Introduction
I don’t know about you, but I think the worst text to get from someone on a semi-regular basis is, “We need to talk,” or “Can you call later.”
If you're anything like me, the second that text hits your phone, your stomach drops. You don't even wait for context. Your brain just goes straight to worst-case scenario. What did I do? Did I say something wrong? Are they mad at me? Is this about that thing three weeks ago I thought we were fine about?
You spend the next few hours, sometimes the rest of the day, replaying conversations in your head. Scrolling back through old texts looking for clues. Rehearsing what you're going to say when you finally get on the phone. Your anxiety just keeps climbing, hour by hour, because you don't know what's coming. You're guessing. And your guesses are almost always worse than reality.
And then, most of the time, you finally get them on the phone, and it's nothing. They just wanted to ask if you could hang out next weekend. Or they wanted to tell you some good news. All that dread, all those hours of spinning, over absolutely nothing.
What strikes me about that whole experience is that the outcome never actually changed based on how much you worried. You could have spent zero minutes anxious or five hours anxious, and the phone call would have gone exactly the same either way. The only thing that changed was how much peace you had before you knew the answer.
I think a lot of us live our faith lives in that same "we need to talk" anxiety. Not over a phone call, over eternity. We wonder, deep down, if we're okay with God. We hope we are. We assume we probably are. But if we're honest, a lot of us are just guessing, and quietly bracing for the worst, the same way you brace yourself before that call. Years can go by like that. Assuming. Hoping. Never actually knowing.
God has not left you to spend your life guessing about where you stand with him, replaying your track record, wondering if you've done enough, said enough, believed hard enough. In our passage today, John says something remarkable. He tells us he wrote his entire letter for one specific reason: so that we could actually know.
Not guess. Not hope. Know. And that word shows up five separate times in the nine verses we're looking at this morning. Each time, it’s not just a passing comment, but another brick laid on top of the one before it.
Here are five truths God wants you to be absolutely sure of, and one command at the end, to help you guard them.
Truth #1: You Can Know You Have Eternal Life
I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life.
1 John 5:13 ESV
That little phrase, "these things," is doing a lot of work. John is looking back over everything he's written, four and a half chapters about love, about light, about walking in obedience, all of it. And he says, "I wrote all of that... for this."
Even though "these things" points backward at the letter, the verb points forward. That you may know isn't the conclusion of an argument John's been building toward—it’s the purpose of it. It's the reason the whole letter exists in the first place. John didn't write this letter just so we’d have good theology to admire. He wrote it so we would land somewhere. So that we may know.
I think a lot of us feel the tension of living in a culture that treats certainty like arrogance. If somebody tells you, "I know for sure I'm going to heaven," something in us wants to say, "Who are you to say that? That sounds a little full of yourself, doesn't it?" We're much more comfortable with, "Well, I hope so," or "I'm doing my best," or "I guess we'll find out."
John isn't writing to a room of arrogant people, though. He's writing to ordinary believers, and he's not scolding their humility. He's answering their anxiety. Most of us aren't worried about being too confident with God. We're worried about not being confident enough.
The Bible doesn't treat that kind of confidence as arrogance. In fact, Paul describes the Spirit himself giving believers confidence that they belong to God. in Romans Paul says:
The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God…
Romans 8:16 ESV
That's the kind of assurance John is talking about. Not confidence in how well you've performed, but confidence that God has made you his child.
A lot of us are functionally still auditioning. We're checking our performance from the last week like it's a report card. Did I read my Bible enough? Did I lose my temper with my kids again? Did that thought I had on Tuesday disqualify me from relationship with God? We're constantly taking our temperature, hoping we land somewhere in the acceptable range, instead of resting in a verdict that's already been settled.
Paul gives us another picture of what happens when we're justified by faith. Listen to how he describes what we have now in Romans 5:
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Romans 5:1 ESV
We have peace with God. This isn’t a hope that we'll have peace someday. The verdict isn't waiting on your next week's performance. It rests on what Christ has already done.
This verse is an invitation for you, this morning, to stop guessing. To stop replaying the tape. Let this be settled, so that everything else John's about to say, about prayer, about your identity, about Jesus himself, can actually build on each other
We can know! We have eternal life if we are in Christ! That is the foundation of this message today, but also the entire letter John wrote.
Truth #2: You Can Know God Hears You When You Pray
Once John establishes that you can know you have eternal life, he doesn't stop there. Look at what comes next:
And this is the confidence that we have toward him, 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 that we have asked of him.
