Proof that we Know Christ

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.

You can also find us on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you listen to your favorite podcasts. Please enjoy the.

Moses, Disobedience, and the Seriousness of Obedience

All right. Well, we're back in the first epistle by or from the Apostle John. And as we begin our time there, I invite you to turn with me to 1 John 2, verse 3. And if you would, take one finger, put it in 1 John 2, verse 3, and then follow me to another place.

It will go to Numbers 20, and verse 1. In Numbers chapter 20 and verse 1, as you find your way there, we find ourselves in an interesting scene in the history of the nation of Israel. If you're familiar with this book and with this section of the book, you'll know that the 12 tribes have made their way through much of the wilderness wanderings.

They've been there, some would say, for nearly 38 years, 39 years. And here in chapter 20 and verse 1, they find themselves in the arid hills of Kadesh. That is southwest of the Dead Sea. It is about 11 days journey by foot south of Jerusalem.

And for this nearly 40 years now, the people had been wandering in the wilderness as they waited for their opportunity to enter into the promised land. And as they made their way through this region that is still today known as an especially dry and oppressive place, the people of Israel found themselves in a situation that they had been in at least a time before, and that is that they were without adequate water.

Now, in any circumstance, if you're walking long distances, you and I both know it's a big problem if you forget your water bottle. But it is an especially big problem if you are walking somewhere between Egypt and Canaan, where the temperatures reach up to 45 or 50 degrees Celsius in a sweltering desert.

And though the Lord had provided for His people in the past, He had and was continuously still raining manna from heaven. He had brought streams of water from stones in the desert. When the people began to reflect on their conditions here and the scarcity of water, they began to do what they had done so many times before, what became, in fact, very natural for them to do in the middle of this wilderness.

As they began to become thirsty, the people started to complain. Some cried out that they wished that they had died with their brothers on the journey. Others longed to be back in the oppressive or under the oppressive reign of Egypt, making bricks under the hot sun.

And everyone universally turned on Moses and Aaron. Now imagine for a moment what it would be like to be before a crowd of a million plus people who feel, at least, that they are dying of thirst and it is your fault.

What did Moses and Aaron do? But they went to the tent of meeting. They fell on their faces before God, and they cried out to Yahweh. And as they laid there in the dust, the Lord appeared to Moses or instructed Moses to go to a rock that was in their midst, to speak to that rock, and to wait for streams of water to flow from it.

As Moses and Aaron did that, as they got up, shook the dust off their clothing, and proceeded to the rock, you can almost imagine it in your minds, the crowds surrounding them as they approach the rock.

Sorry, looking for my spot. As the people began to surround Moses with their complaints, longing to die or to be subjected once more by their enemies, Moses became so exasperated that he harshly spoke to the people.

In fact, he said, you rebels, shall we bring water out of this rock for you? And then instead of speaking to the rock, as God had commanded him to do, he raised his staff, likely in frustration. And if you know how the story goes, he struck the rock, not once, but twice.

And though God provided water by this action, not long after, God confronted Moses and Aaron for their disobedience. And God declared to him, he said, because you did not believe in me, this is Numbers 20 and verse 12, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.

Now, what this means is that though Moses had faithfully guided the nation for nearly four decades, even though he had done that, even though he had communed with God at the peak of Mount Sinai, though he had resolutely stood in the gap between God Almighty and a corrupt nation, because he had violated God's explicit command regarding water from this stone, he would no longer be able to enter the land that God had promised to his ancestors.

Now, put yourselves in Moses's sandals for a moment. Imagine for a moment what it would be like to spend 40 years of your life preparing for something, enduring with much patience great difficulties on the road to that destination, only to have that door slammed shut in your face because of a single act of disobedience on your part, and yet to recognize, as Moses did, that God is perfectly just to do just that, because obedience to God matters.

Stories like this shock and surprise many Christians today. Go out into the average evangelical church today, tell this story, and then ask the question, did Moses deserve to be removed from that promise, to not experience the joy of entering the land?

