How to Know What You Believe

The year is 1968. A year to remember. A tumultuous year. The year that Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy are assassinated. The year of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The year that if you’re going to San Francisco, you have to be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. It is the Summer of Love, but it is also the summer of the Democratic National Convention riots in Chicago. The war in Viet Nam rages out of control, beginning with the Tet offensive in January.

The youth counter culture is in full flower, rallying around the banners of free love, drugs, and rock music. That summer of 1968, 60,000 young rock fans come together in London’s Wembley Stadium to tune in and turn on to the music of one of their greatest rock heroes.

The air is electric with excitement. The great stadium lights shine down on the throng through a haze of marijuana smoke rising like incense from a religious ritual. Frisbees float lazily above the crowd, adding an unreal quality to the scene.

Suddenly the crowd roars - a deep, throaty, animal roar, rising to a crescendo of sound which washes over everyone. A lone, caped figure has walked onto the stage, bathed in the spotlights. He makes his way to the microphone carrying the guitar that is his trademark, his weapon, his voice.

The crowd grows quiet - almost reverent - as he sits down on a stool and adjusts the mic. Pausing for a moment before he begins to play, Jimi Hendrix gazes out at the dark stadium and asks the expectant crowd a question. “Does anybody have the answer?” Silence. “Does anybody have the answer?” The crowd stirs self-consciously, but nobody speaks. Hendrix shrugs and begins to play. Two years later, Jimi Hendrix is dead. He never found the answer.

About the same time, another popular singer, Neil Diamond sang a song that goes something like this:

Is there a God? I really don’t know.

Does he have a Son? I really don’t know.

But when I’m down, and things are all wrong,

I turn to him, to help me be strong.

And I say “Oh Lord! Shine on, shine on, shine on,

Shine on your light and show me the way.

God made the sun. At least that’s what they say.

The rivers and trees. He made night and day.

But who made the child hungry and blind?

And who has the answers that I cannot find?

To be alive in 1968 was to have questions without answers. And for most people, to be alive in 1989 is to have questions without answers. Perhaps today, we are a little more reserved about asking these questions out loud like the young people did twenty years ago. We’ve tried to persuade ourselves that the questions will go away if we tranquilize ourselves with the good life. But the questions don’t go away. And today, twenty-one years after 1968, people are as lost as ever.

We have been looking at the writings of a man who claims to have the answers. Over and over again, in the first letter of John, we have encountered the verb “to know”. John keeps saying to us “You can know the answers. Because God has given us the answers to life and he wants us to be sure of them.”

We come today to the last few verses of this little book. The book closes on this same theme: God wants us to know. There are three confirmations and a command in the last four verses of chapter five. Let’s look at them together…

1 John 5:18 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.

1 John 5:19 We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.

1 John 5:20 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 Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.

1 John 5:21 Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.

Let’s look at these three confirmations first. And let’s look at them in reverse order. First, look at what it says in v.20…

1 John 5:20 We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true.

The only way we can answer the question “Is there a God?” is to know who Jesus Christ is. Jesus Christ is the Son of God. The apostle John was one who saw Him, who knew Him in the flesh. He heard Him teach, He saw Him do miracles, and he saw Him die on the cross and rise again. And John tells us in no uncertain terms that Jesus is God Himself. God, in Jesus, revealed Himself to us in a way that we could understand. He became a man. Without Jesus, we couldn’t really know what God is like. But God made Himself understandable to us by becoming a man - Jesus Christ. He has given us understanding so that we may know Him who is true. And to know God is to have eternal life. John wants us to know that.

But he also wants us to know what that makes us.

1 John 5:19 We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.

A person who knows God through Jesus Christ is a member of God’s family - he’s a child of God. But that puts him in a different category than the rest of the world. You see, the rest of the world is under Satan’s control. The expression literally means that the world lies in the power of the evil one like a baby lies asleep in the arms of its mother. The world isn’t struggling to escape from the clutches of Satan, it’s blissfully resting in his arms. It is in his power, it’s under his spell.

Now that’s a fact John wants us to know. He wants us to be quite clear about this. The world is under Satan’s control but, if you are a child of God, you’re not. But do you see the implications of this? A child of God needs to be extremely alert and wary in his relationship with the world, with the people of the world and with the values of the world. Because when he deals with the world, the Christian is on the devil’s turf. And don’t think that a Christian might not be affected by it.

Recently I heard of an evangelical church where there currently is a crisis among the youth of that church. There have been a number of teen-age girls who have become pregnant. Another young person has taken his own life. The youth pastor, who is struggling with this difficult situation, has made an interesting discovery. He has found, in his conversations with the kids, that the youth who come from Christian homes have basically the same values as the kids from non-Christian homes. They attend the same R-rated movies. They listen to all the same heavy metal groups who advocate free sex and defiance of authority and suicide as a way out of problems. They read the same unsavory literature. These Christian kids and their parents from this fine Christian church seem to be totally unaware of the fact that if you get wrapped up in the things of the world, you’re going to get hurt.

There seems to be an attitude among Christians that if you haven’t sat through the latest movie - usually full of raunchy language and illicit sex, or if you’re not part of the latest fad in fashions, or if you don’t go to rock concerts, or if you’re not an avid fan of the latest TV series that promotes non-Christian values, then you’re too conservative. You’re paranoid. You’re too legalistic. You’re repressive. You’re uptight.