1 John 5:14,15 ESV
Once again, we can see the chain John is building here. Verse 13 says you can know you have eternal life. Verse 14 says that assurance produces confidence, real, standing-before-God confidence, when you pray. And verse 15 says that confidence produces something even more specific: we can know our prayers are being heard. Assurance leads to confidence, and confidence leads to certainty.
That's a big claim. Because prayer doesn't always feel like a place of confidence. Sometimes it feels more like sending a message into the void and hoping something comes back. Especially when things aren’t going according to our plan.
But look at the qualifier John uses: …if we ask anything according to his will...
I think some of us have been taught to treat prayer like a vending machine. You put in the right request, say the right words, maybe add a little extra faith for good measure, and out comes the answer you were hoping for. And when it doesn't come out that way, we start to wonder if we did something wrong, or if God just wasn't listening.
That's not what John is describing here. He's not promising you answers to every request. He's promising you access, real access to a God who hears you, whose ear is turned toward you, not because you found the magic formula, but because you belong to him.
And John has said something very similar earlier in this same letter. Listen to how he connects confidence before God with prayer:
Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.
1 John 3:21-22 ESV
This isn't a brand-new idea in chapter 5. John has been building toward this all along: knowing that we belong to God gives us confidence to come before God.
So often, my own prayers sound like, "God, fix this." Fix my finances. Fix this relationship. Fix this situation at work that's been stressing me out for weeks. There's nothing wrong with bringing those things to God, he wants us to.
But those words, "according to his will," push me toward a different kind of prayer, too. Not just, "God, fix this," but, "God, change me in this." I don’t just ask him to rearrange my circumstances, but also to align my heart with his.
That's what it means to pray according to his will. It's not shrinking your requests down to only the safe, good-sounding ones. It's bringing everything to him and trusting that he knows better than you do what you need.
Paul gives us a similar picture when he talks about what happens when we bring those requests to God in Philippians:
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God... will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 4:6-7 ESV
Notice that Paul doesn't say, Once you know God will give you exactly what you asked for, then you can have peace. The peace comes from bringing the request to the Father and trusting him with the outcome.
None of this means every prayer gets answered exactly the way we hoped. Some prayers get answered with a yes. Some get answered with a no. Some get answered with a not yet. But every single one gets heard by a God who is not indifferent to you. That's the confidence John is describing. This is not a guarantee that you'll get what you asked for, but a certainty that you're never praying into silence.
Think about the people you trust with your hardest requests. It's never the people who say yes to everything. It's the people who love you enough to tell you the truth, who care more about what's good for you than about making you happy in the moment. That's the kind of access John is describing. Not a vending machine. A good Father.
If you walked in this morning feeling like your prayers just bounce off the ceiling, I want you to hear this: You have a Father who listens. Not because you said the right words, but because you belong to him through his Son.
Truth #3: What You Know About Yourself
John shifts gears here. Verses 13 through 17 have been about assurance and prayer. Now, starting in verse 18, John hands us three more "we know" statements back to back, and they're not random, they widen out, one after another. This first one is about you. The next is about the world. The last is about Jesus himself. Let's start with what you know about yourself:
We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.
1 John 5:18 ESV
Read that quickly and it can sound like a claim to perfection, as if John is saying real Christians simply stop sinning. That's not what's happening here. The phrase "does not keep on sinning," describes a pattern, not a performance record. It's the difference between someone who trips, and someone who chooses to lie down in the mud. Every believer stumbles. What John is describing is direction, the overall trajectory of a life that's been born of God, not the absence of every single failure along the way.
Here's the part I want us to catch. Look again at who's doing the protecting: "…he who was born of God protects him…" That's not you protecting yourself. That's Jesus, the one born of God in the fullest sense, keeping hold of you.
Think about the difference between something you're gripping and something that's gripping you. If you're the one holding on, your security is only as strong as your grip. Anybody who's held a toddler's hand in a parking lot knows exactly how this works. If they're the one gripping your finger, the second they spot a dog across the street, you're sprinting to catch up. But if you're the one gripping their hand, it doesn't matter how badly they want that dog, they're not going anywhere.
That's the picture here. Your assurance isn't hanging on your own ability to keep yourself sinless. It's hanging on Jesus, who holds on to you even on the days you feel like you're barely holding on to him.
Jesus gives us a very similar picture when he talks about the security of his sheep. In John’s gospel Jesus says:
My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand.
John 10:27–29 ESV
That's the same comfort we're seeing here. The Christian life isn't ultimately secured by the strength of your grip on Jesus. It's secured by his grip on you.