And some with certainty are going to say, well, it is a bit harsh, isn't it? And I believe it is because we do not know the power of God, nor the scriptures. Though the Bible presents a complete picture of the Christian life, as I pointed out last week, I fear that many Christians have a gnostic theology of sin, rather than a biblical one.

We believe that because God has redeemed our souls, it doesn't really matter all that much if we obey him day to day in our physical bodies. And it just might be the case that many Christians today are antinomians unaware.

That is, that they believe that God has given us grace, and so he has no longer given us a law to obey. We have become anomos, without a law, from which we get the word anomaly. The modern Christian is an anomaly, with a robust biblical category for forgiveness, but almost no category whatsoever for obedience.

And yet, as we see in the life of Moses, obedience matters. One can lose what they have worked 40 years for because of an act of disobedience. When God redeems a people for himself, he orchestrates their salvation.

Praise the Lord. But he also expects their obedience. Many Christians today have forgotten what one commentator wrote several decades ago, that Christianity is the religion which offers the greatest privilege and brings with it the greatest obligation.

Knowing Christ by Keeping His Commands

Today, as we look, I had you put your finger in 1 John chapter 2, as we look at 1 John chapter 2, John writes to his Christian audience, you'll remember from last week, that they might know that they have eternal life, that their joy would be full.

And as he does this, John shows us, he shows them, he shows us, that one of the telltale marks of a Christian is this. The Christian who truly knows Christ is the Christian who truly obeys Christ. When you examine yourself to see if you are in the faith, which is a good thing to do, not at every moment compulsively, but from time to time, one of the best ways that you can do this is to examine your relationship with God's commands.

The true Christian life is an obedient Christian life. And the question that John puts to all of us in this passage is this, are these proofs present in your life? So, with our Bibles turned to 1 John chapter 2, we're going to look in this epistle, and we're going to look at, I'm going to say three phrases or three words, three tests that we can use to discern if we truly know Christ.

And the first one is this, number one, do you keep Christ's commands? Do you keep Christ's commands? What is the proof that we know Jesus Christ? Your God gives us a simple, and I'm going to suggest, an unpopular answer.

We can have certainty that we have come to know Jesus Christ when we keep Christ's commands. In verse three and four, you're going to wonder, why do I say this? It says exactly this in the passage. And by this, we know that we have come to know Him, that is Christ.

If we keep His commandments, whoever says, I know Him, but does not keep His commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in Him. If you remember some of the context from last week, you will recall that John is writing to encourage and to instruct what is likely a network of churches in Asia Minor, that is in modern day Turkey.

You'll remember I mentioned the secessionists, that some had gone out of the church, and as a result, there was not only disunity, but confusion. And so John is writing here to encourage them. And on this occasion, John is now coming to do battle against an early form of Gnosticism.

Again, I taught this last week, that view that teaches that all things spiritual are good and all things physical are bad. And as John moves to this next section of his letter, he attacks the important theme of knowledge.

Just look with me again at verse three. And by this, we know that we have come to know Him if we keep His commandments. Verse four, whoever says, I know Him. Again, this knowledge emphasis. And this is why, if you understand at all that the origins of the word Gnostic or Gnosticism, it actually comes from a Greek word, gnosis, which means knowledge.

And the Gnostics were given this title because of their preoccupation with what they saw as their purpose to attain a secret kind of knowledge that would grant them eternal life. You see, they didn't see faith alone in Jesus Christ alone as the fountain of God's salvation, but rather a secret knowledge that if one were to possess, then and only then could he be saved.

And so as John addresses how we may, in his words, know that we've come to know Jesus Christ, he's actually attacking this error at its very root. What is knowledge? To know Christ, John tells us, is not a secret kind of knowledge.

It is not a mental exercise for the intellectually inclined. It is an experiential knowledge of Christ that transforms the life of the individual believer. And this is something that John really majors on his letter, if you're familiar with 1 John.

Of all the inspired authors of scripture, John above all wants God's people to understand what it means to truly know God. In his three epistles, just as a case study, he uses a variation of the word know or knowledge 39 times.

