What Are You Sure Of?

Well, the curse is dead. This past week, the New York Rangers overcame 54 years of futility and won the Stanley Cup. But as I watched the joy on the faces of players and fans as they celebrated that long-awaited championship, I couldn’t help thinking that it would all be so short-lived.

The euphoria the Rangers felt on Tuesday night is already beginning to wear off. Players who devoted their whole careers to winning the Stanley Cup are now finding out that, while it feels great for a moment, that feeling doesn’t last. A couple of months from now, a new season will begin, and all the teams will start out equal again. And all the Rangers will be is last year’s champs.

In 1974, the Oakland A’s won the World Series. They were led by manager Alvin Dark. A few years ago, I had the opportunity of meeting Mrs. Alvin Dark, who is a Christian. She described to me what it felt like to win a championship.

Jackie Dark said that as she sat in the stands and watched her husband’s team reach their dream, she felt a sense of elation. But that giddy feeling of euphoria was soon swallowed up by a hollow sense of emptiness - a sense of “so what?” What have you really accomplished? What’s the long-term value of it? Just when you think you have true happiness within your grasp, it slips through your fingers.

1968 was a year to remember. A tumultuous year. The year that Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. The year of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The year that, if you were going to San Francisco, you had to remember to wear some flowers in your hair.

It was the Summer of Love, but it was also the summer of the Democratic National Convention riots in Chicago. The war in Viet Nam raged out of control, with the bloody Tet offensive in January of that year.

The youth counter culture was in full flower, rallying around the banners of free love, drugs, and rock music. On a hot day that summer, 60,000 young rock fans came together in London’s Wembley Stadium to tune in and turn on to the music of one of their greatest heroes.

The air was electric with excitement. The great stadium lights shone down on the throng through a haze of marijuana smoke. Frisbees floated lazily above the crowd, as though in slow motion, adding an unreal quality to the scene.

Suddenly, with one voice, the crowd roared as a caped figure walked onto the stage. He made his way to the microphone carrying the guitar that was his trademark.

The crowd hushed - an almost reverent hush. He sat down on a stool and adjusted the mic. Pausing for a moment before he began to play, Jimi Hendrix gazed out at the dark stadium and asked the crowd a question. “Does anybody have the answer?”

Silence. “Does anybody have the answer?” The crowd stirred self-consciously, but still nobody spoke. Finally, Hendrix shrugged and began to play. Two years later, he was dead. He never found the answer.

A long time ago, Neil Diamond sang…

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 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?

Questions without answers. Life without meaning. That’s where most people were at back then, and that’s where most people are at today.

Oh we try to persuade ourselves that the questions will go away if we just immerse ourselves in the good life. So we acquire things, and strive for accomplishments. And we hope that those things will give us meaning, but they never do. The nagging questions just don’t go away.

If we’ve learned anything, we’ve learned that science and technology don’t give us the answers, either. Although we’re living in the Information Age, all that information and education haven’t given us any assurance of what life is all about.

A university biology professor begins his lecture on the first day of class by saying “Ten years from now, the facts that I am going to teach you today will no longer be true.”

Nothing stays the same. Everything is changing. Even truth seems to be changing. So how can we ever know for certain what life is all about?

By turning to the Bible. We have been studying the letter of 1 John - a letter about certainty. 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 four verses of this little book. And in those four verses, there are three certainties and a command. 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 certainties first. And let’s look at them in reverse order. First, look at the certainty you find 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 through Jesus Christ because Jesus Christ is God himself. 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. God 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. Jesus said “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”

God made Himself knowable to us human beings by becoming one of us himself - Jesus Christ. Jesus gives us the understanding to know Him who is true. Notice that it doesn’t say “to know the truth.” It says “to know Him who is true.”

The reason why man doesn’t know the truth is that he is seeking to know truth apart from God. He’s searching for truth as though it were some impersonal quality out there in the universe waiting to be discovered. It’s not. There is no truth apart from God. Truth is rooted in the person of God. All truth comes from Him and is grounded in Him.

So what is the first certainty? The only way to know truth - the only way to get answers - is to know God. And the only way to know God is through Jesus Christ.

