For those of us who have had our hearts transformed by the grace of Christ, God’s Spirit must and will break our resistance to his commands.

Well, we’re about halfway through our series in First John. How’s everybody doing? You doing okay? As I said at the beginning, First John is near the top of the list of the most personally challenging books of the Bible. Spiritual challenge is found throughout this book. And that’s because from beginning to end, John relentlessly stays on the topic of how to know your own heart. The reason he’s writing to the church is to prevent them from falling prey to false teachers who are coming to try to mislead them. But the way he equips them, the way he gets them ready for those false teachers who are coming, and teaches them how to spot this false teacher, is by assessing their own spiritual state. So, for example, he says, watch out for people who say they walk in the light but encourage you to sin and to then say that that sin is no big deal. And the way he teaches them to see this is first he asks the question, are you walking in the light? Do you walk in the light? Are you genuinely waging war against your sin because your heart has been made new in Christ? If so, you will know what to look for. You’ll be able to spot what I’m talking about. And if not, you’re not going to spot false teaching because you’ve already embraced false teaching. So quite unsurprisingly, our passage today is yet one more description of the inner workings of our hearts and minds.

And this is an interesting passage because it’s slightly confusing, but once you untangle it and you follow what John is saying, he describes a condition of our hearts that we don’t talk about very much. And that’s resistance. He talks about resistance. This what do we do when we sense inside of us resistance to the clear commands of the Lord? Some use the phrase hardening, the hardening of our hearts. What do I do when God is giving me ‘yes’ and my heart wants to tell God ‘no’. God says go, I say stay. God says give, I say keep. I harden myself to God’s directions. What do I do in that case as a Christian? For the non-Christian, that’s just life. That’s just all the time. But for me as a Christian, what is happening inside of me and how do I then overcome it? I’m going to show you this morning that for those of us who have had our hearts transformed by the grace of Christ, God’s Spirit must and will break the resistance in our hearts to his commands. For the true Christian, the resistance won’t last. It won’t. It’ll be there for a time, but it will fade away. The hardness will break. And that’s because the Holy Spirit will conform us to obedience.

And if that doesn’t happen and the hardness persists, that’s a sure sign that you don’t have the Holy Spirit and you don’t know Christ at all. We’re in First John chapter three, verse 19 this morning. First, John is going to describe this resistant heart and what God does about it. Then he’s going to describe the restored heart. And then finally he introduces for the first time in this letter the Holy Spirit’s role in all of this. So let’s start with the problem of the resistant heart. 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. Now you’ll remember in our passage last week, John framed our Christian life in terms of loving our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. He said that since Jesus laid down his life for us, we should then lay down our lives for others. He’s saying that a heart that has been transformed by the gospel will result in a life that is shaped like the gospel. And he gave a very specific example of this. He says, if you see a brother or a sister in need and you have what they need, you’re going to jump in. You’re going to help. You’re going to be you’re going to go into that situation. The phrase John uses is ‘you will not close your heart against him’.

That’s what resistance is. See, gospel shaped love will act in gospel ways. It will compel us to just not just stand there or to look the other way, or to make excuses as to why we don’t need to be involved. We will not close our hearts against him. That’s the hardness, right? That’s resistance. You see the need. You know what God commands. You don’t do it. You refuse to do it. That’s hardness. John has been pleading with us over and over again not to fool ourselves into believing that we can live that way and still claim that Jesus is our Savior and our King. And here in verses 19 and 20, John is not leaving the topic of loving people. He’s not saying, okay, I’m going to talk about something else now. He’s not leaving the topic altogether, but he is broadening it out. He says, don’t just love with words and talk, love with deed and truth. So we’re challenged to ask then, is that true of me? Is that how I love? And to answer that, John turns away from the specific example and he says, okay, let’s talk about what’s happening inside of you. Let’s talk about what the inner workings, the machinations of your heart. By this, he says, we will know that we are of the truth. Truth here ties back to verse 18.

So he’s saying, here’s how you know that you are in fact living an authentic, a truthful Christian life. And then discovering that you are in the truth will then do what? It’s going to reassure you. It’s going to reassure your heart. You see that there in verse 19? And that’s what we all want, isn’t it? Don’t we all want reassurance? Don’t we all want to be sure of who we are? Don’t you love it when you’re in a potentially dangerous situation and then you receive some information, some bit of truth, and that then reassures you that you’re fine, that you’re not in danger at all. You know, it’s why we say to a loved one who leaves our house and drives home, we say text when you get home, right? Text me when you get home. Why? Because we want that little bit of information, that little bit of knowledge that settles your heart and assures you that everything is going to be okay. John wants us to have that assurance in our heart that we are, in fact, new creations in Christ who have received God’s grace. We are, as he says, of the truth. Now, how he gets to that assurance is the part that’s a little twisty this morning, but it’s interesting, and it’s not usually how I assure people of anything. This is not how I assure people. If you’re anything like me, the way you usually assure people of something is to assume the positive.