And so much of what we read in the gospels about knowing God, knowing Christ, comes from John's gospel itself. It was John in John chapter 17, in verse 3. You'll remember Christ's high priestly prayer, the longest recorded prayer of Christ in the Bible.

And he begins in verse 3, and this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. And the knowledge that John is speaking about here is not merely to know facts about Jesus.

It is not to know who his parents were, or where he grew up, or other trivia about his life. But it was speaking to an interpersonal relationship with Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It is possible to see Christ, to know something of him, and yet not to truly know him.

And this is what John is seeking to prepare the saints for, to know Christ. John was making this point when he recorded in John 14, in verse 9, an interaction between Philip and Jesus as the disciples were conversing with Christ about his true identity.

And there the disciples, as they were speaking, Philip says, Lord, show us the Father. It is enough for us. And using this, the same Greek word, ginosko, our Lord Jesus replied to him, have I been with you so long, and still you do not know me, Philip.

In some ways, you can almost imagine the Gnostics' claims to have some kind of special knowledge, that that would have been fiercely personal to the Apostle John. To know Christ is not to possess a secret key that is limited to the mind.

It is to know who he truly is, to have intimate communion with him, and it is something that by necessity must change the person who possesses, or who is acquainted with such a relationship with him. And so I ask you the question, do you know Christ in this way?

Do you know Christ in this way? And the natural next question is this, how can one know that they know Christ? How can we be certain that we actually possess a relationship with the living Christ? Here, John tells us that we will know because we will keep his commandments.

Again, this word command is something, is a prominent theme in John. It's used 14 times in 1 John, in the singular and in the plural. And there's been a lot of debate about what this means. What does it mean that I know Christ by keeping his commandments?

Now, some have pointed a line from 1 John 2 to Exodus 20 and said, it is surely that we keep the 10 commandments of Exodus chapter 20. It could be that. I'm not actually convinced of that in particular, but others have indicated that John may be referring to the new command that we should love one another.

But again, I'm not convinced by that also because every time we see the word command in the singular, it is in reference to this loving one another. In fact, we can see it in chapter 2 in verse 7. Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment singular, but an old commandment singular that you had from the beginning.

The old commandment singular is the word that you have heard. And then he speaks to how we are to love one another. But it's not that either, I don't think. I would suggest that here John is not referring to either of those, but rather he is speaking to the same commandments that Matthew references in his great commission in Matthew 28 and verses 18 through 20.

There we read, our Lord Jesus gives this great commission. He says, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

And behold, I am with you always, sorry, in the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. I almost missed that. And behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

What Christ commanded is what was to be passed along to these disciples. And what John is getting at here is that we are, we will know with certainty that we have come to know Jesus Christ when we are growing in an ever-increasing obedience to the whole body of Christ's teachings.

The whole body of his teachings as they are contained in the gospels, as they are explained and applied in the epistles, and as they are reflected in the remainder of the New Testament. And this begins with the command that John lays out, I think, in 1 John 3 and verse 23, if you look there with me for a moment.

And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another just as he, that is Christ, commanded us. To begin to obey the commandments of Christ is to believe on him for eternal life.

Any obedience rendered to Christ must necessarily start here. The Christian is only ever and always justified by grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone. Don't come to me, please, at the end of the sermon and say, Shane, you said for me to be saved, I need to obey the commands.

No. But it is by being saved, it is by being regenerated, it is by being or having the indwelt spirit of Christ within us that we are then enabled to obey his commandments. But Christ will never leave his people to stop their obedience simply at believing in him.

But through the new birth, through the sanctification of the spirit, through the providential working of God in the lives of his people, our Lord will bring all those who are his into an ever enlarging place of obedience to his commandments.

This includes his teachings. You might ask, what is, what are his whole body of teachings? This includes, for instance, his teachings on the sermon, sorry, in the sermon on the mount, as he did an exposition, completed an exposition of God's moral law summarized in the Ten Commandments.

It includes his commandments related to faith, life, marriage, the family, the church, the church's ordinances. It's contained in every imperative statement that Christ uttered and every subsequent explanation and application that we find in the Bible.