But there’s a second certainty. We are “in him who is true” it says in v.20. We are part of God’s family. We are his children. We have that kind of relationship with him. He is our Father.

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.

That expression literally means that the world lies in the power of the evil one just as 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. The world is in Satan’s power, it’s under his spell.

Now that’s a fact John wants us to know. He wants us to be quite clear about it. The world is under Satan’s control. But if you know Jesus Christ, you’re not. You are in a different category: you are a child of God.

So that means that you need to be very careful in your relationship with the world - the people of the world, the things of the world, and the values of the world. Because when you deal with the world, you are on the devil’s turf. And don’t think that you might not be affected by it.

The first certainty is this: if you want to know God, you have to know Jesus

The second certainty is this: if you know Jesus, you are part of God’s family; you’re a child of God. You’re different from the rest of the world.

The third certainty 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 amazing happens to the caterpillar. He makes a cocoon and disappears inside of it.

Finally, one day he emerges, but he isn’t a caterpillar anymore - he’s a butterfly. Does he crawl out of his cocoon and go back to the underside of the leaf? No. He spreads his wings and flies away because 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 new birth results in new behavior. When a person becomes a real Christian, his lifestyle is going to change. 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 a certainty.

Now of course, Christians can and do sin. But this verse says that they do not continue to sin as a way of life. If you see someone who claims to be a Christian, but who continues to do evil things as a matter of course, the person you are looking at is probably not a Christian.

When you enter God’s family by trusting in Christ, you leave Satan’s family. You go from being a child of the devil to being a child of God. And there’s nothing that Satan can do to stop you from doing that. He is powerless in that respect. He cannot sever the relationship between a child of God and God the Father.

How do we know? Because the Bible tells us so.

Verse 18 tells us that Jesus Christ - the one who is born or 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 meets Mary Magdalene at the Garden Tomb after his resurrection.

Mary is so overwhelmed that she falls to the ground and takes hold of Jesus feet. She’s worshiping him, but she’s also hanging onto him in case he goes away. So Jesus gently tells her, “Mary, you don’t need to hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. It’s not time for me to leave yet.”

The word that Jesus used there and the word that John uses here means to cling, to grasp, to clutch. Satan can no longer hold on to the Christian. He can’t wrap his tentacles around us. We are no longer in his grasp, in his clutches. If you are a Christian, you are in God’s grasp, not Satan’s. Jesus said in…

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, Satan cannot wrap his arms around a child of God. He cannot pull him out of God’s hands. Our security as believers is a matter that God has made Himself responsible for. We are in His hands.

So there are three certainties that John wants us to know for sure:

1. That the Son of God has come and through him we can know God.

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

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

There’s one command that John gives us:

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 human tooth which is supposed to have belonged to Buddha.

According to the local legend, it was recovered from the Buddha’s funeral pyre in 543 BC. It was brought to the Island of Ceylon eight hundred years later. So for 400 million Buddhists, that little tooth is the most sacred object in the world.

When we think of the word “idol”, that’s the kind of thing that comes to mind. Something strange and foreign and primitive. But we are too sophisticated to worship idols… or are we?

Why in the world does John end his letter this way? I believe it is for this reason: He has just finished telling us what God has done for us: God sent His Son Jesus Christ so that we could know him and have answers to life. God made us His children. God pledged Himself to keep us safe from the clutches of the Evil One.

Those things are certainties because they are God’s responsibilities. But those certainties will do us no good if we do not fulfill the 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 life. And that’s what this final verse in 1 John is all about.

God has given you the freedom to choose what place He will have in your life. He certainly deserves first place, and you will be happiest when you give him first place, but he lets you make the choice.

And often times, we choose wrongly. 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. Whatever it is, it becomes to us the most important thing in the world. It becomes the thing we live for. It becomes the thing we think about most. It becomes the thing that we put the most emotional investment in.

We give our best energy and resources 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 become idolaters in that way.

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.

In the Rubayait of Omar Khayyam, Edward Fitzgerald wrote…

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.

God created us for Himself. It is our crowning glory as human beings to worship and serve Him. So don’t drown that glory in a shallow cup by worshiping someone or something else. Keep yourselves from idols.