Assurance
Summary
Exploring 1 John 3:18-24, Matt Crummy challenges us to imagine love not only as sentiment but as embodied action. “Let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth,” John writes—and Matt walks us through what it looks like to hold love and truth together without collapsing one into the other. He explores how genuine Christian love is not defined by emotional intensity or external performance, but by a Spirit-formed posture of active care and obedience.
Matt also addresses how this kind of love reshapes our relationship to self-doubt and guilt. When our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts. When our hearts are at peace, we are emboldened to live with confidence before God. Assurance, then, is not found in sinlessness but in a love that flows from abiding in Christ. This passage points us to a new kind of interior life—one grounded in obedience, trust, and the Spirit’s witness that we truly belong to God.
Questions for reflection
What does it mean to love “in deed and in truth” rather than just in words?
Where in your life are you tempted to substitute sentiment for action?
How might obedience flow more naturally from a place of belovedness rather than pressure or guilt?
What would it look like for you to rest more deeply in the fact that you belong to God?
How do you typically respond when your heart condemns you?
What does it mean that “God is greater than our hearts”?
How can obedience and love together deepen your confidence before God?
-
So last week we continued our series on the book of First John. We examined some of the implications of John's kind of blunt reminders that love is not just a matter of words. It's not just lip service. It's not just like good intentions, something we think love moved. It moves towards action. It's rolling up our sleeves. It's bread for the hungry, it's presence for the lonely. It's advocacy for the overlooked. It's sitting with someone in their grief. It's celebrating with a friend. It's worship in both heart and hands, you could say. But John, he doesn't stop there. He knows something else about us maybe that even when we do act, we love, in truth our own hearts can still accuse us. Maybe you've felt that before, that kind of nagging voice in your head that says you didn't do enough. You didn't do it with the right motives or in the exact right way.
Maybe you don't really belong and maybe a most foundational way you don't belong to God. But before we jump into our text today, let's pray and then we'll read together. God, we thank you so much for this time. Thank you for your word. Thank you for time together, even just time to eat and hang out afterwards. We're grateful just that that's a picture of the abundance of what's coming. In the meantime, we know that life can sometimes be really, really hard. Know that things are imperfect, situations are confusing. We just need wisdom. God, we just need that this morning. Spirit. We pray that you would lead our time, enlighten our minds, help us to move love toward action. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen. Okay, so here's one John chapter three, verse 18. And as a note, I just want to mention I'm using the CSB translation, which is abnormal.
Actually. It's HCSB. I'm not even going to get into it other than just, I think it provides some additional clarity in the structure of how it's oriented in English. Okay, here's verse 18. It says, little children, we must not love with word or speech, but with truth and action. This is how we will know we belong to the truth and will convince our conscience in his presence, even if our conscience condemns us, that God is greater than our conscience and he knows all things. So the NIV, you might read the word conscience and see the word heart or hearts, okay? So it's using that as a stand in and we'll go through that later. So here's what happens. Maybe you hear verse 18 and you really take that seriously. Okay, I shouldn't just live my life thinking nice thoughts or saying nice things, although those are good.
I need to move my feet. I need to embody love in the way we extend care to others or creation even more broadly. But here's where things begin to break down. The more you try to love in this way, the more you're going to fail. Sure, you'll do some super important things and maybe a whole host of things you maybe even be proud of. But the reality is that as you try to do anything good, there are going to be times when you fall short. Maybe you must understand a situation or offend someone. Maybe you serve someone but you have a terrible attitude and they feel patronized and the friendship is damaged. Maybe you step over the line or some boundaries ended up taking over in an area you shouldn't have. Maybe you lose your temper and get sucked into an unhealthy relationship or honestly, just a thousand other possibilities.