That’s what I do, right? So I start with the assumption that the person is probably doing all right until I hear otherwise. So somebody says, I say, how are you doing? They say, fine. I say, great, right? I said, okay, you said fine. I assume fine is how you are, right? They tell me their plans. Sounds good. I assume those plans will be fine, right? They tell me that things are going well. Glad to hear it, right? We don’t really. I don’t really need to dive in too much more to that. John starts his assurance with this, ‘whenever our hearts condemn us’, that’s his start. You get the sense that John’s not really into small talk too much? Like he wouldn’t be great at parties, you know, he’d just go really deep right away. He just got done telling us how tangible and sacrificial Christian love is supposed to be. And then he goes directly to our hearts. And what does he do? He assumes that there is going to be resistance to that. He assumes resistance. That there will be times when we’re not going to want the thing that he just told us. He knows that God’s command to love in a gospel-shaped way is going, at times, to pass through our ears and bounce off of our stubborn hearts.

If you have ever been thrilled with the benefits of God’s grace, but then challenged to accept the high call of living in obedience, showing grace to others, forgiving people, loving your enemies, sacrificing your time and money for the sake of the mission of Christ. If you’ve ever had any of that resistance, then you know why John starts with this. The believer in Jesus is no longer a slave to sin. Okay? If you trust in Jesus, you are no longer bound down to sin. You have been set free. The world, the flesh, and the devil have no actual power over you anymore. But the remnants of the sinful patterns of our old lives are hard to change. We are new creations, but we are living in weak bodies and we are surrounded by temptations. We are surrounded by foolishness. And this is why we have sections of Scripture like Ephesians six, where we are told to put on the full armor of God. It’s why Paul tells us to take every thought captive, to press on toward the goal of the upward call of Christ. See, God knows that sin is still going to influence our heart and harden us against obedience at times. Resistance to God’s commands comes from a gap. Okay? There’s a gap. There’s a gap between who we are, our new identity as new creations in Christ, and our current spiritual maturity.

There’s a gap there. And the hope would be that when you experience the gap and the resistance that comes out of the gap, that you would feel God’s condemnation of your attitude. That would be the hope. And for the believer, you will. You will experience that. John assumes it here. That’s why he says, whenever. Not if. Okay. Whenever. Not if your heart condemns you. Whenever it happens, John knows not only is this going to happen, it’s probably going to happen regularly. Now, the condemnation that John describes here is not the final condemnation or judgment that Paul talks about in various places. But in Romans chapter eight, when he wrote ‘there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’. He’s thinking there of final judgment, final condemnation. If you are trusting in Jesus, that’s gone, okay? That’s not in your future anymore. John is talking about the conviction that a believer feels when he’s resistant to God’s direction. Here’s some strange comfort for you this morning. If you are regularly feeling the sting of condemnation over the times you failed to live in obedience to God, that is great news. That is great. If you’re regularly feeling bad when you are disobedient to the Lord, that is good news for you because it means that God is at work in you. If you are never broken over your sin, you are always right, You’re always ready with an excuse, always the Victim of others, never the perpetrator, and never feel inadequate before God, that’s because you don’t know him. You don’t know God. You couldn’t know the true God and feel that way all the time. A truly saved and transformed person is going to feel the inadequacy of coming up short. You’re going to feel the pain of your own stubbornness toward God. And when we do, John says, here’s the solution. Here’s the solution to all of it. God is greater than your heart, and he knows everything. Now, this phrase is a little bit hard to interpret. In what sense is God greater, bigger, louder than our heart? The key here is to remember that John is talking about a condemned and convicted heart. Okay. Keep it in context. It’s a heart that struggles to want what God wants. A heart that fails to love what God loves. And when you remember that’s what he’s comparing to, it clears it up. The whole gospel, the whole gospel is the powerful antidote to that condemnation. That the power of God at work in you will overcome this hardened, resistant heart. That’s what Jesus did to save us. That’s the whole gospel. He triumphed over sin and death. We would succumb to it and be condemned forever, but in Christ we have victory over sin and death. So when I am resistant to God, and I feel myself hardening toward his commands, what I need to do, what you need to do, is rehearse the gospel in your mind.

