“See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. 2 Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. 3 And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure. 4 Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness. 5 You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin. 6 No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him. 7 Little children, make sure no one deceives you; the one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous; 8 the one who practices sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil. 9 No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. 10 By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother. 11 For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another; 12 not as Cain, who was of the evil one and slew his brother. And for what reason did he slay him? Because his deeds were evil, and his brother’s were righteous.”
I’m going to begin by going slightly out of bounds and referring you back to the final verse of chapter 2. I do this, because we can almost get the sense that as John finished his thought there, his last words inspired the anthem of rejoicing that begins chapter 3.
So here is 1 John 2:29
“If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone also who practices righteousness is born of Him.”
“Born of Him”.
Listen. If you are in the church because it seemed at some point like a good idea; because it was a place to find mutual support or because it was a good place to raise your children in a world that is spinning so out of control; or for any other self-serving reason, then you cannot know the meaning of being ‘born of Him’.
The true Christ-follower has not just joined an organization or subscribed to a choice of lifestyle that looks more beneficial than some other options out there. The true Christian, ushered by Christ through faith into grace and filled with His Holy Spirit, is ‘born of Him’. And with that I want to dive into these verses that are our text today, and begin by echoing John’s rejoicing…
BESTOWED UPON US
“See, how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God; and such we are.”
What a rich declaration! Verses 1-12 have been chosen from which to build a sermon, but we could easily stay right here and go no farther and leave blessed and helped today.
How great is the love that God the Father has lavished upon us, and how is this great love demonstrated? In that He has called us ‘children of God’? Yes, and more! That He has made us children of God! See John’s words of assurance?
‘And such we are’!
Now here is what must be understood about Christianity and about the Christian, and I touched on it a minute ago. We are something. We have been made something. God did this. Everywhere you look in the New Testament you will find declarations of this truth; that it is God who has taken those who were dead in their sins and their transgressions and has given them life. He has made them a new creature. He has even made them a kingdom of priests serving God, according to Revelation 5:10, and more than that He has made them His children in that they are born out of Him. We are born of God.
Now what John has shown in the verses of our text is the eternal and absolute difference between those who are born of God and those who are not. We’ll spend our time today looking at the differences and finding out what separates saints from sinners.
INVISIBLE TO THE WORLD
The first thing I want you to see is that the saints are invisible to the world. The world doesn’t know us because the world did not know Christ. I will explain that further, but first I want to make sure everyone understands what is meant by the term ‘saint’.
The Roman church designates certain people as ‘saints’ based upon what is recorded of their lives and a standard that they have measured up to. Therefore there is a limited number of those who are awarded that title.
Due to the influence of the Roman Catholic church on society and the terminology they use that has affected even the secular world, people outside of the church altogether usually think of saints in the same way. A person is a saint because they have lived a pure life, zealous in deeds for God and for the church.
This is not Biblical thinking and it is not the Scriptural definition of a saint. The word is derived from the same word from which we get ‘sanctified’ or any of the various forms of that word. It means ‘set apart’ or ‘designated for a purpose’. Depending upon its application it can have a reference to purity or holiness.
Everyone who is born of God and has the Holy Spirit indwelling and giving them life is a saint. They are sanctified. They are set apart to God and He reckons them to be pure and holy through the righteousness that has been imparted to them in Christ.
If you are a true believer, a true Christ-follower, you are a saint. You are a saint by God’s doing and calling. Saints are not saints because they act saintly, they act saintly because they are saints, and they are saints because they are born of God. They are saints because they are in Christ Jesus.
Now I began by saying that we as saints are invisible to the world. Here is what I mean. While we are still in the flesh and walking and living in this world, we are not of the world. We are spiritual beings who have been given our spiritual birth from above. This is what Jesus meant when He told Nicodemus that a person must be ‘born again’.
Therefore when we are born again, or born from above, our new life is spiritual and it is that life wherein God dwells and deals with us. The world cannot see that. The people of the world, who are ruled by the spirit of this world, see our physical form, but they cannot see the spiritual. They cannot see that there is a difference between them and us, except occasionally in our behavior, when the Christ-life within us manifests itself in physical action that is contrary to the way a person without the Christ-life would respond and react to life.
For the most part though, they cannot see who we really are because our life is hidden with Christ in God, and the world cannot see Christ and does not know Him or the spiritual person we are in Him.
The world cannot see the true Christian and cannot see the true church. What the world sees and thinks is the church is just an earthly organization with worldly rituals and ordinances and practices carried out in the flesh; but that organization is not the true church and very often is not even a true representation of the true church. In fact, quite often what the world sees and thinks is the church is diametrically opposite of what the true church is, and when they ridicule and mock and condemn what they see, the true church should be ridiculing and condemning along with them because it is so often made up of thinking and behaviors that bring reproach upon the name of Christ and His church rather than representing Him.
No, John says, ‘the world does not know us, because it did not know Him’.
