You Will Go To Heaven (1st John 5:13)

Introduction

I would like you to think about where you are right now. What if the Lord returns today and concludes all of this?

Do you have confidence that you’ll go to heaven? Or if he were to suddenly appear, would you cower somewhere in the corner in fear that destruction is coming? How confident are you? I started thinking about this idea a few weeks ago. I’m supposed to preach it last week. Because I talk to a lot of people who don’t have much confidence about where they’re going. Is that the way it’s supposed to be? Feeling like you’re always teetering on the brink. One little slip and off to hell you go. Or as Christians, are we to have more confidence than that? What is all the false confidence about? What is all the lack of confidence about? I think there are people on both ends of that spectrum. People who think they’re going to heaven who probably shouldn’t, and people who don’t think they’re going to heaven who probably should.

Where are you? Where’s the right balance? I want you to strike the right balance. That’s the purpose of this sermon. I think Christians are supposed to think confidently about where they’re going. John says in 1 John chapter 5 and verse 13, I’ve written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God. Now hold on to that phrase. I mean, that’s critical. Whatever that means, the name of the Son of God, all that he is, all that he represents, you believe in that. He who believes in the name of the Son of God, I write these things to you. Look at this. In order that you may know that you have eternal life. And again, I know it’s very easy to go from that and say, oh, I believe in Jesus.

I believe, you know, he’s the Savior of the world, therefore it’s I’m still delivered. No sweat, no problem. Well, you’re going to have to let John define some of this for us. Go back earlier to 1 John chapter 1 and verse 6 and look at this first phrase. If we say that we have fellowship with him, now that’s the goal. You have fellowship with God, he comes to end all this, you’re going to go to heaven. If we have fellowship with God, and yet walk in darkness, now that’s not a slip or a step or a stumble that happens from time to time that we can rectify, but that’s walking in the darkness. And he’s clear about that in chapter 2 and 3. Walking in the darkness, he says, we lie.

You say you have fellowship with God, but you’re lying. Because you do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, and the scriptures are clear to explain what walking in darkness is, what walking in light is, if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, okay, model Jesus’ behavior, good idea. We have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his son cleanses us from all sin. And that’s what we need.

In 1 John, and I’ve talked about this before. I think I’ve mentioned it several times since we taught 1 John. But I do not hesitate to mention it again. Because what we have in this tiny little epistle from the Apostle John is a cycle of three critical tests that he keeps repeating, beginning in chapter 1, he repeats it several times, several cycles of this throughout 1 John. And it becomes clear when you once you notice these cycles, you see him repeating it over and over again throughout the epistle. And we’ve talked about this. Some of you probably know what I’m going to put up here. No, it’s been a while since I taught it. But three critical tests, test number one. There is the moral test.

There must be, and as 1 John 1 and verse 6 and 7 was telling us, there must be a determined walk in holiness. Not a perfect walk. Not never assumed, never a slip. The Bible talks about that. John talks about that in 1 John chapter 2. If we sin, we writes these things that we may not sin, but if we do, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. So what we’re talking about is a determined walk in holiness. First test. Second test, the social test, attitudes toward and treatment of others. And considering what’s happened here in the last week, I think some would probably look at the social test as the test of Christianity. That is one of the tests. One of three tests.

And all three are important. Yes, this social box, we’ve got to get that right, attitudes toward and treatment of others. But again, the moral test, a determined walk in holiness is a critical test, too. And then finally, he talks about what I call the convictions test. We must maintain sound beliefs about God, about Jesus, and his word. We must think about those things appropriately. Interesting. I thought thinking about this little chart. Church going isn’t a box. And the reason why I make that observation is a lot of folks think I go to church, check. I’m ready for heaven. Well, that may or may not mean that our convictions are what they should be, that we’re complying and accomplishing the social and the moral test just because we show up at a religious assembly.

Many will say unto me, Lord. So church going isn’t one of the boxes, but it’s included in the boxes. Okay. Somebody says, Well, you’re already making me feel worse, not better. Well, if we can boil down a right response to God, that’s what I was thinking about. How can we boil it down for people? How can we develop confidence? A right kind of confidence. If I, if you walk out of here this morning and you have a false competence, I’m in danger of the judgment. I don’t want to encourage that. I don’t want you to think you’re saved if you’re lost. I don’t want you to think you’re lost if you’re saved. And that’s why I’m preaching this.

But if we can boil it all down, and Christina was telling me this when I was telling her about this idea that I had. She goes, well, here it is right here. Mentioned in several of the narratives as we’ve been looking at our synoptic accounts this morning, not just the Mark narrative. The greatest commandment. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. The second is likened to it, love your neighbor as yourself. A lot of folks know that. That’s the right answer. But he told the fellow in Mark chapter 12, you are not far from the kingdom of God, though he gave the right answer. And says, even burnt offerings and sacrifices alone are not enough. Okay. So he knows it’s more than just saying, I love God.

