Distinguishing Marks of Believers (1 John 5:16–21) from South Woods Baptist Church on Vimeo.

Our students have been reading and discussing Jackie Crowe’s excellent book, This Changes Everything. She begins the book with a helpful analogy. Things change when a sibling is born or you get a job or graduate from school. Things change but not everything changes. Those kinds of things affect certain aspects of your life. The job involves 9–6 and graduation certifies academic achievement. But life continues with a little wrinkle here or there by these temporal events of life. But not everything changes.

Yet when we come to believe the gospel of Jesus Christ everything changes. That’s why John can write, “He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life” (1 John 5:12, italics added). It’s why Paul declares, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Cor 5:17, italics added). Peter explains this as an act of God’s great mercy that “has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Pet 1:3). Consequently, he says that it’s just like we’re “newborn babies,” like “aliens and strangers” in this world (2:1; 11).

That’s a far cry from the occasional pew sitter that has jumped through a few religious hoops to satisfy himself that he is a Christian, while knowing nothing of this new birth, new creation life. Knowing God through Christ changes everything. But what does that look like?

John spells out this kind of Christ-transforming life to counter the gnostic-inclined former members of the Ephesus church that had left with a swagger and determined antipathy to the revelation of God in Christ. They denied Jesus as the Son of God that came in the flesh; they rejected the necessity of the God-Man atoning for sin at the cross; they substituted a mysterious religious knowledge for faith in Christ [I. H. Marshall, NICNT: The Epistles of John, 253–254]. Yes, they were different in the way that they lived in relationship to others and to God—different than Christ’s followers. But not with the kind of difference that Jesus Christ through the gospel makes in all who trust in Him.

John ends this letter by identifying five changes that mark those transformed by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

1. Jesus changes relationship toward others

One of the great hallmarks of John’s Gospel and Epistles is his emphasis on loving one another. He quotes Jesus who said, “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). In contrast, John tells us, “The one who says he is in the Light and yet hates his brother is in the darkness until now. . . . The one who does not love [implication is love God and one another] does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 2:9; 4:8). Positively, he writes, “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” (4:7).

This kind of love aims to serve others; it notices needs and seeks to remedy them; it looks for ways to encourage and spur others to love and good deeds (Heb 10:24). But in the context of our passage, John shows another angle of the way that we love one another. Our relationship toward others has been so changed by Christ that we intercede in prayer for our brothers and sisters.

He has already told us that the confidence of one in Christ is found around God’s throne, so that “if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked from Him” (5:14–15). Now he applies it.

The believer sees and prays

Three uses of if seem to show a progression (vv. 14–16): if we ask God hears; if we know that God hears we receive; Since we receive from Him then, if we see our brother committing a sin we pray. Love calls for action. John proceeds to give an example of how this is worked out in practice. “If anyone sees h[...]