Could I just throw out a thought for your later meditation here? When the true church is raptured I think we would all agree that it is going to cause chaos all over the earth due to the impact that so many suddenly taken away will have on every part of every society. But whatever reasons men will come up with for the chaos, I don’t think they will say ‘it is because the church has been raptured’. Do you know why I say that? It is because the world does not know us because it did not know Christ, and the world has never seen the true church and therefore will not recognize her departure.
CHILDREN OF GOD/CHILDREN OF THE DEVIL
In Bible College I had a professor who was a very distinguished looking man. His suits were tailored, his posture was straight and tall, his hair was gray and his speech was always proper and articulate and intelligent. So it made the class laugh out loud one day when in reference to the spiritual life in Christ he said, “Either you is or you ain’t”.
But it couldn’t have been said more succinctly. There really are two kinds of people in this world – those who have been born from above by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit through faith in the shed blood and resurrection of Jesus Christ, or, those who have not and are dead in their trespasses and sins and therefore without God and without hope in the world.
John points out the differences between the two in his text.
Children of the devil, which is exactly what you are if you are not a child of God, practice sin and lawlessness. Let me explain that.
Although there are several definitions of sin in the New Testament, the one given in verse 4 of our text is the most revealing. ‘Sin is lawlessness’, says John. In other words, Lawlessness is the essence of sin, not the result of sin.
Sinners are not made sinners because they sin, they sin because they are sinners. They are sinners, because they have not believed in the Son of God and His atonement made for all on Calvary’s cross. Let me put that another way. Everyone born of man and woman is already a sinner, and that only changes when they are given new life in Christ. Therefore, lawlessness is their nature and lawlessness is all they can produce.
Now over in verse 8 John says that the devil has sinned from the beginning, therefore the devil’s very nature is lawlessness and all who are his are by nature also lawless. It is interesting to compare this with God the Father’s proud declaration of the Son in Hebrews 1, when He says,
“Thou hast loved righteousness and hated lawlessness”.
Now before we move on to see the contrast between the children of the devil and the children of God, I want to share a quote with you by renowned commentator and preacher John R.W. Stott and say a few additional words about that. This is from his commentary on this first epistle of John and it is about sin and the faulty modern views of sin and approach to sin.
“The heretics seem to have taught that to the enlightened Christian questions of morality were a matter of indifference, just as today the truth about sin is concealed by euphemisms, and our sins become mere ‘peccadilloes’, ‘temperamental weaknesses’ or ‘personality problems’.
In contrast to such underestimates of sin, John declares that it is not just a negative failure, but essentially an active rebellion against God’s will and a violation of His holy law”. The Epistles of John, J.R.W. Stott, ‘Tyndale New Testament Commentaries, Eerdmans’s 1980 [Tenth printing]
Stott has unmasked a very real threat that has existed often unnoticed in the church for many years. It is a worldly way of thinking, but it has found its way into the church and gotten a very strong claw-hold on the minds even of Christians. Sins have names and we get so caught up in battling the names that we miss the whole point and only end up embarrassing ourselves before a watching world.
Sin is an entity that moves men to open rebellion against God and while the church focuses on the symptoms the world goes about giving innocuous, tame sounding names to sin and the church gets virtually hypnotized into acceptance of things that don’t sound as bad as they used to – as the Bible makes them sound – and the devil keeps winning little battles until the church is an ineffective, powerless lump of goo that has no serious role in society.
We of the church, the ones born of Him, must call sin what it is and send out the message loud and clear that apart from a change of mind and a turning to God men and women remain what they have always been; children of the devil destined for a devil’s hell and eternal damnation.
Now let’s talk about children of God; those born of Him.
What are the things that mark the children of God?
Well, in verse 3 of our text John says that we have our hope fixed on Him.
That means that our confident assurance of our eventual receipt of all the promises of God and our glorification are anchored in Christ.
Having this fixed assurance, our heart’s desire is to purify ourselves.
Now I want to avoid the error in thinking that has us attending to rituals and religious observances with the tenacity of someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, adhering to a strict and joyless Christianity trying with pathetic fruitlessness to be as pure as Jesus.
That’s not at all what John is teaching here. He is teaching that the true believer who has the indwelling Holy Spirit, living according to the new nature will desire holiness over worldliness and fleshliness and sin.
This is why Paul admonishes the believer to be transformed by the renewing of his mind. It is why the New Testament epistles throughout encourage the believer to reject worldliness and temptation, to resist the devil, to love one another with purity of heart and so forth; it is because, contrary to our old condition when we were lost and without God, now we can do these things – now we can resist sin and walk in Godliness.
So John is saying, here is the evidence of someone whose hope is fixed on Christ; he or she desires to live Godly in Christ Jesus – he or she seeks to live according to purity and holiness because that is pleasing to the Father who has bestowed His great love on us.
John says the one who is born of Him practices righteousness and does not practice sin.
Now here is where it becomes necessary to explain his wording in these verses and avoid confusion that arises when someone takes these verses and begins teaching a doctrine of sinless perfection.