It’s more than burnt offerings and sacrifices. It’s whatever that means. Love God and love others. That’s the right response. And so I’ll just stop here and say, you get this right, you’re going to heaven. You love God and love others, you’re going to heaven. But that’s more than a correct answer. That’s what, okay, you need to love God and love others. You still might not be in the kingdom. Just because you give the right answer. Jesus might say to you’re close. That’s good. Some people can’t give that answer. You’ve given the answer. That’s great. But you’re not there yet. You are not far from the kingdom of God. Well, what do we mean by love God and love others? Well, of course, we must love by God’s definition.

You know, we can talk about what we think love is. We can be satisfied with how we’re responding and call it love, but unless God agrees with what we’re calling it, unless it measures up to the definition of love, and how are we going to get that definition? What why did he tell the fellow you’re not far from the kingdom of God? Because there were some things and attitudes, some practices that he had to maintain in his life in order for him to be able to say truthfully, I love God and I love others. A good Samaritan story might have a relation to this commandment. So it’s love by God’s definition. Well, how are we going to know what that is? Well, Jesus said, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

Living, that involves real living that leads to eternal living, comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. So now you’re back to the problem that you started with in your introduction. You were trying to boil this down, and now you’ve said, I’ve got to know every passage of the Bible. Well, that’d be a great goal. And I’ll just tell you digest as much of it as you can. So these people are so crazy about Bible study here. They’re Bible studying all the time. Well, because we’re trying to digest all the information that leads to life. And I don’t know about you, but my rememberer isn’t too good sometimes. I need refreshing, and as I get older, I need more. I forget the things I learned last week.

And so. Pardon my poor English and grammar at this point, trying to relate to the audience.

We’re out here in the sticks, you know, in Decker Prairie. So we need to do the will of God. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the will of God. But if we could somehow summarize it in a few passages. That one might be a little too much. That love God and love others. That’s what the whole thing is about. Everything that Paul wrote, all 13 epistles. But could we boil it down to a few verses that sort of summarize what it means to love God and love others? And the practice of these verses, like we can say about Mark 12. You do this, you’ve got to go to heaven. I want to look at a few of those verses.

Maybe you can take these four in a package and concentrate on their application in your life if confidence and certainty lacks. For you. Let’s pray together. Our Heavenly Father, as we’ve come to you a number of times today, we come to you about this lesson this morning. We want to live confidently before you. We want to know our home is with you eternally. We pray that you would help us and guide us and help me as I teach this. We want to live confidently, but we don’t want to be falsely overconfident. Help us to strike the right balance. Help us to clearly see your will for us and how we ought to respond to you and to others.

1. Set Your Heart to the Task

So that we can walk in this world in a way that we can know where our destination will be in the next. We pray for help and guidance in Jesus’ name. Amen. And so as I started thinking about this, could I get this into four verses? Well, four different places, a total of six verses, but four different texts that would get us to heaven. That would help us to love God and love others in a way that pleases him. And I’ve got to tell you, this first verse is the one that sparked the whole thing. Somebody mentioned it. I don’t know, it wasn’t a lengthy drawn-out conversation, but somebody mentioned this recently, and it just struck me in a different way. It’s the example of Ezra in Ezra chapter 7.

I bet you weren’t expecting me to go to Ezra. Ezra 7 and verse 10. Again, I want to put these verses in a package, and I want you to work with them together. Okay, Ezra 7 and verse 10. For Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the Lord and to practice it and to teach his statutes and ordinances in Israel. Now, Ezra served in a special way as God’s priest, as a leader, but it occurs to me that’s really the call of the New Testament for us as His disciples, as Jesus’ disciples as well. We’re set our heart to the task. He set his heart to study the law of the Lord. But not just to become a theologian, not just to be able to give right answers, like the lawyers who came to Jesus and asked him about the greatest commandments.

He set his heart to practice it. He set his heart to the accomplishment of the task. And then to impart to others what he knew about a right response to God. It just occurs to me that’s where we have to start. No one comes to the Lord who does not first set his or her heart to the task of knowing God’s will. And the problem in our culture. The problem with many who are in Christ, the problem why some don’t have confidence and some shouldn’t have confidence, is they’ve not set their heart to the task. They’ve not set their affections on things above. Perhaps they were in the past, but now their affections are everywhere. And there are so many things to give your affections to in our place, in our time, in our culture, other than that which gives us confidence and hope of heaven.

Next Lord’s day, Lord willing. If another hurricane doesn’t come our way. And it might.