So we go to the opposite extreme. We try to see how close to the world we can get. I am here to tell you that if you get close to the things of the world, you’re gonna get burned. Because the world is Satan’s turf. It’s in his control. And there’s nothing he’d like to do better than to fry a few Christians. So think about this the next time you turn on the tube or the stereo, or pick up a magazine, or go see a movie. Whose turf are you walking on?

The third thing John wants us to know is found in verse 18:

1 John 5:18 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.

Have you ever seen a caterpillar? Usually you find a caterpillar crawling along a branch or munching away on the underside of a leaf. He spends his whole life in one tree. But then one day something funny happens to the caterpillar. He makes a cocoon and disappears inside for a time. Then he emerges, but he isn’t a caterpillar anymore - he’s a beautiful butterfly. Does he crawl out of his cocoon and go back to the underside of the leaf again? No. He spreads his wings and flies away. He’s a new creature. There’s a whole new world of experience waiting for him. He’s had a new birth, so now he behaves differently.

This verse tells us that the new birth results in new behavior. When a person becomes a real Christian, there’s a difference in his lifestyle. The old behavior patterns and thoughts and attitudes begin to drop away and new ones take their place. It may be gradual, it may be rapid, but it is happening. (This verse does not say that anyone born of God does not sin. It says that he does not continue to sin as a way of life.)

When we come into God’s family by trusting in Christ, we leave Satan’s family. We go from being a child of the devil, under his control, to being a child of God. By the way, in case you don’t like my terminology - calling us children of the devil - just look back to ch.3:10. It’s biblical.

Now there’s nothing that Satan would like better than to get us back. He’s pretty upset when he loses people. So he unleashes all the arrows he has in his quiver to try to knock us off the pathway to God. But v.18 tells us that Jesus Christ - the one who is begotten of God has made himself responsible to keep us safe. The evil one cannot harm us. The word “harm” here is used only one other place in the NT. It is in John 20:17, where Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, who was about to embrace him,

“Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father.”

The word means to cling, to grasp, to clutch. Satan can no longer hold on to the Christian. Oh, he can hurt him with his arrows to be sure. But we are no longer in his grasp, in his clutches. Christians are in God’s grasp instead.

John 10:28-29 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.

Although the whole world lies in the arms of the Evil One, he cannot lay hold of the child of God. He cannot pull him out of God’s hands. That is why I believe in the security of the believer. Because our security is a matter that God has made Himself responsible for.

Jude 1:24 To him who is able to keep you from falling…

So there are three things that John wants us to know as he concludes his epistle.

1. That the Son of God has come and has made it possible for us to know God.

2. That we are children of God even though the whole world is under Satan’s control.

3. That anyone born of God does not continue to sin and that Jesus keeps him safe.

Now he ends on an unusual note. He gives one last command.

1 John 5:21 Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.

In the country of Sri Lanka, there is a great Buddhist temple called the Temple of the Tooth. There in that ornate building, surrounded by gold and precious gems, sitting on a golden lotus blossom, is a little discolored eye tooth which is supposed to have belonged to Buddha. It was supposed to have been recovered from his funeral pyre in 543 BC and brought to the Island of Ceylon eight hundred years later. For 400 million Buddhists, this little tooth is the most sacred object in the world. And when we think of the word “idol”, that’s the kind of image that comes to mind. Something strange and foreign and somewhat primitive. Certainly we are too sophisticated to worship idols… or are we?

Why in the world does John end this way? I believe it is for this reason: He has just finished telling us what God has done for us: God has sent His Son Jesus Christ so that we could know him. God has made us His children. God has pledged Himself to keep us safe from the clutches of the Evil One. These great truths are all His responsibility. But these things will do us no good if we do not fulfill one thing that is our responsibility. You see there is one thing that God cannot do for us: He cannot make us put Him first in our lives. And that’s what this verse is all about.

God has given us the freedom to choose what place we will allow Him to occupy in our lives. He certainly deserves first place in our lives, and we are happiest as human beings when he is in first place in our lives, but he lets us choose. And most often we choose wrong. We give first place to someone or something other than God. It may be another person, it may be our spouse or our children, it may be our career, or our hobbies, or our possessions. But it becomes to us the most important thing in the world. It becomes the thing we live for. We think about it all the time. We give the best of our energy and time to it. Martin Luther said “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is your God.” And it is very possible for us to substitute one of these idols for the true God in our lives.

The word “idol” in classical Greek meant a shadow, a phantom. An idol is a God-substitute. The danger of an idol is that it looks like the real thing but it isn’t. The things that we allow to take over first place in our lives can look wonderful for a time, they can satisfy us for a while, but ultimately they leave us empty and used up and disappointed.

In the Rubayait of Omar Khayyam, Edward Fitzgerald writes…

Indeed the idols I have loved so long

Have done my credit in this world much wrong

Have drowned my glory in a shallow cup

And sold my reputation for a song.

In the place of the God who is real, our idols are nothing but a cheap illusion.

The wonderful truths of the book of 1 John will do us no good whatsoever if we do not keep ourselves from idols. If you boil down to its essence what a real Christian is, it is this: An authentic Christian is a person who keeps God in first place in his life and keeps himself from idols. That is why John closed on this note.