The man or woman who truly knows Christ says with John, his commandments are not burdensome and looks forward to every opportunity to learn these commands and to apply them in his life. Now, this is without a doubt an unpopular teaching.

We might read this. In some ways, brethren, I will confess that I have looked at this passage and I've thought you could simply read this and say, amen, and then we could go on our merry way. But the reality is, and I've seen it even with visitors who have attended our church, that they have come and said, no, no, no, no, no.

There is no obedience required from Christians. There's only faith required of Christians. And I ask you, what does 1 John chapter 2 and verses 3 and 4 say about the Christian faith, about the Christian life?

But now others will come and say, who can live up to this standard? Let me say for one, such obedience to Christ's command is an utter impossibility apart from the Spirit of Christ indwelling the believer and empowering his or her obedience.

Ultimately, this is not a grin and bear it kind of Christianity. But it is the Spirit of God empowering a Christian to will and to work, that is biblical language, to will and to work for God's good pleasure.

Professor Christian, I want to ask you, do you have an experience of the Spirit of God in your life making you a new creature, turning your affections Godward, increasing your faith in Christ, enlarging your love for God, enabling you to mortify sin in your life?

Can you honestly say, no matter how small the change may have been, that God has most certainly wrought a change in me? Once I loved sin, but now I love Christ. And while my flesh is weak, my soul's desire is to render heartfelt obedience to Christ.

My desire, above all things, is to please Him. This is the heart attitude of the genuine Christian. This is at least one of the evidences that you truly know Christ, that He has changed you, that you not only profess to believe in Him, that you not only profess to be in Him, but that this union with Christ has wrought a radical change in the trajectory of your life.

But secondly, and this needs to be qualified very, very seriously, very solemnly, you need to realize that this is, at the same time, not sinless perfection. We dealt with this last week in 1 John chapter 1 and verse 8.

In fact, you'll see the language almost mirrors in 1 John 8 and then in 2 John 4. It's almost a mirror image. In 1 John 8, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, we are liars, and the truth is not in us.

Whereas in chapter 2 and verse 4, whoever says I know Him but does not keep His commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. It's almost like these are to go together, that we can never at any moment say that we are without sin, and yet we are seeking, we are working, we are making headway in keeping His commandments.

What does it mean? What this does mean is that the genuine Christian experiences a growing resolve to obey Christ in all things, that He would have dominion, that Christ would have dominion not only from sea to sea, but also in all of me.

I so appreciate what John Calvin says on this. He says, John does not mean that those who wholly satisfy the law keep His commandments. No such instance can be found in the world, but those who strive according to the capacity of human infirmity to form their life in obedience to the will of God.

Now, some of you, dear ones, some of you, this is your experience now. I would hope that you open your Bibles with eagerness to conform your lives to the commands of Christ. You see all that Christ has done for you, and there is nothing in all the world that you can add to that, but your heart's greatest aspiration now is to respond with unreserved obedience, to look through the pages of Scripture and to say like one Christian said of old, Lord, I desire to obey you more still.

Oh, Lord, give me another command to obey. Give me but another. Your commandments are not burdensome to me, but it is a great joy to obey you. Christian sister, Christian brother, if this is you, be of good cheer.

Such attitude reflects one who knows Christ. But I expect that for many others, there are those among us who must sheepishly admit that while this was our experience at one time, we have backslidden from such a heartfelt desire to please our Savior.

For some of you, at one time, you opened the Bible with eager expectation to learn how you might better please Christ. I recall this even in my own life. I remember one day as a brand new Christian, a brother read me a short passage from Colossians chapter 3, where it speaks about setting our minds on Christ, on the things that are above and not on the things that are below, and then how we should conduct ourselves in the world.

And I recall this passage lighting up before me that not only has Christ saved me, that I'm free, but now I'm free to apply these things in my life. And it is my greatest joy to do so. There was a time when the book of James was my favorite passage, not because I was inclined to some form of legalism, but simply because it seemed to me to be a roadmap to please God to a greater degree in my life.

