Uncondemned before God

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. If you would like to learn more about us, please visit us at our website at graceedmonton .ca. You can also find us on Instagram, Grace Church, Y-E-G, all one word, or on Facebook.

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Assurance in Christ and the Theme of an Uncondemned Heart

Well, as I mentioned, we are in 1 John 3 and verses 19 -24. And as we enter into the study of God's Word today, we are going to consider this theme. It is a theme that I hope truly, it has been my prayer all week, that we would leave this room today rejoicing in Christ.

And it is because we're going to look at how it is that we as men and women in Christ might possess hearts that are uncondemned before God. What does it mean to be before God and to be uncondemned, to have perfect confidence in Him, to on this side of eternity, to have and to live daily as Christian men and women, and to be free from haunting feelings of shame, from feelings of condemnation before God?

Did you know that it is possible to stand before God today even with a sense of confidence that you are right with Him and that you are unchangeably the object of His love, to live for Him and to love Him and to serve Him all the days of your life, knowing that He is well pleased with you even while you wage war with the remaining sin that is in you?

Did you know, brothers and sisters, that it is possible to have such confidence with God, to feel so uncondemned before Him, so at peace with Him, that we are able to come to Him in prayer, knowing that He delights to hear our voices, your voice, that God Himself is willing to personally commune with you, and that He is pleased to answer your prayers in accord with His will?

It is possible as even sinful men and women to come before God and to have peace with God. And I know that for us as Christians who are familiar with passages like Romans chapter 5 and verse 1, that we say, of course, of course, that is the case.

Of course, we can have peace with God. And yet, for many Christians today, many live in a state of being that is altogether divorced from, that is separated from this experience, that there are perhaps many even here today who live with a regular, if not an incessant sense of God's displeasure looming over your head.

Many of us simply do not possess the kind of joyful confidence that we ought to have day to day. For many of us, we see the promises of God's Word, and we believe them. We see that there is a kind of gospel confidence, if I can call it that, that is available to us even now.

And yet, even though it is within our reach, it always seems to elude our grasp. And we wonder, why is this the case? Why is it that so many of us believe in Christ and yet still live with some measure of fear that one day we will still be condemned along with those who do not believe?

Over the past several weeks, we have listened, we have watched as John the Apostle has dealt with the gospel assurance of his first century audience. He has dealt with them in a way that, from an under-shepherding perspective, has been frankly inspiring in a way that is gentle, in a way that is compassionate, in a way that is fiercely pastoral.

In these first three chapters, John has labored to show that the first century readers of this text, though they were buffeted from every side, from false brethren, and difficulties, and division, and everything that we have already talked about, nevertheless, John labors to show them that they are the true children of God.

And today, we will find John again using the same pastoral approach, but now going straight to the heart of the matter. Now, perhaps some of you have thought to yourself that we have heard enough assurance sermons, we've heard enough encouragement, but I want to challenge you that there is still greater joy to be had in Christ than you already have.

I think that is what John is laboring to show us. And today, what I want to put before you, what I think John is putting before us, is that we as Christians can possess still a greater assurance, that we can possess a true assurance of faith, a confidence, a sense of no condemnation whatsoever as we stand before God.

But we must, but we must train our hearts in the gospel, that there is something that in John's letters, we have, in letters, excuse me, we have not yet addressed, that it is possible to stand before God uncondemned, to be uncondemned in truth, and to feel uncondemned subjectively, to be bold and unashamed before Him.

But before we can take hold of this, we must realize the propensities of our hearts, and we must condition them with the truths of the gospel, and only then, and only then can we enjoy uncondemned hearts before God.

The Stubborn Inclination of the Heart to Condemn Us

So if we turn our attention to our text, today we're going to turn our attention to our hearts. John puts three important truths before us today, all of them having to do with our hearts. And I labored, I emailed or messaged our sister last night and said, don't touch the bulletin, I have to reorganize this.

I've tried to do this as clearly as I possibly can, but I want to show you that first of all, that we have, there is a stubborn inclination of our hearts that we must first address, the stubborn inclination of our hearts.

In verses 19 and 20, this is what we read, By this we shall know that we are of the truth, and reassure our heart before Him. For whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and He knows everything.