In short, you tried and you failed. And these things, they begin to stack up in our minds. And I was just telling someone a few weeks ago that one of the hardest parts I think about getting older is that you collect grief as you go. Memories, disappointments, tragedies, the weight of your own memory. It can feel like a lot. And that's not to diminish the good times, the good memories, of course, but this happens also with our screw ups. And so when we reread one John verse 18, with the weight of our sin, our failures, our conflicted attitudes, our broken relationships, suddenly this verse that maybe once seemed like kind of an inspiring call to Christlike love now sounds impossible. And we begin usually quite subtly I would say, to condemn ourselves. But the key is what happens next? Sort of this next move. Some may simply kind of grit their teeth and kind of white knuckle.
Their good works kind of come hell or height water. We're not going to disappoint God. They see themselves maybe as a barrier to overcome primarily others may begin to withdraw. You slowly begin to stop trying. It's just too hard, too painful to try stuff. You feel like a failure. So if you attempt less stuff, maybe you'll feel less disappointment, maybe you'll hurt less. But either way, we end up in this place where we're going into a particular voice in our heads, and that is a voice of self-condemnation. So do you see how John's argument flows here? We shouldn't only love in words with truth and action, and that is how we know that we belong to the truth. It sort of comes out of our lives and that persuades our conscience or our heart. That is true in fact, right? So we start to see stuff happen even when we fail, but when our minds are in accordance with truth, we start to realize, oh, I do belong to the truth because I'm giving my life to it even when we fail.
So even if our love in action, our embodied truth doesn't convince us that we are children of God, we are reminded that God himself is greater than our own hearts testifying against us. And that's a big deal because he knows all the facts more than you, and he knows everything, and yet he still loves you. So this morning I want to remind you of this, when we experience failure, perhaps even because of sin, we need to train our ears to listen to the voice of God and away from voices of condemnation, maybe even first and foremost, our own self condemnation. Perhaps it's where you're at this morning. Maybe your heart is a little prosecutor that you're kind of carrying around with you everywhere you go. But you and I, we need to be reminded that we don't have a final say even over ourselves. Ultimately love does because Jesus does, and the spirit of God testifies to this truth, and that's the case.
Whether you're arrogant and overconfident or you feel beaten down and feel like giving up God is overall. Now remember last week we talked about how John was writing to this kind of group of Christians who had been internally divided. There was a group, kind of a faction you might say, that had broken off because they had some sort of belief system that had kind of minimized the humanity of Jesus, so much so that they ended up diminishing the need to live lives of virtue. They were basically ready for God to take them home, but didn't see much value in loving their neighbor. They were in it for themselves in some way, and in that way, they were acting a little bit like Satan, who took all of God's gifts and then bent them inward on himself so that he rejected God as king, thus lying to himself and to the world.
Because this is essentially sort of part two of my sermon from last week, which I'm riffing on to be clear, I'm going to pick up on a few other helpful kind of I think framing concepts from this German philosopher I talked about last week named Joseph Pieper. He talks about how prudence, which is simply wisdom translated into real actions. That is, its distinct of course, from knowledge. There's a lot of information in the world, but that is quite different, I would say, than wisdom, right? You could just look on the internet for that. There's a lot of information, but maybe not as much wisdom and prudence. It requires being able to see things as they really are and then acting wisely. I have no doubt that Satan is quite intelligent, but he's not wise or prudent, but he looks that way and that's what's so confusing about evil.
It's deceitful. It promises us one thing only to turn into death later. So John is writing against this in some way against deception, against the twisting of facts, under the banner of godliness or righteousness. And I think on a smaller scale, Joseph Peiper, he addresses how this plays out in our real lives. Here's what he says. Cunning is the most characteristic form of false prudence. What is meant by this is the insidious and unobjective temperament of the intri. This could be like Satan who has regard only for tactics, who can neither face things squarely nor act straightforwardly. The meaning of the virtue of prudence, however, is primarily this, that not only the end of human action, what we're aiming toward, but also the means of its realization. The way we get there shall be in keeping with the real truth or with the truth of real things.