You got to remember who you are and what God has done for you. That prick of conviction in my heart is God’s way of getting me to remember and apply the gospel that is greater than my sin. It’s stronger than my own resistance. See, my inclination when I sin, is to hide my sin, or excuse it, or defend it, or explain it away. But God is not fooled by this because John says, God knows everything. God knows you’re not hiding anything. You’re not excusing anything from God. He knows you better than you know yourself. He knows all the truth deep down into who you are. The only proper response to the condemnation that we feel when our hearts resist God’s call to sacrificial obedience is to repent and to remember, and then to rest in the powerful work of Jesus that is greater than our sin. And here’s what happens when we move from a resistant heart to a restored heart. 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. Notice first how John says in verse 20, whenever our heart condemns us. And then here he says, if our heart does not condemn us. Okay. So he assumes first of all, that our hearts will condemn us at times, and then the God who is greater intervenes. And then our hearts are no longer condemning us. He assumes that there’s a process that’s taking place. And I gotta tell you, church, that process is the Christian life. That’s the Christian life. It’s stumbling forward toward greater Christ-likeness. It’s living in victory over sin through the power of God’s great gospel at work in us. That’s the process. We’re hardened against him, God intervenes, we repent, we trust, we become more like Jesus. So if you come to me and you say that you’re struggling with sin, I will tell you that that struggle is good. That’s the first thing I’ll tell you. That’s step one. Step one is conviction. But don’t stop there. Don’t stop at step one. Step two is letting the weight of that conviction drive you to Jesus. Remember, your sins went to Jesus on the cross. There is no final judgment against even this resistance that you’re feeling against God. You now stand with Christ, which means that with the full weight of the gospel behind you, you can kick sin in the teeth. You can overcome it. You can kill it. But don’t stop there. Don’t stop there. Step three is to walk with Christ in victory and confidence, as John says here. I want to pause here just for a moment and dwell on this phrase that we have here ‘confidence before God’, ‘confidence before God’. You know, the religions of the world and the secular worldviews of our day do not offer confidence before God. World religions offer God, but not confidence. They offer a series of religious practices and hoops that you can jump through so that you can take a shot at being accepted by God. You can’t really have confidence because your future judgment is based on your inconsistent effort. Could you imagine if your whole confidence was in you before God? Oof. That’s what world religions offer. Secular worldviews offer confidence, but no God. So if you remove God as the source of objective truth and create your own reality, complete with your own set of values and morals, you can have total confidence that you’re living just fine. All you have to do is ignore the overwhelming amount of evidence for an intelligent designer and clear moral objectivity and all the historical evidence for the resurrection and reign of Christ. You just put all of that aside and you can have confidence. Why? Because you get to move the goal posts anywhere you like, and you always are fine. Secular worldviews and world religions fall short. They cannot offer the full package together. And that’s why the Bible is so amazing. It. It offers us something utterly remarkable, totally unique. The ability to stand before the true Creator of the universe with total confidence that despite your failings, you are accepted. And that’s because your confidence isn’t one through your efforts, and it’s not lost through your failures. It is bought for you by Jesus. And it is given to you as a free gift. And when you have this confidence before God, you can live right now boldly and faithfully. John says, whatever we ask, we receive from him because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. Now, if I were to take that line out of context, out of the letter, you know, just take that line, that sentence by itself, it sounds pretty transactional, doesn’t it? Right. If I keep God’s commandments well enough, he will give me what I want, right? It’s like treating God like a bank, you know? I just keep making deposits with God, and eventually I can start making withdrawals and get my funds back as needed. But that’s not what John is saying here at all, because he’s describing something completely different. He’s describing the loving relationship we have with God as part of his family. My confidence before God means I know that he hears me when I pray and when I ask for what I need.

I know. I know he hears me and he then takes care of me. We don’t exploit God. We commune with God. We’re in his family. It’s just like your family, probably. I mean, mostly, right? Everyone works together to live in harmony together, right? Hopefully that’s what’s sort of taking place in your house. That’s what we’re called to do, right? Your kids then make requests and then you grant the ones that are blessings and that make sense, and you say no to the ones that are not in their best interest. Right. My daughter wants a ride to a friend’s house. Fine. I can do that. My daughter then wants a ride home from her friend’s house when I am tired. Okay, sure, we can do that. She’s also put in a request for me to buy her a Bronco Sport. Nope. Nope, not doing that. Nope. Her first car is going to be much older and cheaper for her own good. So when she bumps into things, inevitably, right? It’s not the end of the world, right? As we repent of our resistance to God and His commands, our confidence before him is strengthened and emboldened, which makes us want to listen to him. It makes us want to obey him even more faithfully. And that’s the cycle of spiritual growth. As he commands, we obey. As we obey, our confidence before God and our trust in him grows.