As John writes in verse 19, he takes us on something of what I am calling a related digression. And what I mean by that is that here John is doing two things as he begins this next round of instruction.

First, he is leaning on what he has just said in verses 11 through 18. We cannot fully understand our text without remembering what John said last week. And if you'll remember what John said last week, it was an exhortation, it was a command, it was the normalizing of this, that a true Christian loves his brothers, loves the brethren, loves one another.

We have this obligation. And yet at the same time, the second thing that John is doing is that he is departing from that theme in large part to deal now with the believer's assurance on the tail end of those truths.

And there are two significant dots that I want you to see, if I can call them dots in the text, that we need to connect in order to see what John is up to here. Last week, John concluded his exhortation, if we look at verse 18 for a moment, exhorting us to love the brethren with these words, little children, let us not love in word or talk, but in deed and in truth.

Now that word truth is key because what we see and then in verse 19 is that now John doesn't emphasize loving in truth, but now knowing that we are of the truth. And this is remarkable, that John is very concerned that we would not only see the evidences of God's grace in our lives, but that we would see this and that we would know then that we belong to God, that our hearts would be reassured in this truth.

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here, that our hearts would be reassured in him, in this truth, that we are in Christ, and that Christ is in us, and that we possess eternal life. John seems like a hound on this trail throughout the whole of his letter.

It might even be that John is more concerned about your assurance than you are. He just keeps hitting this. But here John does something that we have not yet seen him do. Up until this point he has focused almost entirely on these evidences of grace in our lives, the externals.

He asked the question, a yes or no question, do you confess your sin? Yes or no? Do you walk in the light as he is in the light? Yes or no? Do you keep his commandments? Do you love one another? Do you love the world?

But now John's approach is different. It is as if he is pulling us now into the surgical theater of God. The lights are bright, they're overhead, they're looking down, and he shows us not the externals, but what is on the the inside.

What is happening in the inner man, what is happening in the inner chambers of our hearts. And what he shows us here is the key, I am convinced. I know that's a dangerous thing to say. It is the key to our being able to stand before God confidently knowing that we are his.

And this is what we find. As John is addressing our heart, we see that even when the evidences of God's grace are present in our lives, when we see that the love for the brethren and we see the keeping of the commandments, albeit imperfectly, and the walking in the light, and all of these things that we have looked at, even when we see these things, and even when we believe the gospel, and even when we bear fruit in keeping with our new nature, and even then we are still inclined to struggle with assurance because we have hearts that are stubbornly inclined to condemn us.

You heard that right. John says in verse 19, I'll show you, that we must reassure our hearts before him. The root of that word, reassure, for those of you that are doing our Greek class, I'm not sure that we'll get there, it's the Greek word patho, to persuade or to convince.

It is as if we are trying to convince a discouraged brother of the evidences of grace that we see in his life. But it's not another brother here that we need to convince, nor is it another member of our household, someone who is near to us.

But John says that we need to reassure our own hearts that we belong to the truth. Here, John Stott comments on this. He says that we need to, with the knowledge that our minds possess, silence the doubts of our hearts.

With the knowledge that is here, silence the doubts that are here. Now you might think that I'm reading too much into this, but look at what John says in verse 20. John writes, for whenever our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts.

Whenever our hearts condemn us. Are you seeing what our hearts are up to here? One observer has pointed out that it is as if there is a drama that is being played out in verse 20, and we find ourselves here in a courtroom.

And as we are in this courtroom, we are looking around to find our way, and we look down and we realize that our hands are cuffed, and our feet are shackled, and we are sitting in the defendant's chair.

That we are the defendants in this courtroom. We have been accused, and here we are standing trial. A charge has been brought against us. And as we sit in this courtroom, we look up at the bench, and who is there?

Unsurprisingly, we find God. It is God who is the judge. He will do the judging here. And then, realizing that we are the defendants and God is the judge, we look for our accuser, and we ask the question, who is our accuser?

Is it the evil one? Is it Satan who John calls the accuser of the brethren in Revelation chapter 12? It is not. Is it this world with devil's fill that threaten to undo us? It is not. Is it a band of persecutors who despise Christ and rage against his church?