We’ve got to package it as a theme. We’ve got to advertise it, you know. And that’s the hardest part for me is to come up with what I’m going to do, the sermons I’m going to preach. And Sherry and I were out for a walk one day before the storm, and we came up with this idea. So since you’ve never heard it, I thought, well, I’ll just throw it in here. It’s called unearthing godly passion. Sort of fits with some things that they’re doing with the congregation over there in Athens. And I really think that’s what we need to concentrate on in this first point. We need to take the clutter away and focus our passion on God and the accomplishment of his work in our place in our time.

Set our hearts to that.

2. Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit

It’s so important. And when you look at where Ezra is in Judah’s history on the heels of a national tragedy. Babylonian captivity and the return from captivity, this was an educational period in Judah’s history. And now he’s in a place to shape the lives of other people, and he first gives attention to himself. There is no higher mission in your life than to set your heart. As Ezra did. Verse number two. And this is where Lucy nearly threw a kink into the whole thing. How could she pull up that verse in the class? But she did. The beginning of the Beatitudes. Can you set your heart to know the will of God, to implement it in your life, to help others to know it? Where does all of that begin?

Let’s start with the Beatitudes and the very first one. Blessed are the poor in spirit. And the reason why this verse came to mind is because of what follows. The person who does this, his is the kingdom of heaven. That says something about certainty, doesn’t it? I tell people all the time, you get poor in spirit right, you’re going to heaven. You maintain poor in spirit, you’re there. May I suggest even before Matthew 5 and verse 3 was written, that’s where Ezra was. Blessed are the poor in spirit. When you get down to all the details of what God wants us to do, and all those are important. We shouldn’t leave any of those undone. He tried to explain that to the Pharisees, but when you get down to all the details, if you get this right in your heart, all of that follows.

Everything that follows in the Beatitudes follows. Matthew chapter 5 and verse 3. The hungering and thirsting after righteousness, which sort of goes back to Ezra 7, verse 10. Matthew 5 and verse 6. Blessed are the peacemakers, the pure in heart. All of that starts first with the right disposition of mind. Now here’s something.

Glad you’re cluing in. Well, I got news for you. You aren’t the center of the universe either. So we’re all in the same boat. You know that’s the malady of our times. There’s a lot of folks out there that the center of their world is me, myself, and I. Perhaps a storm like this awakens us to how powerless me, myself, and I is. That’s right. And I’ve got to tell you.

God is.

I hope not anyway. I’m going to be here because I’m not the center of the universe. God is. And we start talking about people’s problems and attendance. And I know some of you won’t be back here tonight. I know you’ve, especially some of you have been displaced by the storm. I don’t know what you’re going to do. But here’s the thing. If you’re a member here and you can make it here, you need to be here. Not because of some kind of duty or obligation, because the elders are going to be on my back, Tony’s going to be preaching about it. That’s not why. We sometimes talk about missing assemblies, and we talk about this and talk about that and beat people over the head as guilt of them to be in here.

3. Buried With Him in Baptism

Look, it’s all about the fact that you’re not the center of the universe. God is. And there’s too many people among the Lord people that don’t have God at the center of the universe. That’s my rant on that. The correct posture of mind is essential to godliness. And there’s very little in the media that’s going to help you to develop that. That’s going to expose you to that. That’s my job here today. We need to work on our disposition about things. Okay. But there is this activity that has to be accomplished for our sins to be forgiven initially. I don’t see any way around this activity with the right disposition of heart in order to be saved. Having been buried with him in baptism, Colossians 2 and verse 12, then I have these words underlined, in which, okay, whatever buried with him in baptism means in likeness of Jesus’ death and his resurrection, I’m going to come to life, buried with him.

I identify with him in baptism. A lot of other passages explain the nature of baptism, that it’s in water, that it’s a submerging, it’s for the purpose of cleansing. But so he says here, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were raised up with him. You’re not going to heaven without that. Just as he rose to life, we’ve got to rise to life. Raised up with him through faith, our confidence in the working of God who raised him from the dead. I believe Jesus rose from the dead by the power of God, and I believe in this act. He’s going to raise me up to walk in newness of life. I was dead in my transgressions, and the uncircumcision of my flesh. That was before I was buried with him.

But he made you alive together. Now that sounds like that sounds like good, doesn’t it? Certainty. I’m made alive. Together with him, having forgiven us all of our transgression. What about that circumcision business? Now he’s talking about men and women, so he’s not just talking, he’s not talking about physical circumcision. But what about what about my flesh was uncircumcised? What did circumcision mean to the Jews? When you were circumcised. You were a Jew. That was your identification with the promises made to Abraham. You. You are an Israelite. You are not the uncircumcised anymore. You’re the circumcised. You’re in the class of the saved. In baptism, the world gets cut away from us. And we become the new circumcision. We become identified with Jesus own. It is the culminating step of faith that places us in Christ.

