to us and our love back to Him and to the brethren. The propitiation accomplished by Christ is the ground of our personal assurance of salvation. As you search the Scriptures you will find that you cannot live a life of gratitude to God without assurance, you cannot worship aright without it, you will not be eager to obey and put off sinning without it. It requires assurance to love, and to serve with right motives. According to our text in First John, God desires a level of assurance for you characterized by confidence and enjoyment of God.
Because of these reasons, Scripture makes Christian assurance a duty (2 Pet 1:9-10). Where true faith exists, it will long for assurance just as much as you long to know where you stand with your best friend. Scripture is not stingy in extending solid promises of assurance to those who are truly born again (1 Jn 5:11-12).
This is certainly then an important question: how may we know for sure that we “have the Son?” Let’s be honest, faith can be a labored thing for many who can’t seem to penetrate the cloud of doubt that blocks their view and enjoyment of God’s personal love to them.
“Do I have the Son?” In many quarters of Christianity one might hear in answer to this question, “Just trust your decision that you made and do not doubt it. Write your decision date on a card and put it in a safe deposit box.” But evidence for assurance of salvation in Scripture is far more “3-D” and comprehensive. In some ways, assurance is like happiness, pursue it directly, and it tends to evade you. Like happiness, assurance is also the byproduct of something. Assurance is the byproduct of a life lived unto God. We’re to pursue assurance God’s way. Thus our premise in the lesson is that assurance cannot be reduced to a feeling because assurance is a byproduct of a God-ward life.
So, in this lesson you will be exposed to the concept of a “lifestyle of assurance.” This scriptural principle indicates that assurance is more of a lifestyle than a feeling or spiritual commodity. 1 John 4:13-18 provides an encouragement for Christians to have assurance. We are to desire it; but we are to desire it by the means God has appointed. That helps explain the title of this lesson. We are to live a lifestyle of assurance BECAUSE God’s grace promises assurance to us if we will live by grace.
The benefits of assurance, or confidence before God, are truly valuable. Assurance is the best preparation for service in the body of Christ, and it’s the best preparation for glory. John is not only the Apostle of love; he is the Apostle of the Christian’s assurance.
Assurance, boldness, and confidence are gifts of grace; but their enjoyment is tied to a lifestyle, or God-ward life direction. John boils down this grace living (or, assurance lifestyle) into three areas. God will fill our hearts with confidence if we continue to:
- Believe the Gospel
- Abide in Christ
- Love the Brethren
In the first half of 1 John 4, the Apostle has laid out a two-fold test to determine whether or not a person is a true believer: Believe, and love. The genuine believer always has faith in the apostolic gospel, and he loves the brethren. The false teachers, whom John is exposing, fail the test on both counts. They do not hold to the biblical gospel (as Gnostics they hold to a distorted view of Christ’s incarnation) and they do not love the brotherhood.
To love with God’s love (of His nature) is only possible if God’s Spirit resides in you. Those born of the Spirit are made capable by the Spirit of supernatural love, and by the Spirit, they are ensured of experiencing God’s love.
God is the Source of love—He is the source of our love back to Him and to the brethren. He showers His people with His love and He expects us to express His love to others. Communing with Him fits us for the expression of His love.
Verse 10 -- God’s love is demonstrated in sending Christ to be the propitiation for our sins. As sin bearer, Christ averted God’s wrath from us to Himself. He bore the penalty for our sin in His own Person.
God’s love is self-sacrificial—it is given to those who are lying under divine wrath; it is extended to those who are polluted, unlovely, morally deformed, unclean, repulsive, and unattractive. Wonder of wonders, God is not ultimately repelled by our brokenness and moral deformity, His love is drawn out to us even in our helpless, rebellious condition.
Have you seen yourself as among that number of the unworthy, deserving only of God’s judgment? And yet you found to your amazement that God did not spare His own Son but delivered Him up for you. If so, then God has set you apart to manifest His love to you.