In verse 6 when John says “No one who abides in Him sins” and some translations leave the word ‘practices’ out of verse 9 and simply say ‘No one who is born of God sins’, and so forth, the Apostle is not by any means teaching that once a person is a Christian they will never sin again.
He is not teaching that when a person is a believer all sin will cease in their life – and he is absolutely not teaching that if a believer sins he stops being a Christian. That is another teaching of the heretics that must be put down and put away forever.
Here is the teaching. When a person is born of God and has the Holy Spirit of God dwelling in them, when they find themselves sinning or about to sin they will be repulsed by the revelation of it in their inner being, and they will turn from it, confess it to God, and receive that which is abundantly available to them from Him, which is forgiveness and cleansing and spiritual strength.
What is the difference between the child of God and the child of the devil?
It is in what I have designated the key verse of our text; verse 10
“…anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother”.
PROOF!
Christ is, according to verse 3, pure and according to verse 7 righteous, in His essential and eternal nature. He is pure and righteous therefore anyone born of Him is, by God’s declaration, in Christ, pure and righteous. As one who has the Holy Spirit in him, his heart desire therefore is to be like Christ and to seek to be in his living, pure and righteous.
But there is one final manifestation of the children of God mentioned here by John and it is apparently the most telling proof of all.
He will love his brother.
Let’s read verses10 through 12 once more and make an observation or two from them before we close.
“By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother. 11 For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another; 12 not as Cain, who was of the evil one and slew his brother. And for what reason did he slay him? Because his deeds were evil, and his brother’s were righteous.”
“This is how God’s children – and the devil’s children – are made evident”, says the Holman translation. This is the proof – the litmus test if you will. It comes down to this and it is the tell-all.
I remember a certain little girl years ago, who when her mother entered the room was found to be sitting in the middle of the floor, empty candy wrappers all around her, and chocolate smeared all over the bottom half of her face. Her mom, stifling a giggle, asked, “Did you get into the candy?” To which the little girl responded by shaking her head “No”. So the mother insisted. “You got into the chocolate, didn’t you?” The head shook with more vehemence. But the chocolate was there, and the wrappers were there. And the little girl’s guilt was quite literally written all over her face.
Two things tell the children of God from the children of the devil that cannot be denied. The desire to do right and the love for the brethren that is born of God and flows out from the Christian. Children of the devil have neither and cannot long pretend either one.
Christians, the world hated Christ and the world hates you. Make no mistake about it. They will smile and approve of you as long as you smile and approve of them. They will even tolerate your religion as long as your religion consists of good behavior and feeding the hungry and closing yourselves off in your private buildings of worship to do whatever it is you do.
But when your public behavior and testimony decry sin and proclaim Christ as the only way to God and Heaven, your best friends and friendliest working partners will turn on you with venom. And when true love of the brethren exists and is manifested in the fellowship of Christians the world will try to stop it, and those of the world in the church will try to fight it.
Do you wonder why John referred all the way back to Cain and Able for his illustration, when so many other examples of history could have been used?
Listen. They were brothers. They had the same parents. But one murdered the other. Why? Was it a question of the birthright as between Jacob and Esau? Was it jealously over the inheritance of God’s promises as between Isaac and Ishmael?
No. It was because the deeds of one were righteous and the deeds of the other were evil…even though they were brothers.
And I will submit to you today believer that when Christians in the family of God treat one another in harmful ways it is because there is evil in their heart and evil in their intent. And since the Apostle John says this is the fundamental difference between the child of God and the child of the devil, it would behoove us, when we see so-called Christians destroying one another, to be discerning about who in the equation is born of whom.
What is the difference between the children of God and the children of the devil? It is that the children of God act like God and the children of the devil act like the devil. It really is that simple.
There is one more observation I want to make here and then we’re done.
Have you noticed that while the world is not aware of the church, the church is both taught and admonished to be aware of the world?
In his essay on Christian Behavior, C.S. Lewis made this astute observation:
“When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good; a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly; while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil; bad people do not know about either.” C.S. Lewis, MERE CHRISTIANITY, ‘Christian Behaviour’ MacMillan Pub Co.
It would be a very wise thing for anyone who considers himself to be a Christian, to appraise his own behavior and his responses and reactions to life and to other Christians around him, and to the teachings of Christ and His Apostles, and examine himself in light of these things.
To the Corinthian church Paul wrote (1 Cor 2:14-15)
“But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one.”
How are you appraised today in light of the things the Apostle John has taught us? Are you as one in Lewis’ illustration who does not truly understand either good or evil? Or are you one who understands both because you are born of God and have His Spirit in you?
Do you know that you are a child of God because of the desire burning in your heart to purify yourself and to do righteousness and hate lawlessness and love the brethren in the faith?
If you’re not certain, then today is certainly the day to make it right. Let His Spirit change your mind about things and ask Him to give you birth from above that will make you into one born of Him.
Implore Him to begin in you now, the process that is at work in every true believer because of His life-giving, heart-changing Spirit within, that will culminate in your instant transformation into His perfect likeness when you see Him as He is.