The more our trust grows, the more we want to know his commands. That’s how his instructions become a delight to us. A delight. The resistance in our heart drops as we see and experience and enjoy the fellowship that we have with God when we listen to him. That’s how the psalmist in Psalm 119 can write this. With my whole heart I seek you. Let me not wander from your commandments. I don’t want to wander away from your commandments because I’m seeking you with my whole heart. Church. Does your whole heart seek God and His commandments? You see, I seek after God. Yeah. Do you seek after his instruction? Do you want his guidance in your life? If we want God, we want direction and instruction. Faithfulness then becomes a joy. God commands. We sacrificially love our fellow Christians. Why? Why does he do that? Is it because God wants to annoy us and put us out? No. It’s because by sacrificing for others, we come to know and understand and enjoy the Savior who sacrificed himself for us. See, my knowledge of the gospel is deficient until I live out the way that God has commanded me. And then I come to know Jesus even more. Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God, and God in him. So if your heart is resistant to the commands of God. There are only two ways things can go.

You will either remain resistant and harden yourself against Him, and prove that you are not transformed by Christ and have no relationship with God at all. Or you will call out your own heart. You will point at your own heart and say, no, this is not going to be the way it is. You’re going to break that resistance and thereby prove that you truly have a mutually abiding relationship with God through Jesus Christ. But I have to say, church, this is pretty tough. It is hard to spot the hardness in our own hearts. That can be very, very difficult. See, we have a tendency to wander very far from obedience to God’s Word because we move by degrees. We give ourselves excuses for why we’re still faithful when we’re clearly not faithful anymore. And it’s not usually because we don’t know what God’s Word says. It’s usually because we think that our lack of faithfulness is not really so unfaithful. My family and I experience a wonderful illustration of this on a regular basis, because we see it in our dog, Chewy. We don’t like when Chewy runs around our feet under the table when we’re having dinner. Or I should say, I don’t like it when Chewy runs around our feet underneath the dinner table. And so we have trained Chewy at mealtimes to go to his bed, which sits across the room.

Now he can still, we can still see him. He’s still sort of part of us or whatever, but he’s across the room and he has to stay there until we’re done. And then what happens is we when we get done, we verbally release him usually by saying, okay, Chewy. And he gets up. And he knows the rules. He knows the rules. In fact, he knows them so well that he will often go straight to his bed, unprompted, as we start to move toward the dinner table. He knows what’s coming, but every once in a while, we start to see this. Every once in a while, I took this picture from the dinner table. This week, my family was like, what are you doing? I said, illustrating a sermon. This is what I’m doing. And so you’ll see here in this picture that he is technically still in the bed. His back legs are still touching and kind of in the bed. This is absolutely what he is hoping that we will think. That he will say, that, see, my legs are still in here. By the way, it looks like he’s sleeping. He is not. He is looking me square in the eye right now saying, you see those legs, right? You see that they’re still back in there. Now, has he obeyed? Has he obeyed? By the letter of the law? Perhaps, but certainly not by the spirit.

But maybe he just needs to stretch, and sort of he stretched out, and this is just sort of what happened. Okay. Clearly now, clearly now, we are outside the letter of the law here. I think we would all agree on this. Right. We’re outside the letter. Again, still full stare at me. Those eyes are looking right at me. At this point, he is bed adjacent. Which means he’s obedience adjacent. He’s in the ballpark of what obedience to the command might look like, but he’s resistant to actually carrying it out. But you will say to me, Kyle, Kyle, now, look, it was such a hot week. It was such a hot week. Surely that wood floor is cooler than that bed. He’s probably trying to be obedient as he can be under these special circumstances. Have you ever seen a dog army-crawl across a wood floor before? Neither have I. Because he waits till we’re not looking to make these moves. We just look up and, ‘oh, look where he is now’. Wow! Can we do now do away with the story here that says Chewy is just trying to be obedient and he just can’t because of his exceptional circumstances going on in his life. Right? But you say, Kyle, he’s such a good boy. He’s such a good boy. Okay, clearly he’s resistant to the command, but maybe, maybe he’s confused.