Okay, that's a lot. He goes on to say something important I think about our situation about false prudence. He says, all these false prudes in super prudence that's fun arise from what he calls covetousness coveting, wanting something that you don't have and are by nature akin to it. Covetousness here means immoderate straining for all the possessions which man thinks are needed to assure his own importance and status. Covetousness means an anxious senility, desperate for self-preservation, overriding concern for confirmation and security. So what can end up happening is that we go down this slow spiraling cycle of self-condemnation when we try to do the right thing and fail, and then our conscience begins to testify against us, and that leaves us in a vulnerable state to begin to try to find ways to protect ourselves. Potentially we begin to strain for things that will assure our own importance and status because these sort of foundational parts of our own identity have crumbled under the weight of failure.
But building our lives on these things means that we get sidetracked by tactics. As paper puts it, we begin to try to find shortcuts toward that good feeling that you get after you do the right thing. But that actually isn't virtuous. It's just not how Jesus works. You don't aim for the good, but do evil to get there, right? As Peter puts it, not only the end of human action, but also the means, the steps it takes to get there. The means for its realization shall be in keeping with the truth of real things. So both the journey and the destination ought to be good and in keeping with the truth, and that is the way of Jesus. So Jesus, he's greater than your self condemnation or anyone else's for that matter, greater than your failure, more powerful than sin and death. He knows it all. And even still, he steps in. And so we can have confidence before God and ask him for help. He actually invites this.
But I think what's hard is that we often, when we do fail in the means as we're trying and we strain toward the end of pleasing God, we are redoing what has been happening since humanity began, right? We're sharing in this, so we all have this, and then in that way we try to position or make ourselves out to be. We don't. We want to protect ourselves, maybe our reputations or whatever. We want to kind of pretend like that we don't all have this in common. And as far as the flow of John's argument goes, this makes sense. He moves from love and action in chapter three to false teaching in chapter four. This is like the twisting and disordering of love. It's cunning types of false prudence. We become vain. And so it makes sense for John to root us first solidly in the acceptance of God.
So again, we declare this morning that God is greater than our self condemnation or yourself aggrandizement, because remember, God loved you first. Now, notice how John ties this all together. Let's read verse 18 again. He says, little children, let us not love in word or speech, but in action and in truth, verse 19, this is how we will know that we belong to the truth and we'll reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows all things. Dear friends, if our hearts don't condemn us, we have confidence before God. See, I'm reading the NIV here. Sorry, you might've noticed the switch hearts.
He knows all things. Verse 21, dear friends, if our hearts don't condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive whatever we ask for him because we keep his commands and do what is pleasing in his sight. Now, this is his command that we believe in the name of his son, Jesus Christ and love one another as he commanded us. The one who keeps his commands remains in him and he in them. And the way we know that he remains in us is from the spirit he has given us. Okay? So there are two things to address here. One, our feelings and our conscience or our heart. So first up, feelings. So is there any place, I'm not actually asking you to close your eyes, but if you can just envision your happy place, what is a place you go that makes you happy? Maybe it's like a particular park or like a scenic overlook or taco truck that's your favorite, or a coffee shop with a friend.
Maybe it's being out on the open road on a motorcycle. I don't know, being at a theater, reading a book I wrote here the lighting section of Menards, I don't know, right? But what's interesting about these things is they all describe kind of a certain environment that we all sort of associate the feeling of happiness with this kind of particular environment. And here I'm going to borrow from Dallas Willard who I think explains this well. Here's Dallas Willard. I'm going to read this. This won't be on the screen. He says, most of the conditions we commonly speak of as feelings are not really feelings at all, but the feeling tones or sensations that accompany those conditions are so powerful that the conditions themselves become identified with the associated sensations. And we will explain this here in a second. This is true of love and hatred or contempt, for example, but also with hurry and peace and with self-esteem and discouragement.