Now it is impossible to comprehend this exotic love UNLESS we first receive it. Only then are we able to transmit and express it to others. We must first be made (by God’s Spirit) objects of this exotic manner of love, feeling it experimentally before we will be able to love others in the same way.
While still in your sin and pollution, God’s love was drawn out to you. He lavished his love upon you, making you an object of His mercy and compassion. Only those who have tasted this redeeming love are capable of passing it on to others. We love, because He first loved us (v. 19).
Supernatural love is beyond our natural ability. In order to love supernaturally, we have to love our brother as God sees and loves us. That means you love them on the account of God having loved you—seeing you as polluted and perishing. This is light years away from simply loving those who like or love us (Luke 6:32). To identify our love with God’s love, we must be able to have deep compassion on the evil-doer and earnestly long for his salvation. That is only possible if we ourselves know we were former enemies of God who have been reconciled solely by the blood of Christ. Throughout his epistle of 1 John, as well as in chapter 4, the Apostle repeatedly brings us to this conclusion: There is no safe way to prove we are born of God BUT to love the brethren. John wants to assure the believer; but love is one of the tests of true salvation. Christians are encouraged to have assurance because God’s love and grace provide its source and foundation (vv. 13-18). It’s the best preparation for service and for glory.
I. The Basis for Christian Assurance (vv. 13-16).
A. The ministry of the Holy Spirit is the source of assurance (v. 13). “Know” is a present active
indicative (Grk.)—i.e. knowing constantly. This means that our knowing issues from the Spirit’s work of continually reassuring us. By the grace gift of God’s Spirit we come to know God’s love for us. By the Spirit, God sheds abroad His love in our hearts (Rom 5:5). John brings faith and knowledge together here—the result of the Spirit’s testimony in our minds and hearts (inspiring faith) is an experimental knowledge of God’s love for us. Fresh acts of faith give us enjoyment of Christ and the benefits He has purchased for us. The
Christian’s freedom is experienced as he lives by faith and is taken off of self as the source of any qualification to be loved by God. As you abide in Christ there is a consciousness of sonship produced by the Spirit—and paradoxically, the stronger our consciousness of sonship, the less we will be hampered by self-consciousness (Gal 4:6; Rom 8:14-17).
The Spirit gives us certainty regarding the veracity of the gospel—that what is promised to believers in the gospel is indeed our personal possession (1 Cor 2:12). In the written pages of Scripture the gospel is propositional truth (yet a dead letter to the unbeliever), but to the man or woman made new, regenerated by God’s Spirit, the love of God in the gospel is literally transplanted into the heart, “And we have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us” (4:16a).
Believing the gospel is a matter of revelation according to Matthew 11:27—the Son must be “revealed” to the sinner so that the truth of the gospel becomes a moving power within. The man convinced of sin, discovers in the gospel that he is an object of God’s love – trembling, he takes hold of God’s love (and continually does so). From then on, he becomes a conscious storekeeper and conduit if you will of God’s love.
Once he has become a grateful receiver of God’s love (actively embracing it), he is now a glad transmitter of God’s love. He’s not content to keep God’s love to himself, but actively looks to love others. This is the testimony of the new believer.
“We cannot truly love the brethren with a sincere heart unless the Spirit puts forth His power” (Calvin). In this way (by loving the brethren), God also testifies that He indwells us – it is proof that we have God abiding in us. When God’s love is expressed through us to others (by the Spirit’s power), it deepens our confidence that we are possessed by God’s love and belong to Him as His beloved children. Throughout the context of this epistle, John keeps joining faith in the truth and the love of the brethren. He wants us to see that they are found together and they operate together.
This section of 1 John provides reassurance to the genuine Christian who likely sees his failures in the area of love. Chapter four of 1 John refocuses our attention on Christ’s work on our behalf, on God the source of all true love, and on the Spirit’s enablement, and testimony of God’s love for His own. In regard to assurance, the Spirit does more than bear witness to mutual abiding. He inspires faith in the gospel message and thus assures our hearts (3:18-19).