It is not. But lo and behold, with shock, we find that the accuser is our own hearts. That our persecutor in this moment is not outside in the world. It is not outside in some unseen realm, but it is our own flesh and blood that is calling for our condemnation.

And we can tell from John's words that our heart is wrongly afflicting us. Because in verse 20, John mentions that when our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything, implying that God is right and our hearts are wrong.

And the ESV uses a very interesting word here, where it reads, whenever our hearts condemn us. This does not mean that we are condemned by our hearts in our standing before God as a one-time-only type of thing, an isolated incident.

But it's not if our hearts condemn us, but when our hearts condemn us. There is a level of frequency here. And dear ones, this is something that I want to relay to you from our text. I know we're looking very closely in at this, but here we see that we need to reassure our hearts that our hearts are condemning us.

And if you are going to have confidence before God, if you are ever going to enjoy the blessing of an uncondemned heart before Him, you need to be acquainted with this vital truth. That though your heart has been made new in Christ, gloriously new, it is the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.

It is the wonder of the New Covenant. Though your heart has been made new in Christ, and though it is being made or renewed day by day in Christ, still, your heart is often wrong, and especially wrong on the matter of your standing before God.

And while it is true, and we need to be careful here, that we can sear our consciences and make them unfeeling to sin, we must carefully guard against this. It is just as likely that the heart of a sincere Christian who desires to honor and please God will have an oversensitive heart, what Paul would call a weak conscience, a heart that goes rogue and sets itself against us.

It may even be a universal rule that at some point in our Christian lives, one of the characteristic features of our redeemed heart that proves that we are not condemned is that we feel condemned. Not enough Christians in the world know this, that if we are to have assurance, if we are to be right with God, we cannot trust our feelings.

And that is exactly what so many of us do on this point. If someone were to come to you today and say, perhaps you're sitting in a conversation with three people, and sometimes you're the quiet person in the conversation watching two others converse, and you see one brother or one sister give counsel to another brother or another sister, and they were to say to them, oh, just follow your heart.

You might be so moved so as to audibly disagree with them and say, absolutely not, do not follow your heart. You might silently there stand there and like me, perhaps shake to the depth of your bones that our hearts are deceitful, they're desperately sick.

But when it comes to assurance, this is exactly what we naively do, that we stand before God and we feel condemned. And so we are. As one brother described it, many earnest Christians have a heart that is like an engine that can never idle.

Some of you work on engines, maybe some of you have no idea what I'm talking about, but an engine that can never idle, meaning there's something malfunctioning with that throttle and it just revs the engine up and up and up.

You can never fine tune it so that it will just idle, just to run at baseline. And that is what we need, brothers and sisters, is to find that idle, to find that baseline in our souls. But it is not going to come by looking to our feelings.

Christ has come to give us rest, but our hearts will not allow this often. And then the question becomes, who then can tame, how then can we tame these hearts of ours? At the end of verse 20, John tells us what we must look to.

God’s Greater Knowledge and Gracious Omniscience

This is my second point, that God, the God who is greater than our hearts, the remedy to a heart that is always revving up and up and never able to idle is this, not to look to that heart, not to look to that feeling, but to look to the God who is greater than that heart.

Verse 20, for whenever our heart condemns us, I don't know if that surprises you that the first half of that verse says that. Have you ever thought about that? Whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our hearts and he knows everything.

This is an interesting sentence that John brings in here. Perhaps it's especially interesting because John seeks to comfort us from a place that we might think unlikely. We might expect that if our hearts are condemning us, that John would simply try to pour on the reassurance by pointing us to the cross.

He will do that, but he doesn't do that first. You might think that he would point to those evidences of grace in our lives as he's been listing them in the letter, but he doesn't go there either, but rather what John appeals to is the character of God.

He doesn't appeal to who we are or what we feel, but he appeals to who God is and this is what John is intending to do. While he is telling us that our hearts are inclined to condemn us because of our limited and distorted knowledge of ourselves, he is telling us at the same time that God knows everything perfectly and it ultimately does not matter what our hearts do think or feel.

The subjective feelings of our hearts do not factor into the equation even for a moment. What actually matters is who God is and what God objectively knows to be true and even what he tells us to be true.