Now, there are some extremely, I'm sorry, extremely serious dangers here. When we confuse the condition with the accompanying feeling, he says peace. For example, with the feeling of peacefulness, we're very likely to try to manage the feelings and disregard or deny the reality of the condition that way lie such things as falling in love with love, and most of the well-known addictions, the person who primarily wants the feelings of being loved or being in love will be incapable of actually sustaining loving relationships, whether with God or with other humans. And the person who wants the feeling of peacefulness will be unable to do the things that actually make for peace, especially doing what is right and even confronting evil. So as far as our planning for spiritual formation is concerned, we must choose and act with regard to the condition, good or bad, and allow the feelings to take care of themselves.
In particular, we must never directly cherish, protect, or manipulate our feelings whether in ourselves or others. Okay? So what Willard is saying is that peace isn't first a feeling we have, but a reality that we live in. You can feel calm without actually being at peace, and you can be at peace when your emotions are all over the place. So feelings come and go, but peace as a condition is sort of the steady confidence that your life is held by God Over time. When we fail or fall short, our attention drifts from the reality of what's good and true and beautiful to feelings that accompany failure, shame, disappointment, self condemnation. We start living as if those feelings are reality themself. But as Willard reminds us, feelings are powerful but not always reliable. When we confuse the condition, the state of being with the feeling, we end up trying to manage our emotions rather than respond to what's true. That's the failure condemnation loop. But in Christ, God calls us back to reality.
That's a song, isn't it? Sorry, to the condition of grace and love that exists, whether or not our feelings agree that moment. Okay? So like I mentioned that amazing feeling. You get nirvana when you walk into the lighting section of Menards, all those glowing bulbs and warm lamps. It's like stepping into a slice of heaven, especially when you're a kid. I call it Midwestern sublime for a minute. You just feel happy, kind of peaceful, inspired, but of course, nothing in you has actually changed other than you're about to save some big money. So that's pretty huge. But you're not more loving or more patient. You're just standing in an area where the lighting happens to flatter everything, and everyone, the feeling of peacefulness isn't the same as the condition of peace. Does that make sense? So what Willard is warning us about is what happens when we chase that Menards, that real high, the Menards lighting aisle feeling in our life, in our spiritual lives, perhaps when we start trying to recreate that sensation of peace instead of cultivating a life that actually produces peace.
And then when that glow fades, we think something's wrong with our faith. But what's gone missing? God's presence. It's like mood lighting, right? Here's one John three 20. It says, even if our conscience condemns us, that God is greater than our conscience, and he knows everything. So where is God inviting you to be released? Maybe from the scripts you've already written about the future, about other people, about yourself? Where are you chasing the feeling of success and maybe ignoring the substance of it formation? It isn't primarily about managing how we feel, it's about becoming the kind of person who can live in truth, maybe even no matter how we feel, and that is really hard. So how do our hearts betray us like this, and why does it even matter? Well, we talked about last week. I think it affects the way we see reality and how we interpret what is real.
It informs the process that converts knowledge or information in experience into wisdom. And we take this wisdom and connect it to good actions leading to further interpretation. And it's a cycle. So God gives us life and breath, and we take those things and make a life of it. But our ideas, they can get warped by these kind of myriad lesser gods that can compete to narrate our stories for us. So John is reating our story again through the voice of God. Lastly, I'm going to briefly touch on the idea of conscience for this. I'm going to turn back to Pieper again, and I'm going to teach you a new word. And actually it's kind of an old word, but it's probably new to you. Those of you who are in our discussion group last week, you have heard this, it's the word is the built-in moral awareness that God has given every human being, that deep kind of almost instinctual or instinctive sense that good should be done and evil avoided in some general way.
There's a lot of different ways people conceive of this, okay? This is just his. You can think of it as sort of the good or the true north in a moral compass within all people. But a compass alone doesn't get you down the road, right? That's where we need prudence. Prudence is the practical wisdom that helps you figure out what doing good actually looks like in real life situations. And Joseph Pieper, he said, these two ideas work together. Ciis gives us sort of general direction, and prudence gives us specific navigation together. They shape what we call the conscience, our kind of inner witness to what's right and true. Here's what he says. The living unity incidentally of sinus and prudence, these two ideas is nothing less than the thing we commonly call conscience prudence, or rather perfected practical reason, which is developed into prudence is distinct from this sort of general moral idea synesis, in that it applies to specific situations.