B. The Apostles’ gospel confessed is the source of assurance (vv. 14-15). The Holy Spirit uses
apostolic testimony to produce ongoing faith in the Person and work of Christ. Assurance has its subjective side, but the Spirit of God utilizes the gospel of grace as the object of faith to stabilize you and assure you. The Spirit working in us enables us to see afresh Christ’s propitiatory death as God’s act for our salvation. We “see” or “behold” God’s love in sending the Son to be our propitiation—in so doing, we experience fellowship and communion with Him and the presence of His love.
Authors C. J. Mahaney (The Cross-centered Life), and Jerry Bridges (The Discipline of Grace) stress the necessity of preaching the gospel to ourselves every day. When we take Christ as our righteousness and right-standing before God each day, we are communing with God at the “Mercy Seat” of Christ. This is a heart-strengthening privilege to commune with Christ by taking Him each day for our righteousness, cleansing, security, and comfort.
It is imperative that we begin to understand that the only way to give glory to God as our life direction is to live with overflowing gratitude for all we have in Christ (Col 2:6-7). This is the starting point for all obedience and service to God—anything less will cause us to slide into a performance mode.
By fresh acts of daily faith, we reason our way through the gospel—conversing with our own soul. By the Spirit’s enabling power, we meditate on the fact that in the Word of His Grace, the gospel, the Son of God is daily displayed (as in 1 John 4) as our entire qualification to be freely loved by God . Our daily gospel meditation may contain the following elements:
God is completely pacified on my behalf because of Christ’s death for me. Therefore He receives me into favor. By my Savior’s atoning sacrifice (His work of propitiation), He has taken away the enmity—only reconciliation remains. My guilt has been absolved in Christ. This is the basis of my acceptance. I am in union with Christ who is my life. I want to see with ever greater clarity the exchange which took place between Christ and me. I know that God’s love and holiness require righteousness. I have fled to Christ where righteousness is found. Christ is my qualification to be freely loved by God! Christ is my eligibility for ongoing favor and acceptance from God. Christ literally is my covenant with God and my holy status before God.
APPLICATION: In order to keep reasoning this way, we must keep drinking from this gospel well. The Spirit of God is so ready to assist us in this kind of meditation: His ministry is to take of Christ and disclose it to us (Jn 16:14). This sets up a cycle of living out our relationship with the Lord. Here is the order: His truth is to abide in us; we abide in God
based upon this truth; we love the brethren (1 Jn 2:24).
In sending His Son to be the propitiation for our sins, God has effectively removed every obstacle to a love relationship with Himself. The Word of Grace in the hands of the Spirit is the source of our knowledge that we abide in God. To abide is to remain in the sphere of, it is to hold fast, to remain steadfast. The Apostle John uses the word abide to refer to the closest possible relationship. It alludes to the believer’s mystical relationship with Christ of union with Him of inner unity and fellowship. “Abide” in the context of union with Christ does not mean holding a position, but rather, allowing oneself to be held by Christ (pictured in John 15 as the vine holding the branch.) Abiding in Christ is a statement of Christ’s ownership of us right down to the depths of our being (Colin Brown, Dict. of N.T. Theol.).
Mutual abiding is the mystery of the gospel spoken of in Colossians 1:27—you in Christ and Christ in you. Abiding is union with Christ lived out. It’s a lifestyle in which you willingly order your life as one owned by Christ and possessed by His love.
By the Spirit’s indwelling ministry we grow in our knowledge that we abide in God. This passage is reminiscent of the pattern for assurance found in other portions of the N.T. such as Romans 8). FIRST, there is Spirit-enabled ongoing faith in the gospel. SECOND is the testimony of a changed life (able to say no to selfishness and yes to the love of the brethren). THIRD, there is the witness of the Spirit which issues forth in the knowledge that we are known and loved by God.
Abiding is our response to God’s offer. He offers Himself to be enjoyed by us in His Son. As John Piper often says, abiding to the glory of God is taking delight in all that God is towards us in Christ. Therefore, we can safely say from our text that it is by habitual abiding and dwelling in God that we give evidence that He dwells in us. In practical terms, it is the individual who communes with God in Bible study and prayer who will be the instrument through which God will demonstrate His divine love. Thus, abiding involves the faith-based recognition of your union with Christ. Can you say it with conviction: “Christ clothes my soul in His righteousness.”