That changes how you're supposed to measure your own assurance. Don't measure it by your best day, when everything felt easy and your faith felt strong. And don't measure it by your worst day, when you blew it and you're tempted to think you've disqualified yourself.
During your best days or during your worst days… He's holding on, either way.
So, when hard times come at you, and they will, this verse says they cannot get a hold on you. Not because you're strong enough to fight them off, but because you already belong to someone stronger.
Truth #4: What You Know About the World
If verse 18 tells you who's holding onto you, verse 19 tells you where you stand:
We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.
1 John 5:19 ESV
This is a short verse, but it widens the lens fast. Verse 18 was personal, it was about your security. Verse 19 is about your location. John doesn’t just say, "You're safe." He says, "You belong to a completely different reality than the one pressing in on you every single day."
The world doesn't feel like it's under anyone's power except its own. It feels loud, and constant, and like it's setting the terms for all of us whether we like it or not: the news cycle, the economy, the culture wars, whatever's blowing up your group chat this week.
John flips that completely. He's not saying the world's pressures aren't real. There's a difference between something being loud and something being in charge. The world can dominate your attention without owning your allegiance.
Jesus prayed for his followers in the middle of this tension. He never asked the Father to remove them from the world, but he did ask the Father to keep them from belonging to it.
I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.
John 17:15-16 ESV
That's almost exactly John's point in verse 19. You're still here. You still live in this world. But being surrounded by the world doesn't mean you belong to it.
And notice the contrast John draws, it's not we're doing okay versus the world's a little rough right now. It's we are from God versus the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. Those are two entirely different citizenships, two entirely different sources.
Practically for us, it means that our citizenship isn't up for renewal based on how loud the world gets. It doesn't matter how chaotic this week's headlines are, or how out of control your circumstances feel. None of that changes which kingdom you belong to. You're not a citizen of the world, who hopes God rescues you sometimes. You're already from God, standing in the middle of a world that isn't.
That's not a call to ignore what's happening around you. It's a reminder of which reality gets the final word when it does.
Truth #5: What You Know About Jesus
Everything John has said so far has been building toward this. Verse 18 told you who's holding you. Verse 19 told you where you stand. Now, in verse 20, John brings us to the top of the climb, the truth every other truth in this passage is rests on:
And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.
1 John 5:20 ESV
Read that last sentence slowly: "He is the true God and eternal life." That's about as direct a statement as you'll find anywhere in the New Testament about who Jesus is. Not a good man. Not a wise teacher. Not a prophet pointing toward God from a distance. He himself is the true God.
And John isn't the only one who speaks this directly about Jesus. Paul says something remarkably similar in Colossians:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
Colossians 1:15-17 ESV
Jesus isn't merely someone who came to point us toward God. He is the one through whom all things were created and in whom all things hold together. That's why John can say, He is the true God and eternal life.
And notice how John describes us getting there, "…the Son of God has come and has given us understanding." Given. Not discovered. Not figured out. Given.
I think we sometimes picture faith like a math problem we finally solved, like if we just read enough, studied enough, thought hard enough, we'd eventually reason our way to Jesus on our own merit. That's not what John says happened. He says understanding was given to us. We didn't climb our way up to God. He came down and opened our eyes. That should change how we hold our own faith, less like something we achieved, and more like something we were handed.
And once that understanding is given, look at what it does: it puts us "…in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ." Not just informed about Jesus. Not just fans of Jesus. In him. That's relational, not just intellectual. It's the difference between reading a biography of someone and being family.
Go back through everything we've looked at this morning. You can know you have eternal life, because of the Son. You can have confidence in prayer, because of the Son. You can know you're protected from the evil one, because the one who was born of God, Jesus, is the one holding you. You can know you belong to God instead of the world, because you're in him.
If Jesus is just a good teacher, none of the rest of this holds. A good teacher can't guarantee your eternal life. A good teacher can't promise to hear your prayers. A good teacher can't keep the evil one from touching you. But if he's what verse 20 says he is, the true God, and eternal life itself, then everything else John has told you this morning isn't wishful thinking. It's as solid as the one it's built on.
John has not simply given us five unrelated things to know. He's taken us from the gift, to the confidence that comes from the gift, to the security that comes from belonging to God, and finally to the person underneath all of it: Jesus Christ!
What About Sin Leading to Death?
Now that we're standing on the certainty of who Jesus is, the true God and eternal life himself, I want to go back and deal honestly with something. If you were following along closely in your Bible, you probably noticed two verses I skipped: verses 16 and 17. And they're not easy verses. On the surface, they might sound like they complicate everything we've just built. Before we close, let's not tiptoe around it. Let's look at it directly.
