Life Proved by Love

The spiritual things which we speak of are matters of knowledge.

John, in almost every verse of this epistle, uses the words “we know.”

The philosophical distinction between believing and knowing is mere theory. “We know and have believed.”

I. WE KNOW THAT WE WERE DEAD.

1. We were without feeling when law and gospel were addressing us.

2. Without hunger and thirst after righteousness.

3. Without power of movement towards God in repentance.

4. Without the breath of prayer, or pulse of desire.

5. With signs of corruption; some of them most offensive.

II. WE KNOW THAT WE HAVE UNDERGONE A SINGULAR CHANGE.

1. The reverse of the natural change from life to death.

2. No more easy to describe than the death change would be.

3. This change varies in each case as to its outward phenomena, but it is essentially the same in all.

4. As a general rule its course is as follows—

   • It commences with painful sensations.
   • It leads to a sad discovery of our natural weakness.
   • It is made manifest by personal faith in Jesus.
   • It operates on the man by repentance and purification.
   • It is continued by perseverance in sanctification.
   • It is completed in joy, infinite, eternal.

5. The period of this change is an era to be looked back upon in time and through eternity with grateful praise.

III. WE KNOW THAT WE LIVE.

1. We know that we are not under condemnation.

2. We know that faith has given us new senses, grasping a new world, enjoying a realm of spiritual things.

3. We know that we have new hopes, fears, desires, delights, etc.

4. We know that we have been introduced into new surroundings and a new spiritual society: God, saints, angels, etc.

5. We know that we have new needs; such as heavenly breath, food, instruction, correction, etc.

6. We know that this life guarantees eternal bliss.

IV. WE KNOW THAT WE LIVE, BECAUSE WE LOVE. “We love the brethren.”

1. We love them for Christ’s sake.

2. We love them for the truth’s sake.

3. We love them for their own sake.

4. We love them when the world hates them.

5. We love their company, their example, their exhortations.

6. We love them despite the drawbacks of infirmity, inferiority, etc.

Let us prove our love by our generosity.

Thus shall we supply ourselves with growing evidences of grace.

Love-Lines

Just as in his gospel he rescues the word logos from anti-christian uses, so in this Epistle he rescues the word “know,” and aims at making his “little children” Gnostics in the divine sense. Knowledge is excellent, but the path to it is not through intellectual speculation, however keen and subtle, but through faith in Jesus Christ and subjection to him, according to those most Johannine words in the Gospel of Matthew: “Neither knows any man the Father save the Son, and he to whoever the Son will reveal him.”—Dr. Culross.

The Christian apologist never further misses the mark than when he refuses the testimony of the Agnostic to himself. When the Agnostic tells me he is blind and deaf, dumb, torpid, and dead to the spiritual world, I must believe him. Jesus tells me that. Paul tells me that. Science tells me that. He knows nothing of this outermost circle; and we are compelled to trust his sincerity as readily when he deplores it as if, being a man without an ear, he professed to know nothing of a musical world, or being without taste, of a world of are. The nescience of the Agnostic philosophy is the proof from experience that to be carnally minded is death.—Professor Henry Drummond.

The world always loves to believe that it is impossible to know that we are converted. If you ask them, they will say, “I am not sure; I cannot tell”; but the whole Bible declares we may receive, and know that we have received, the forgiveness of sins.—R. M. McCheyne.

In the writings of Paul, “Faith in the Lord Jesus, and love to all the saints,” constitute a well-understood and oft-recurring sequence. It is a straitening about that upper spring of faith that makes the streams of love fail in their channels.—W. Arnot.

No outward mark have we to know

Who your, O Christ, may be,

Until a Christian love does show

Who appertains to you:

For knowledge may be reached unto, And formal justice gained, But until each other love we doe,

Both faith and works are feigned.

George Wither, 1588–1667.

Yes, brethren in Christ have all one common Father, one common likeness, one object of faith, love, and adoration; one blessed hope, one present employment; alike in trials, alike in prayer. They lean upon the same hand, appear daily before the same mercy-seat, feed at the same table. How much all these things link them together, not in profession only, but in heart! Hence this is a decisive test: “We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren.”

—D. Katterns.

In the early days of Christianity, when it triumphed over the old heathenism of the Roman world, it founded a new society bound together by this holy mutual love. The catacombs of Rome bear remarkable testimony to this gracious brotherhood. There were laid the bodies of members of the highest Roman aristocracy, some even of the family of the Caesars, side by side with the remains of obscure slaves and laborers. And in the case of the earliest graves the inscriptions are without a single allusion to the position in society of him who was buried there: they did not trouble themselves whether he had been a consul or a slave, a tribune of the legion or a common soldier, a patrician or an artisan. It sufficed that they knew him to have been a believer in Christ, a man who feared God. They cared not to perpetuate in death the vain distinctions of the world; they had mastered the glorious teaching of the Lord, “One is your master, even Christ, and all you are brethren.”—E. De Pressensé.