Maybe he doesn’t quite remember where he’s supposed to be. It can be so confusing. Maybe he doesn’t quite know what the command actually was. Maybe. Maybe he needs more information. That’s probably it, right? He needs more information so that he can be faithful. So he would know what faithfulness would look like. He’s not hardened in his heart. He’s just uninformed. Chewy, bed. Oh, he knows exactly what the command is. He knows exactly where he’s supposed to be. He just doesn’t want to be there. Have you ever seen a more dejected walk back to faithfulness? That little face just slumps down on the bed like, umph, I don’t want to do this. Right. That’s priceless. He knows exactly what is required of him. It just isn’t his joy and delight, yet. He doesn’t delight in the command. God has commanded that we believe in the name of Jesus Christ and love each other the way Christ loves us. Deeply, sacrificially. This is for our good. It’s for our joy as we participate in the family of God. And when we find ourselves cells resistant to the theology of the gospel or to the practical outworkings of the gospel. We need to turn once again to God, who is greater than our stubborn hearts. We need to be willing to let others point out that stubbornness, too. And that can be very difficult to have someone else point out to you where you are not being faithful and you are resisting what God has said.

Part of growing in spiritual maturity is listening to fellow Christians when they point out just how far from faithfulness our resistance has caused us to stray. We need to be sensitive to the leading and the conviction of the Holy Spirit. And that’s how John ends this section. And by this we know that he abides in us by the Spirit whom he has given us. This is the first mention of the Holy Spirit in the letter. It’s the beginning of a section where he’s going to describe the work of the Holy Spirit in us. For instance, next week we’ll look at what it means to be spiritually discerning and to know the difference between the work of demons and the Spirit of God. So there will be a lot more to say about the Holy Spirit in the coming weeks. But here he introduces the Spirit’s work by saying, it’s the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believer that confirms that we abide in God. So when you repent of your sin and you give your life to Jesus, what happens is you are born again by the Holy Spirit. He makes you spiritually alive. You were dead before. Now you’ve come alive. And that’s hard for us to grasp because you can’t see the Holy Spirit. Jesus describes the Holy Spirit’s movement and his work in John chapter three as like the wind.

We hear its sound, but it’s mysterious to us. We can’t see the Holy Spirit. But if you’re truly a new creation in Christ, you will see and feel the effects of the Spirit’s work in your heart. And one of those jobs that he does in us is that he gives us the confidence that we are, in fact, abiding, remaining connected to God. By this we know, he says, this is how we know, by the Holy Spirit’s presence. We know that we are in a forgiven, binding and sealed relationship with God. In God’s family forever. But again, you can’t see the wind. What is the evidence of the Holy Spirit’s presence in you? Well, it would take another sermon to describe all of the ways that the Holy Spirit works in us. But I’ll just limit it to the two that we find in our passage this morning. John says, the first commandment God gives us is to believe in the name of Jesus Christ. That means to put your faith in his saving work. You cannot do that unless the Holy Spirit makes you spiritually alive. So your trust and your rest in Jesus is evidence that you have the Spirit. And the other thing that the Spirit does in this passage is bring conviction, that conviction that we’ve been talking about this morning, the Holy Spirit convicts us of our sins.

That’s the power of God that is greater than your heart. If you’re deeply convicted over your resistance to God and it draws you into repentance, that’s the Holy Spirit at work in you. Thank you, God, that you have not left us without the evidence of your Spirit to confirm our faith and give us every confidence to stand before you. Right. This week, church, I want you to fight back against your resistant heart. I want you to fight back hard against the resistance that you feel in your heart. Work hard in prayer, okay? Work hard. We don’t think about prayer as work. Sometimes it’s work. God, don’t leave me like this. Work in me. Have you ever thought about prayer as work in your heart? It is. We pray to align our hearts with God’s will, with the Spirit’s work in us. So, ask God openly, plainly, boldly to show you where his commands have fallen on your deaf ears, where you’ve been resistant to what he’s commanded us in Scripture. Ask him to expose the sins that you protect ferociously. That’s hard to do, isn’t it? Say, God, I know I’m protecting my sin. I know I’m stubborn. Peel it back. Penetrate this stubborn heart. Ask him to show you where the power of the gospel and the conviction of His Spirit must be greater than your hardened heart. Let’s pray right now.

Podcast (sermons): Play in new window | Download