Notes on 1 John
Part 1, How Do You Know You're a Christian?
Out at the prison we were in the book of 1 John. There are passages in 1 John that I adore--God is love!--but I'd never done a close study of the book.
What struck me about 1 John is that a major theme of the book, perhaps its main and overriding theme, is the issue of assurance. How do you know you are, in fact, a Christian?
To start, consider how often the word "know" shows up in 1 John: 32 times in only five chapters. No epistle comes close to this sort of density. By contrast, Romans and 1 Corinthians, the two longest epistles, use the word "know" 31 and 39 times respectively.
You can trace this theme of assurance--How do you know?--through the whole letter:
"This is how we know that we know him." (2.3)
"This is how we know we are in him." (2.5)
"This is how God’s children and the devil’s children become obvious." (3.10)
"This is how we have come to know love." (3.16)
"This is how we will know that we belong to the truth and will reassure our hearts before him." (3.19)
"The way we know that he remains in us is from the Spirit he has given us." (3.24)
"This is how you know the Spirit of God." (4.2)
"This is how we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of deception." (4.6)
"This is how we know that we remain in him and he in us." (4.13)
"We have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us." (4.16)
"This is how we know that we love God’s children." (5.2)
"This is the confidence we have before him." (5.14)
"We know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know the true one." (5.20)
So, what's John's answer to the "How do you know?" question? It's a two-part answer, which I'll turn to in the next post.
1 John is kinda like the Sermon on the Mount in that I often find it either life-giving or dread-inducing depending on the mood/spiritual state I'm in. Looking forward to part 2!
Paul says he is writing to them not because they don't know the truth, but because they do know the truth. Specifically that Jesus is the Christ. And he seems to be making an argument about what it looks like to believe/know that Jesus is the Christ. He talks about not sinning while also making the point that you need to admit that you are a sinner. He talks about loving others and not despising others. He talks about listening to your heart and whether it condemns you or not. Believing, knowing, and doing seem to go hand in hand in his description. He seems to be pointing at how you behave in relation to the law, but also in relation to how you treat others, and also an inward regard of your self. It seems his description of "knowing" is multifaceted. I have a concern that your next post is going to over-simplify Pauls notion of "knowing" into something that fits into the evangelical paradigm.