And if we’re a sinner, we can’t get to heaven without it.

4. Be All the More Diligent

And then once you’re in Christ. That’s my fourth verse. Okay, we got the right disposition of heart, really reflected in the first two passages, setting our heart, becoming poor in spirit, putting God as first in our hearts and lives, putting Jesus on in baptism. Now what? A lot of us are there. A lot of us have done that. We might still be working from time to time really diligently on Ezra 7 10 and Matthew 5 3. We’ve got to keep working on that the rest of our lives. I don’t think you ever get to a point where you say, Matthew 5 3, I got that one. I got that one. Don’t need to work on that anymore. It’s sort of like the tongue that no man can tame.

You’ve got to be after it all the time. How about 2 Peter chapter 1 to conclude this morning? This sounds like certainty, doesn’t it? Therefore, brethren, be all the more diligent. May I just stop and say here? You’re going to have to give this some effort. Is that all base? Am I out in left field? Therefore, brethren, be all the more diligent to make certain about his calling and choose. Well, that sounds like we can earn salvation. That’s not what this passage is saying. Make certain about his calling and choosing you. What’s going to reflect that I’m one of his chosen ones? Because I’ve set myself to this task of having the right heart and doing the right things and being the right kind of person.

Because I’ve set myself to that. That’s an evidence. Like being here today is a part of that evidence that says, I’m committed to the Lord. I’m chosen. You need to make certain about his calling and choosing you. For as long as you practice these things, oh, the Tony, he’s so sly. See? I gave you two verses, but really that makes you go back to verse 5. Where he says, now applying all diligence, add to your faith. Those are the kinds of things that are involved in verse 10. As long as you practice these things, and those here’s a list right here. Moral excellence. That sounds like one of the tests we saw in 1 John. Moral excellence, knowledge. You need knowledge to know what God wants you to do.

Self-control. I think Felix was told something about that, was he not? Perseverance, you’ve got to stay at it. Godliness, you need to have God at the center. Brotherly kindness. There’s the social test. And love. If these qualities are yours and are increasing, you’re going to be fruitful. I can’t talk about certainty without talking about 2 Peter chapter 1. Verse 10 and 11. Then look at verse 11. This is great. Okay, so you’re going to stay at this task, you’re going to be diligent about it. You’re going to show yourself and others who see you. I’m a chosen one. I’ve been called by the Lord for a great task. I’m one of his saints. I’m one of his holy ones. For in this way, the entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, you might get in by the skin of your teeth.

That’s not what it says. It says, we’ll be abundantly supplied to you. Listen. You set yourself to this. And God’s going to throw open the doors of heaven for you. That’s right. Boy, we’re so glad you’re here. Come on in. You get it all. You get it all. Do you think God’s going to greet you like that? You know, if I if I asked before this sermon began, how many of us think God’s going to greet you like that on the last day? Most of us probably wouldn’t raise our hands. If you’re pursuing these things, that’s a shame.

Conclusion

I write these things that you may know that you have eternal life. I’ll tell you why you don’t want to miss heaven. Because there’s a relationship that’s going to exist between God and His people that is unlike any relationship on earth. Not even close. I could stop right here. That’s why you don’t want to miss heaven. But that’s not all. And I would just say that each one of the things I’m about to put up there is enough reason in and of themselves. But you get the whole enchilada as we say here in Texas. Thrilling worship. I’m so edified by worship. I love the songs that we sing, even though some of them I don’t know very well.

I am thrilled by worship. We’re talking about the perfect expression of that. Where we can adore and praise God and get lost in praise as we sing, lost in praise for eternity and be thrilled. You ever gotten chills? How about eternal chills? I don’t know that really, we’re not going to have physical bodies, but that’s what it’s going to be like. Again, that’s enough reason all by itself. Man, it’s pictured as rest. I don’t know about you, but as I get older, I need more and more of that. Eternal rest. My favorite verse. His presence with pleasures. Joy forever. Pleasures forever. Perfect peace.

Okay.

You got some work to do. Again, I’m not your friend if I don’t tell you what you need to do.

There’s some things you have to do. You’re going to have to set your heart to the task. It’s going to involve some sweat and some work. Some good days and bad. But you’ve got to stay at it. But I’m here to tell you it’s worth it.

There’s somebody in this audience. Remember that Colossians 2, 12 and 13? Have you been buried with him in baptism? Are you ready to start the trek that leads to glory? So you can confidently say, if I die today, I’m going to be with God, and it’s going to be the greatest thing. I can’t even imagine how great it’s going to be. Can we assist you? We sing to encourage anyone’s response today. Let’s stand and see it.