Through abiding, we experience an ongoing knowledge of God’s love. We can only pass on what we ourselves are receiving in our spirits. In that sense, abiding is a prerequisite for loving the brethren because only by abiding are we reasoning from the grace perspective that we are objects of God’s unconditional love. You can only truly pass on unconditional love if you know yourself to be the object of God’s unconditional love. John’s point is that habitual abiding in Christ is to be actively and constantly pursued by us.
Now, there is a necessary relationship between abiding in Christ and loving the brethren. Abiding in the grace of Christ slays, blasts, and withers all attempts to be perfected by the flesh. Grace makes us utterly beholden to Christ. Grace burns our score cards of over-under; top dog; superiority; and upsmanship. Grace minimizes our human distinctions by leveling us before the cross of Christ. So we see that John is unfolding the logical relationship between abiding in the grace of Christ and loving the brethren: 1.) By the new birth and the indwelling of the Spirit we gain the knowledge of God’s love. 2.) As we walk in the Spirit, we rely on His love; we abide in Him and learn that God’s nature is love. 3.) We discover that to live in God (abide) means to love the brethren. This brings us to our third basis for assurance.
C. When we seek to demonstrate our active love, which stems from faith in God, it is the source
of strengthening our assurance (v. 16). John uses perfect tense verbs in this one verse. By choosing that tense the Apostle is emphasizing that our knowing and believing is to be grounded on Christ’s once-for-all completed work of propitiation. Again this takes us back to the importance of being saturated in the gospel. For, walking in the Lord’s love is consenting to be accepted, protected and represented by Another. Thus this cross-centered mindset focuses upon Christ as our eligibility. This where the peace and comfort floods in—we are delivered from the bondage of trying to be perfect in ourselves.
The gospel keeps pointing us to Christ as the source of our security, right-standing, qualification, and favor. In this one verse (v. 16), John touches upon all three sources of assurance: the gospel of God’s love in Christ, the Spirit’s testimony giving us the knowledge of God’s love to us, and the Spirit-enabled love of the brethren. We know ourselves to be a child of God’s grace, BECAUSE, by the Spirit and the Word, God sets His own Son before us daily that in Him we might by faith live out our adoption as sons.
By faith God dwells in us, where God abides, there is love, hence it follows that love is a function of faith. As sons of God we now have a faculty of loving—it’s a love that goes forth to people as they are attractive to God, not necessarily to us. In other words, we fall back on God’s love. If we love, it’s only because “We have known and believed the love which God has for us.” It’s faith alone that works by love (Gal 5:6).
APPLICATION: In our communing with God we consent to be loved by God on gospel terms. We lay our hearts open to a full frank acceptance of the love that first loved you— consent to it—THEN from that love will spring up love in you that will make your communion with God without fear and your love of the saints a joy. We don’t work up this love. Our love to God and the brethren is reflexive—it is the Spirit engendered response to receiving His love—the love embodied in the Son whom He sent to be the propitiation for our sins. This is the only way to be an unhindered channel of God’s love to the brethren.
We’ve seen thus far the three pillars that form the basis of our assurance:
- Ongoing faith in the gospel. 2.) Abiding in Christ. 3.) Love of the brethren. In each case, it is God’s Spirit who in grace enables us believe, abide, and love. Now let’s consider the benefits of assurance.
II. The Benefits of Gospel Assurance (vv. 17-18).
A. Confidence in the Day of Judgment is a great benefit of assurance (v. 17).
The Apostle John seeks to instill confidence in the heart of the believer. Abiding produces confidence, boldness, and openness toward God. Believers who live in close communion with the Lord are free from the fear of punishment.