Some of you know what it's like, but now for some strange reason, God's commands, Christ's commands, which are not burdensome, have become a burden to you. Remember back to those times when your communion with Christ was sweet, and there was nothing that you desired more than to live all of your life for all of Him.

Brethren, if that is you, repent. It does not mean necessarily that you are not saved. I'm not here to shake you in that way, but what it does mean is that you need to repent, to say what our Lord Jesus said to the late Odysseans, you have lost your first love.

Repent and do the works that you did at first. Seek the Lord, not tomorrow or next week, but seek the Lord today and ask that He might revive in you the desire to keep His commandments with joy and with thankfulness in your hearts.

Do you not realize, as it says in verse four, that those who say they know Him but do not keep His commandments are liars? Hear this warning from one reformer. This is a brother who defended sola fide, solus Christus, that the certainty of faith depends on the grace of Christ alone, but piety and holiness of life distinguish true faith from that knowledge of God, which is fictitious and dead.

Dear saints, if your faith looks more fictitious and dead than a true faith, repent, and you will most certainly find forgiveness. You will most certainly find power that you might obey Christ's commandments.

Loving God by Keeping His Word

But we'll move along. I find oftentimes I have to build a big foundation and then work from there. Now that John has dealt with Christ's commandments in particular, he is moving to God's word in general.

And here, if you can picture it, we're looking through a telescope, we're zooming out to see the second proof that we've come to know Christ, and that is those who truly know Christ keep God's word. Or you could say keep God's word as an expression of love for God.

In verse 5a, but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. But whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. Now some have looked at this passage, and perhaps if you're like me, you might say, what exactly is John getting at here?

That the love of Christ is perfected. Is he saying that when we obey, when we keep God's word, that God's love for us will be made perfect in the sense that God will perfectly love us? So by obedience, we receive the full love of God.

Or is he saying that if we keep God's word, he will perfect our love for others, or our love for him? A close reading of the text, I think accounting for the grammar, accounting for the context, tells us something different from these two things.

But what this passage teaches is that the Christian's love of God, it might just as well be translated the Christian's love for God. But here John tells us how a Christian truly loves God with all that is within him.

The Christian whose love for God, or sorry, the Christian whose love for God has been perfected is the Christian who loves God by keeping his word. Here John tells us how a Christian truly loves God. In 1 John 5, 3, in the immediate context of this letter, we read this, for this is the love of God, or our love for God, that we keep his commandments, and his commandments are not burdensome.

And this too is an important theme that John highlights not only in his epistle, but in his gospels. If you'll humor me just a bit more, turn with me to John chapter 14. And here we see John strings together a list that proves exactly this point.

In John chapter 14 and verse 15, he records our Lord Jesus saying this, if you love me, Christ speaking of himself, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. Or just six verses further to verse 21, whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.

Or two verses further in verse 23, if anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. I'll say it straight up. I'll say it squarely.

The best way, the principle way that we are to love God is to obey his word, that that is his definition of love. Now, we know that that often is not our definition of love, but that is his definition of love.

And what a strange philosophy that has carried us away to make us think that the best way that we are to love God is by our feelings alone, by our mere sentimentalism alone. Many of us have been seduced by, and I'm not going to trademark this phrase, but it is mine with all of its good and bad.

Many of us have been seduced by what I am inclined to call a youth group devotion. That is that our love for God, we think, is best expressed through mushy songs and warm feelings and emotional experiences and good intentions and fill in the blank that we think the best way to love God is love by, no offense, our weak and pitiful definition of love.

Now, do not mistake me. Our love not only should, but must be heartfelt. It must be expressed in songs. We have been commanded to sing. We have been commanded to shout forth God's praises. But these sentiments, these songs, these deeply felt emotions are hollow and vain if our love for God is not principally expressed in obedience.

John writes in 1 John 3 in verse 18. Sam's going to be upset with me because I'm preaching the whole rest of the book. Little children, let us not love in word or talk, but in deed and in truth. John Stott says on our passage, true love for God is expressed not in sentimental language or mystical experience, but in moral obedience.