We may, if we will call it the situation conscience, just as the understanding of principles is necessary to specific knowledge. So natural conscience is the prerequisite and the soil for the concrete decisions of the situation conscience in these decisions, natural conscience comes first to definite realization. So he's just saying at the core of who we are, we all sort of share this general moral framework, even though we understand. And usually where we have disagreements is this next step. It's when things get specific. We try to define what's good. We try to bring some definition to goodness and evil. And of course this is Pieper's view, but I think it's kind of a good, I would call it a moderate theological middle ground from where to work from. Okay? So he's saying our conscience isn't just one thing, it's a combination of our basic moral understanding, knowing that we should do good and not do bad, and our ability to apply that understanding to specific situations, your conscience, it includes both universal principles that everyone knows deep down and your ability to figure out what's right in this particular moment.
So the general principles only become real and maybe even meaningful when you actually can use them to make decisions. So Pieper, he's following someone named Thomas Aquinas, and he sees this conscience idea as having both natural and supernatural dimensions. The natural conscience, again, he's using this word, it's part of how God created us. Everyone has this basic sense of right and wrong, but for Christians, this natural conscience is illuminated and elevated by the grace, by grace and the Holy Spirit. But it doesn't replace our responsibility to develop prudence through experience and careful thinking. So the Holy Spirit guides us and strengthens our conscience, but doesn't bypass our human faculties, which is crucial. Rather, he works through them and perfects them. And this is why we still need to develop wisdom, even as spirit-filled Christians. And so the reality is that our conscience must be trained, and we want that training to be done by the spirit of God.
As we walk in faith, we aren't frozen in fear. We have confidence before God because we've positioned our very lives to follow him, not the other way around. So to be clear, our conscience isn't like an oracle to obey, but it's more like a faculty to form a striking, I think even surprising partnership between God's light and human discernment. God gives every one of us a moral compass, but he also teaches us how to use it. The spirit doesn't replace our conscience. He renews it, you could say. Okay. Lastly, as we look back in one John three verse two, it says, dear friends, now we are children of God and what we will be has not yet been made known, but we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him. For we shall see him as he is all who have this hope in him, purify themselves just as he is pure.
It's a beautiful picture of our current and future transformation. And now look again maybe with a fresh perspective. One last time at today's passage, verse 18, it says, little children, we must not obey with word or speech, but with love or with truth and action. This is how we will know we belong to the truth and will convince our conscience in His presence, even if our conscience condemns us, that God is greater than our conscience, and he knows all things. Dear friends, if our conscience doesn't condemn us, we have confidence before God and can receive whatever we ask from him because we keep his commands and do what is pleasing in his sight. And this is where it all comes together. Our feelings, our conscience, sort of our ongoing formation. The goal is not to live without emotion or without moral struggle, but to have our inner life reshaped by the steadiness of Christ to see as he sees, is to love as he loves to let his vision of reality train both our desires and our conscience.
The spirit is forming in us a heart that no longer flinches under condemnation because it has learned to trust that God's knowing is greater than even our own self. Knowing that's what it means to walk in truth and action, not performing for God's approval, but participating in his way of seeing the world, clear-eyed, courageous, and full of love. Let's close in prayer. God, thank you for this morning. We thank you again for the reminder that you love us and that you loved us. First. God, we pray just that you would help us to remember this as we go out in life and try things and fail and try again and fail. God, I pray just that the scripts that we write in our heads would be rewritten by your spirit, by your view, by your perspective, by your life and sacrifice. So we thank you just that you are with us always, even to the end of the age, we acknowledge that you are here with us this morning. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