Now when it comes to the character of God, here John deals with one of his attributes, his omniscience, that he knows all things, that God is greater than our hearts and he knows all things. And when it comes to omniscience, we often think of God's omniscience, I think, perhaps it's just me, in a way that is inherently severe, that we are reminded that God knows everything and this means he knows all of our secret sins.

He knows that when we speak to someone and we give kind words at the same time and there is a motive in the back of our minds and the depths of our heart that is corrupted even if we don't realize it.

We think that not only does God know that all of our secret sins and all of our corrupt motives but our duplicitous actions that he sees us when we pray at the prayer meeting and we think to ourselves, but God knows that this is the best of my prayer life, this is the highlight reel, why is it that I pray best here and not when I'm alone before him?

Hebrews 4 .13 comes to mind, that no creature is hidden from his sight but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give an account. But John does not come to us with this approach today.

In fact, he shows us that God knows us perfectly and that for those of us who are in Christ, he accepts us regardless of the charges that the world, the devil, or even our heart brings against us. And John shows us a side of God's omniscience that is not severe but inherently gracious and merciful.

And I want to ask you, do you think of God in this light? Is God's omniscience when you think that he knows everything? Is it a comforting thought to you? If it is not, I would suggest to you that you may be harboring false views of God within you.

That God knows everything is actually, it is perhaps one of the best things for us. Have you ever thought for a moment that God knew you? He saw all of your days, all of your days were in his book before one was yet lived, before you were yet born.

In eternity past, he knew when he created the world. As he was bringing the soil together, he knew you. And yet he still, in an eternity past, planned to redeem you, to send his son to die for you. That God knows everything.

And the fact that God knows everything and that he still saved us is a wonder of all wonders. One commentator writes on this, the statement that God is greater than our hearts in this context seems to mean that God does not share in the meanness that is so often found in human hearts, but that his generosity is far greater, his compassion toward the needy much larger.

The Puritan Thomas Watson, if I can just put him on the doggy pile here, he says, we are apt to think that he, being so holy, is therefore of a severe and sour disposition toward sinners and not able to bear them.

But know in Christ, he says, I am meek, gentleness is my nature and my temper. Believer, your heart knows very little, but God knows everything. Sometimes we think that we are further along than we are, but our hearts are only just beginning to be able to discern between that which is righteous and that which is evil.

But God is the fountainhead. He is the source of all righteousness. And here John, not me, but the apostle John, here John uses this truth to comfort us. God the Father sees who you are in truth. He sees the condition of your soul before him, and he sees the work that he is doing in you better than your heart will ever see it.

And consider for a moment all that he sees. He sees your imperfect repentance. Oh, how very imperfect it is. And yet, God, who knows everything, sees that it is a true repentance. He sees that you have a weak faith.

And yet, if it is a sincere faith, he sees that it is a weak but sincere faith. He sees your sins. What a marvel, he sees even the sins that you are absolutely blind to. And he also sees the Christ who made atonement for all those sins.

After all, was he not there at Calvary as his Son hung on the cross in our place? He sees that our prayers are feeble. But think of this for a moment. We are in this room. You are listening to a sermon.

I'm seeking with God's help to preach a sermon. Perhaps some of you are praying. Perhaps none of us are praying at this moment. And yet, Christ is praying. He sees our feeble prayers. And yet, at the same time, he sees and hears the powerful intercession of Christ at all moments in time.

Can you see that God knows you better than your hearts know you? And while your heart may condemn you, John tells us that God does not. And because he is greater than our hearts, he can certainly be trusted more than our hearts.

So often, we lack assurance because we think less of God than we ought. We mistakenly think that he is like us, that because our hearts are fickle and temperamental and volatile and liable to change, we can say one thing and mean another.

We can promise one thing and then just as easily break that promise as keep it. And this is how it usually goes. After our conversion, we find that everything is going smoothly for a while. But then one day, our heart ushers us into that courtroom of God.

And for the first time, it begins to level accusations against us. Our heart reminds us, and you have heard this if you've been a Christian for any period of time, you have heard these accusations that we are still sinners, that we are incredibly flawed, that our motives are corrupt, that our love is faint, that our faith is little.