Without this confidence, there is always a degree of misery. The person who fears is not experiencing God’s love in his or her spirit. Unbelief leaves the person disturbed. Nothing is more agitating than being harassed by the disquiet of the soul. Even one sin bouncing around in the conscience can steal our joy and peace. Fear has a crippling, paralyzing effect upon us. When we are stuck in mental patterns of disputing about God’s love for us, we can’t seem to reclaim the joy and peace we once had. We actually can find ourselves resisting Christ as the ‘argument’ for our receiving divine love.
Admittedly there is a certain trauma in being loved by God because all you can do is consent to it. You cannot evoke His love or increase His love for you. Any proposed avenue which says that you can transact for it; earn it; secure it; obligate it; or control it is absolutely closed off. Thus, although His love is wonderfully sweet, it is intensely humbling. Yes, the lifestyle of assurance can make you feel exposed because we come to God as a pauper with nothing to trade for His infinite benefits. We are a daily charity case. But, the awesome news is that God has freely given us His Son as the propitiation. And in the Son is everything I need to be fully accepted by God because Christ has willingly born all of my liabilities.
Only the knowledge of God’s love in Christ can bring calmness and peace to the soul. When God’s love is known by faith, peace is given to our conscience. Next time you are disputing, “What does God think of me?” “Have I done enough?” Bring Christ with you to the dispute because He is your ground of acceptance and your favor before God.
So how do we apprehend the kind of perfect love that dispels fear? Fear is dispelled when we learn to flee to God in Christ as a habit. We need to learn proficiency in our faith. Present boldness comes from experimental knowledge of our shared relationship with Christ— that confidence is a precious byproduct of abiding in Christ. So, assurance not only instills confidence in view of the coming Day of Judgment, assurance also frees us from fear.
B. Freedom from fear is a great benefit of assurance (v. 18).
Love and fear are incompatible. In verse 18 the apostle highlights the excellence of assurance by describing its opposite effect, namely fear. By nature we all have a certain dread of God; we prefer estrangement from Him. Thoughts of His holiness and judgment bring to mind the concepts of shame, humiliation, condemnation, guilt, exposure, and terror. We picture our hearts coming under the penetrating gaze of God and, because of our awareness of our sin we do not wish to draw near.
The fear of punishment brings a certain anticipated torment. Conscience “holds court,” and we get a little taste of just how much we fear condemnation and judgment. “If my conscience does this to me now, what would God’s anger do to me?”
This is why it’s so important for the believer to live a life of assurance. Without assurance, we will not be prepared to greet the Lord in confidence (1 John 2:28). We won’t be ready. And, without confidence, we are unable to express God’s love to others. The promise of gospel born confidence is a function of firsthand knowledge of Christ by abiding— we discover more of Him by a lifestyle of abiding in Him as He holds us in His heart of love. The Greek word here for confidence (2:28) includes the idea of openness, frankness, and boldness. Abiding in Christ produces confidence at the prospect of future judgment AND, present confidence because as He is (as the embodiment of divine love) so are we in the world through His Spirit (4:17).
Thus, the believer who abides manifests a mature, or “perfected love.” He has made the gospel the “food” of his meditation. Therefore he understands that Christ’s death answered the claims of divine justice against him. He is free to be a channel of God’s love to the brethren. He rejoices that Christ’s propitiation has removed every obstacle to a love relationship with God. For Christ’s death has secured our not being under condemnation. Thus, when you are perfected in love, you have boldness before God because you KNOW that the wages of your sin was reckoned to the Son of God. As a result, love has a free course. There is no more judicial reckoning. We are to keep reckoning the propitiation as the foundation for God’s free love and acceptance of us. The result of this reckoning is living in God’s love in a way that moves us toward spiritual maturity.
Coming to this mature conviction involves abiding as a matter of practice. Your conscience itself resists your consent to be loved freely by God. As John MacArthur has pointed out in his book on the conscience, your conscience is “wired” for strict justice. It only understands law and punishment. It’s not interested in mercy.
Therefore to consent to be loved by God is a function of fresh acts of faith in the Person of Christ and His finished work for us in His propitiation. Through propitiation the justice of God which once threatened us with eternal perdition has become our friend. Now the satisfied justice of God even pleads for our exoneration (Rom 8:32-34).