And he says this, this is really the icing on the cake. The proof of love is loyalty. C .H. Dodd adds, to know God is to experience his love in Christ and to return that love in obedience. And what we see when we begin to appreciate this is that the Bible is quite literally filled with object lessons on this theme.

My mind, as I was studying this, immediately went to 1 Samuel chapter 15. If you know what's happening in that passage, there we find King Saul and the Israelites. They have just defeated the Amalekites and they were given explicit instructions to put the king of the Amalekites to death and to devote to destruction all of their possessions, their livestock, all of these things.

And when Samuel arrives after the battle has been won, he says to King Saul, what is this bleeding of sheep and lowing of oxen in my ear? And you can picture Saul coming up excitedly saying, we devoted all the bad sheep, all of the worthless ones, we devoted those to destruction, but we kept the very best because we are going to present an offering to God.

Now, I'm not sure that I trust Saul's expressed motives there, but let's just take him at face value. What becomes of the man or woman who comes to God and says, God, I have not really concerned myself with obedience, but with the best of intentions, I bring this to you as my offering, as my expression of love.

What does Samuel say to Saul? In 1 Samuel 15, 22, has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice and to listen than the fat of rams.

Dear professing Christian, is your love for God principally expressed in acts of unreserved obedience, or have you concluded that you would rather love God by some other means or measure? If you have not understood this, or if you have, sorry, if you've not only understood this, but you have sought to love God, dear saints, I know there you are here.

You have sought, albeit imperfectly, to love God with a heartfelt obedience. Rejoice for the grace of God in your lives. This is evidence, at least one, that you know Him. But for others, and I know there are some of you here as well, your love has grown cold.

And this is evidenced by the fact that you do not prioritize obedience in your life. You no longer come to God's word looking for how you might please Him better. But you are caught up, whether you're busy, or whether you're distracted, or whether you've set your affections on something else.

Something has bewitched you. And the same counsel I gave you in my first point, I give to you again, repent. Do the works that you did at first. Again, ask that the Lord would start a revival in your life.

And I want to grant you a way forward. I think an exciting way forward. In the book of Psalms, in Psalm 119, it is fascinating. You know, when we become captivated by easy believism, greasy grace, whatever you want to call it, we can read passages, chapters like Psalm 119, and completely miss the forest for the trees.

What is Psalm 119 about? Most of us are going to say it's about the word of God. I'm going to add something to that. Psalm 119 teaches us about the great value of the word of God, and the right response to the word of God.

I've not prepared anything in particular, but let's just start in verse 1. Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole hearts, who also do no wrong, but walk in his ways.

Verse 4, you have commanded your precepts to be kept diligently. Verse 5, oh that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes. Verse 6, then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your commandments.

Verse 7, I will praise you with an upright heart when I learn your righteous rules. Verse 8, I will keep your statutes. Do not utterly forsake me. I don't know about you, but I had a new perspective on Psalm 119 this week as I was considering this thought, that God's word is pure, that God's word is lovely, that God's word is worthy of our attention, and that the right response to God's word is obedience.

And David shows us what this looks like when we love God through obedience. He gives us a robust, you could say, system of practice, a robust application in Psalm 119 in verse 10. With my whole heart I seek you.

Doesn't that sound like love language? With my whole heart I seek you, let me not wander from your commandments. Or Psalm 119 in verse 34, give me understanding that I may keep your law and observe it with my whole heart.

Or verses 111 and 112, your testimonies are my heritage forever. Oh, this is my inheritance. This is the greatest thing I own, my heritage forever, for they are the joy of my heart. I incline my heart to perform your statutes forever to the end.

One Puritan said that a good Christian is like the sun, which not only sets out heat, but goes its circuit around the world. Thus, he who glorifies God has not only his affections heated by the love of God, but he goes his circuit too.

He moves vigorously in the sphere of obedience. Well, that God would allow by his grace today in your heart, in my heart, in our hearts, I repeat today, to burn with the heat of a thousand suns in our love for him.