It reminds us of our hypocrisy. It digs up old sins that Christ died for long ago. It accuses us of being an imposter and a charlatan and a deceiver. It seeks to prosecute us to the fullest extent of the law.

It asks, how could someone with so much remaining sin possibly be a Christian? How could God promise, how could God's promises be true for such a sinner, a sinner as this? And what makes some of these accusations so powerful is that there is a grain of truth in them so much as it refers to our conduct.

But in all of this, our hearts make a fatal flaw. They besmirch God's character by assuming that God can say one thing and yet do another. They assume that God, when He says He is able to save the chiefest of sinners, they assume that God can say that He is able to save the chiefest of sinners and yet when the time comes, He will be unwilling to do so.

Let me ask, is God not kinder than that? Is God not a thousand times more trustworthy than your tricky, erratic, and fitful selves? Is not God infinitely greater than your hearts, than our hearts, than my heart?

God says in His Word that God is not man that He should lie or a son of man that He should change His mind. Has He said and will He not do it? Or has He spoken and will He not fulfill it? What does Paul say on this?

Can God be trusted? He says, for the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, was not yes and no, but in Him it is always yes. For all the promises of God find their yes in Him. That is why it is through Him that we utter our amen to the glory of God.

That God knows you better than you know yourself and because you are in Christ, He accepts you even when you do not accept yourself and that God has made a very many precious promises concerning you, whether you believe those promises or not, whether you believe the objective truth of God's Word or not.

It has been said that there are, and you have to forgive me, I haven't fact checked, I didn't go and count them all, but there are some 3 ,000 promises made to the believer in Scripture. And when we believe our hearts, who know very little rather than God who knows everything, when we believe our hearts, that they are not trustworthy, over and above the God who has given us His very Word, who is not yes and no, but yes and amen in Christ, we are questioning the character of God and we are questioning the trustworthiness of God.

But if we are to have true assurance, we must cast off what our hearts say and we must cling on to what it is that God says. We find an example, a lucid example of this in the book The Pilgrim's Progress.

And maybe, you know, this is a good, maybe a good gauge of just how well read our church is. Who here has read The Pilgrim's Progress? You don't have to be ashamed if you haven't. Okay. Well, in The Pilgrim's Progress, you've probably heard me speak about this scene and perhaps a different angle before.

There is one scene that I always find particularly captivating, and that is when Christian and hopeful are on their way to the Celestial City on the King's Highway and they decide, look, this looks like a nice meadow and a nice path adjacent to the road that might be worth our taking.

It looks much more pleasant than the King's Highway. And so to take this easier path, they leave the King's Highway, the only road that leads to the Celestial City, and they go through what is called Bypath Meadow.

But as they go through Bypath Meadow, before long, they come to a giant named Despair. And this giant named Despair captures them and brings them back to what is called Doubting Castle. And there at Doubting Castle, Christian and hopeful don't look so Christian or hopeful anymore.

They are subjected to the most cruel torments. They're denied food and water. The giant Despair makes them to look on the corpses of those who he has killed. They are abused and mistreated. They're even told that they would be better off if they took their own lives.

They feel as if they have been altogether cut off from the King and Despair is having its way with them. If you are a Christian in the world today and you have believed in the gospel, the only gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, and yet you live day by day by day in the dumps, if you say, I believe in Christ, but I feel none of the benefits of it.

I feel no confidence in him. I feel that I cannot come to him. I feel that it is as if I am alone that I would be better dead than alive. You just might be in Doubting Castle under the superintendence of the giant Despair.

Here Bunyan draws an allegory that fitly describes the Christian who begins to doubt what God has said and loses his assurance as a result. But one day, something fascinating happens. Christian and Hopeful have been there now for days.

And at some point, Christian reaches up to his breast pocket and realizes that he has a key in the pocket. And he pulls it out and it is the key called Promise. He takes that key, he inserts it into the lock, and behold, these iron doors open.

And he and Hopeful flee for their lives. They get back onto the King's Highway and progress to the Celestial City. If you are living in the dumps, free of joy, feeling condemned, feeling as if you can never come to God, it is not by looking beneath your breast pocket at what your heart has to say to you, but it is taking up the promises of God.