If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask, and God will give him life—to those who commit sins that do not lead to death. There is sin that leads to death; I do not say that one should pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that does not lead to death.
1 John 5:16,17 ESV
Sin leading to death.
That phrase alone is enough to unsettle someone who just spent the last twenty minutes hearing that they can know, for certain, that they have eternal life. Let's ask the obvious question: is John talking about losing your salvation here?
He can't be. That would completely contradict verse 13, and honestly, it would contradict the entire letter John just spent five chapters writing. What's more likely, in view here is physical death, real, earthly consequences for sin, not the loss of eternal life. Scripture gives us a sobering example of exactly this is in Acts, where Ananias and Sapphira lied to God and to the church, and it cost them their lives on the spot. Paul makes a similar connection in Romans, where he ties sin generally to death in the world. Not every act of disobedience results in immediate consequences like that, most don't. But some sin, in some circumstances, carries heavy consequences.
Notice what John does in the very next verse, though. He doesn't leave us with a mystery about which sins qualify. He clarifies: all wrongdoing is sin. He's not building a chart of forgivable sins over here and unforgivable sins over there. That's not the distinction he's making. The distinction is about how we pray for someone, not about whether their sin counts.
Here's what I want you to walk away with. Eternal life is not up for renegotiation because of consequences. A believer can sin, ask forgiveness, be fully restored in fellowship with God, and still face real, earthly consequences for what they did. Grace doesn't erase cause and effect, and cause and effect doesn't cancel grace. Both are true at the same time.
If anything, this confirms everything we've already said this morning. The same God who gives you certain, unshakable eternal life also runs a world where your sins still matter. That's not a contradiction. That's a Father who loves you enough to let both be true.
Closing Charge: Guard What You've Been Given
We land, finally, on one sentence, and it's the last thing John says before he sets down his pen:
Little children, keep yourselves from idols.
1 John 5:21 ESV
At first glance, that might feel like an odd way to end this letter. John just spent this whole passage building certainty, eternal life, answered prayer, protection from the evil one, standing with God instead of the world, the true identity of Christ. And then he closes with... a warning about idols? It can feel like a hard left turn. But it's not. It's the payoff.
Think about the logic here. If everything we've just walked through is true, if you really do have eternal life—if God really does hear you, if you really are held and protected and standing with him instead of the world, if Jesus really is the true God, then there's exactly one appropriate response—guard the life you’ve been given. Don't hand your allegiance to something smaller.
And we just spent time in verses 16 and 17 seeing that sin carries real weight, real consequences, even for people who belong to God. That should make this closing command land harder, not softer. If disobedience still costs something in a world that God runs, then guarding your heart isn't optional, it's wisdom.
Now, when we hear "idols," most of us picture statues. Little carved figures somebody bows down to in a temple somewhere far away. That's not really the danger for most of you reading this. An idol, in the way John means it, is anything you give the trust that belongs only to God.
For me, one of my main idols is control, just ask my wife how I act anytime things aren’t going to plan, or there’s a chance we’re going to be late for something. Apparently, “five minutes early,” is not a biblical command, but I’ve tried to make it one.
C.S. Lewis has a useful way of describing what happens when we start looking for life somewhere other than God: God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
That's really what an idol promises, that something smaller than God can give us what only God can give us. And John says, “Keep yourselves from idols.”
Conclusion
Go back to that we need to talk text for a second.
You know the anxiety. The stomach drop. The hours spent replaying every conversation, bracing for something that, most of the time, was never actually there. All that dread came from one simple thing: you didn't know. You were guessing, and your guess was almost always worse than the truth.
That's exactly the kind of anxiety John is writing to remove.
You can know you have eternal life, not hope it, not assume it, know it. You can know God hears you when you pray, not because you found the right words, but because you belong to him. You can know who you are, not held together by your own grip, but kept by the one who was born of God. You can know where you stand, not a citizen of a world under the sway of the evil one, but from God, standing in the middle of it. And you can know who Jesus is, not a good teacher to admire from a distance, but the true God and eternal life himself, the one every other certainty in this passage rests on.
And even when we're honest about the hard parts, that sin still carries real weight, that our choices still matter in a world God runs, that doesn't undo any of it. Grace still holds. It was never resting on your track record in the first place.
John didn't write these nine verses so you'd walk out of here still guessing. He wrote them so you'd know, and then, with that certainty settled underneath you, guard what you've been given. Not performing for it. Just resting in it, and holding onto nothing else the way you hold onto him.
We don't have to wonder anymore. We already have the answer. Because,
Whoever has the Son has life!