The just wrath of God, like the overwhelming flood waters of Noah’s flood were a source of both destruction and deliverance—destruction for those who did not believe but salvation for those in the ark who were carried by the waters above the cataclysm destroying the earth below. Your task is to attend to the gospel so that your heart will increasingly be inclined to believe what God uses to beget and nurture faith. Thomas Hooker, in his book, The Poor Doubting Christian drawn to Christ, explains just how prone our hearts are to dispute over our worthiness to receive God’s love. Only the gospel promises believed with fresh acts of faith can put a stop to the protests and objections of conscience.
APPLICATION: No wonder we need to feed on the gospel. When we do meditate on the substitutionary work of Christ, our consciences see by faith in Christ’s propitiation “that divine justice has been executed against our sins. Brethren, if we only knew how willing the Spirit was to show us the blood of the Lamb as our only argument for divine favor.
Only then will our consciences lie down and be still and allow us to consent to God’s free love. Apart from ongoing faith in the gospel of grace, our consciences tell us that we are disqualified for God’s amazing love, AND that we must make ourselves eligible for His love.
What does God intend for you by way of confidence? Isn’t clear from our text that God does not begrudge you the precious blessing of assurance, and confidence before Him? God doesn’t want you to live in a state of perpetual suspense about the destiny of your eternal soul. He doesn’t intend that your little boat of hope drift and bob about on a pitching sea of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
God desires your comfort through gospel faith (Rom 15:13)! His nature is love. But it is not comfort by way of presumption, or fiction, or positive thinking – confidence does not come by way of blind assumption, and easy believism. The way of comfort is marked out for us in 1 John 4. God’s way of comfort is by a lifestyle of assurance which involves: believing the
gospel; abiding in Christ; and loving the brethren .
We reach boldness by way of an unforgettable insight and reality—namely that the pains of hell in all their intensity and terror were born by the crucified Christ. The burning wrath of God crushed the Son of God. And now, because of His cross, we who are saved understand that we have been snatched from the fire like twigs already ablaze.
We reach confidence by a lifestyle. It’s the lifestyle described in 1 John 4. It is a life direction of abiding in our glorious Savior whose atonement has made us vessels of mercy in order to make us channels of His love. How many are too busy to make abiding their priority?
CONCLUSION: the gospel begins with who God is—that His nature and disposition is to share Himself with us his creatures that He might be glorified and we might enter into His joy. God gives us Himself in Christ to the eternal joy and wellbeing of the redeemed creature. We must labor to view everything through this lens of the gospel (1 Jn 2:24).
We’ve seen that God’s way of assurance and boldness is by faith in the gospel, by the witness of the Spirit, and by God’s love passing through us to others. When our lifestyle is characterized by abiding in the Father’s love, we will be without fear.
We’ve seen that to live in God is to live in love. God desires to bring His love in you to maturity. The perfection (or completeness) of maturing love produces the experience of present confidence as well as confidence in the Day of Judgment.
How does this confidence begin? First we experience the Father’s love for us. We find it to be powerful, life-changing. Once we have it, we are forever removed from dread. Our trust and love are directly proportional to our lack of fear. As we abide, we experience the holiness of God’s love and our desire for obedience increases. Like the Apostle Paul, we have to see ourselves as built around Christ (Col 2:10). All the things I depended upon to make me right before God have to be released as a source of justification. Through the gospel, I am now reconstructed around Christ (Phil 3:7-11). The marvelous thing is that God has made the fulfillment of His love of the creature depend upon the church of Christ expressing His love. Have you found your place in this plot?
May God motivate us even more to pursue the lifestyle of assurance enjoined in 1 John chapter four. Can we rest assured of God’s love and favor and acceptance? Have we come to terms with the fact that we are capable, through the Spirit of a supernatural love of the brethren? Can we experience ongoing freedom from fear? Because of the gospel, the answer to all three questions is yes. When by the Spirit’s power we are living a lifestyle of assurance; God’s love is being perfected in us, and we can release ourselves to His perfect love.