What God has said, who God is, what God has revealed himself to be in the Word, what God has said about you and taking hold of those promises, fleeing from that castle. How often do we live in that castle, doubting God's precious promises?

Believer in Christ, he has done, what he has done is sufficient to save even you. What he has said is true. His promises, make no mistake about it, are altogether reliable. His words are pure words, like silver refined in a fire, in a furnace, on the ground seven times, purified seven times.

Not one of them is uttered and does not come to pass. And so why, when we read texts like this, that he will never leave us or forsake us, do we believe if we are in Christ that we have been left and forsaken?

If we are ever to have confidence before him, we must trust who God is and we must trust what he has said and that he is a God who is greater than our hearts. But John has more to say. This is my third and final point.

Faith in Jesus Christ, Love for One Another, and Confidence before God

John shows us the faith then that frees our hearts, the faith that frees our hearts. In verse 21, Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God. And whatever we ask, we receive from him because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.

And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his son, Jesus Christ, and love one another, just as he has commanded us. Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God, and God in him. And by this, we know that he abides in us by the spirit whom he has given us.

Now, I don't know about you, but I find personally that verse 21, what John describes in verse 21 is about as close as one can get to heaven on earth here and now, to live in the world today and to have confidence before God.

To know that we are right with him, not only to see that scripture says that we have peace with him, but to know, to know that we know that we know that we have peace with him. Here, John implies that such a confidence is attainable.

That word confidence can be translated boldness or plainness. That we can come to God plainly, boldly, confidently, assuredly as a father comes to his, or as a child, excuse me, comes to his father. And as I listed in my introduction, it is possible to live this Christian life, to offload every doubt and every worry and every care, to give it all to God, to know that you are accepted in his beloved son.

Or to go to verse 22, to wake up in the morning and to come to your father in prayer and to know that he is pleased to hear your voice. That when you come to him, he receives you and welcomes you with open arms.

And then not only to hear your prayer, but to answer your prayer. John qualifies that later, if it is asked according to his will. How few Christians there are today who believe that they can know this kind of closeness with God.

But here John holds this out as that which we are not only to aspire to, but that which we are to take hold of and make our own. And he says, this is what is between the existence of despair and the existence of confidence and communion with God.

He says at the end of verse 22, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him, at verse 23, and this is his commandment that we believe in the name of his son, Jesus Christ, and love one another.

Now he says this is his commandment, singular, that we believe in the name of Jesus Christ. And then there is this conjunction and, and we love one another. The way that our reformed forefathers have dealt with this is they have done this.

They have seen that command in the singular. It refers to this. If we are to have confidence before God, if we are to come to him confidently and to hear the answer and see to the answer to our prayers, it is by believing in the name of his son, Jesus Christ.

It is saving faith alone that brings that. And then what comes after that is the fruit that we will see that will be yielded, that we love one another, that we have faith alone as the instrument of our justification, that we are justified before God and we feel justified before God.

And then from that faith and from that justification, that faith produces the inward evidences, the Puritans called it, of God's grace in our lives. In this case, love for one another. And so the way that we have confidence is by believing in Christ, the savior of our souls.

And then we see this further confirmed in the inward evidences of our love for one another. Now, I know this is hardly revolutionary for you to believe, but it is true. The way that we are to have confidence in Christ is this, that we must cast aside our condemning hearts or at the very least guard them carefully.

I want to be careful not to tell you to not listen to your conscience. You need to listen to your conscience. You need to have a good conscience. And yet at the same time, when our conscience condemns us about things that are clearly at odds with the promises of God's word, we must set that aside and believe and listen to the God who knows everything, who is greater than our hearts.

And then looking to that God who is greater than our hearts, we must look to the substance, to the picture, to the greatest expression of the greatness of that God. And it is none other, it is no one else other than Jesus Christ who said, when a crowd came to him and said, what must we do to be doing the works of God?

Jesus answered them, this is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent. And a few chapters later he says, and everyone who believes in me shall never die. And then he poses the question, do you believe this?

Can't you see the Lord, your God's love for you in his son? John Flavel, he puts together this portrait of a conversation between the father and the son in eternity past. He writes this, the father says, my son, here is a company of poor, miserable souls that have utterly undone themselves and now lie open to my justice.