Who Are the Children of God? (1 John 5.1-12)
This sermon was preached on May 25th, 2025.
1 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. 2 This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. 3 In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, 4 for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. 5 Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.
6 This is the one who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. 7 For there are three that testify: 8 the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement. 9 We accept human testimony, but God’s testimony is greater because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son. 10 Whoever believes in the Son of God accepts this testimony. Whoever does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because they have not believed the testimony God has given about his Son. 11 And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. 12 Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.
In the Gospel of John there are two conversations that Jesus has that we’re meant to read side by side. One of them is with a man status and achievement named Nicodemus. The next conversation is Jesus speaking with a woman of bad reputation and no status.
Nicodemus comes first. It’s the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and he has come to Nicodemus’ attention. So comes to see Jesus at night. And what I think he’s trying to do is see if he can get to Jesus first and steer his ship.
I’m sure Nicodemus thinks Jesus is going to be starstruck. “Nicodemus is talking to me?” But Jesus is unimpressed. In fact, Jesus tells Nicodemus plainly: “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” Nicodemus doesn’t have greater access or understanding of who Jesus is and what he is doing because of his status. In fact, all of that has to be thrown aside, and Nicodemus has to become like a little child to enter this kingdom. His heart has to be renewed by grace, apart from anything he contributes.
The next conversation is in John 4. This woman is the opposite of Nicodemus in every way. She’s a woman in a world where to be a woman was to be a second class citizen. Beyond that she’s a Samaritan, which Jews at the time saw as “half-breeds” who were absolutely not equals.
She’s a woman that has been chewed up and spit out by life. Jesus and she talk about it in their conversation—she’s had five husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband. That means she had been set aside by five different men in a town that was probably at a maximum a few thousand people. And this woman is the person who has the longest recorded conversation with Jesus in all of Scripture. This is the one person that Jesus makes the most time for.
Jesus is waiting for her. Unlike Nicodemus who came to Jesus in the middle of the night, Jesus seeks this woman out at noon, in broad daylight. He sat down at a well outside of the town—the place to gather water. She arrives alone, after everyone else from town would have gone as part of their normal daily routine.
She arrives without pride in accomplishments. Without status. Yet she is able to hear and the receive the offer of Jesus. Jesus tells her that he knows she is spiritual thirsty, and that he will satisfy that thirst with eternal life.
We’re impressed with the Nicodemuses of our world. Men of status and achievement. They seem to have been blessed above everyone else. They have to be the epitome of what it means to be a child of God.
We disregard the women at the well. Women of bad reputation. Women who things haven’t worked out for “what did she do to deserve it?” “Why didn’t she leave?” “What was she wearing? Did she invite what happened to her?”
Yet Jesus is not impressed by Nicodemus’s achievements and status and he is not deterred by the woman’s past or position. And where Nicodemus leaves Jesus and does not reappear until after he is dead, the woman runs back into town and as John 4.39 tells us: “Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony.” And let me point out, she went to the people of her town who had rejected and ostracized her.
Our passage is about being a child of God—how to know who the children of God are, and what those children do. The passage starts in verse 1, telling us that “everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well.”
Our faith is necessarily Jesus-centered, and John spells out exactly who Jesus is, starting in verse 6. It may sound a little bit mysterious to us when John starts writing about “the one who came by water and blood,” then talk about “The Spirit who testifies” and “these three that testify.” What is he talking about? The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
What John is emphasizing with water is that Jesus was born just as we are. “Water” was a common reference to amniotic fluid—the clear liquid that surrounds a fetus in the womb. We still talk about this as “water” when we say a pregnant woman’s water is breaking. Jesus was born and lived as we do.
When it speak of the one who came by blood, it’s speaking of the death of Jesus on his cross. He is not simply one who became one of us, but he is one who faced the worst this world had to offer and faced the wrath of God against our sin. He spilled his blood though he did not deserve to.
And when it speak of The Spirit, it is speaking of a couple of things: the resurrection of Jesus, and the ongoing presence of Jesus with his people. The Holy Spirit invigorated the body that this world had killed, and raised the Lord Jesus from the dead—and as victorious King, Jesus poured out the Holy Spirit on all of us—and he awakens our hearts from spiritual death and remains the life-giving presence of God within us.
The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It is God’s testimony to us of his intentions. The mission of Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection to make what he accomplished ours.
We can see in these verses. Notice between verse 1 and verse 2. He speaks in v1 of believing that Jesus is the Christ born of God. And in v2, he says “this is how know that we love the children (plural) of God.” The Only Begotten Son of God came to make us adopted sons and daughter of God.
And the marker of those who are the children of God is not what we tend to think. It’s not those who seem the most holy or impressive. It’s not the Nicodemuses. The marker is faith in Jesus and that faith being made perfect though love—following Jesus in loving God and loving others, which is the same thing as saying “keeping his commands.”
How do we demonstrate a belief that Jesus is the Christ and is born of God? Those who have a faith that trusts and then works. Not to earn anything, but springing from his love for us come good works that he is leading us in. And following him, obeying his commands, is our pathway to “overcoming the world” as John talks about.
What are these good works? Good works are those that are defined by God to be good works. We do not create our own ‘good works’ and deem them good works. We take our cue from him.
This is what Nicodemus had gotten wrong. Nicodemus had belonged to the Pharisees, a group of people who had laid out all kinds of rules and guidelines that they followed, convinced that holiness looked like just separating yourself off in almost every way. The leaders of the Pharisees held great respect and power, and holding on to both of those things was important to them.
But we don’t obey God by making up our own rules and following them. We don’t obey God by grabbing for positions of power and angling to maintain our status. No. Obedience to God is obedience on his terms. We don’t follow our hearts—we give our hearts to Jesus and follow him, and he renews our hearts to be like his.
So much of Christian history has gotten this wrong. For centuries, the idea was that monks, who separated themselves off from the world and took vows of silence or spent the whole day in prayer were the ones doing the real good works. Or leaders who would print crosses on the front of their shields and physically conquer in the name of Jesus—in a way that Jesus never took. Or the idea that real Christians don’t drink alcohol, don’t really befriend “sinners,” and definitely aren’t seen by others around people and around places of bad reputation.
All of that may sound good to us and may sound like holiness to us. But that’s not good enough. What does obedience to God—not our own so-called best thinking—obedience to God look like? Look to Jesus. How did he live this out?
Jesus was unimpressed with those with status. He was grieved at those with power who misused that power. He was furious at those with standing who mistreated people. He was seen with the wrong people, in the wrong places—to the point that gossip went around about them that he was a glutton, a sinner, and a drunk. He welcomed people who no one else would, and allowed his valuing of people to ruin his reputation.
Obedience to God is copying him as his children, and this necessarily looks like how Jesus lived in this world. It means that we begin caring a whole lot more for people, particularly those for whom life in this world is difficult and troublesome, than we care for our status or reputations. It means we rearrange our lives to seek the good of others, and stop living closed off and separated, as if the good of our neighbors isn’t intimately tied up with our good.
It looks like the woman at the well, who when Jesus told her he was the Messiah ran to her enemies. And they came to Jesus themselves, and even said in 4.42:“We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”
The woman at the well’s heart had been captured, and she responded by doing exactly what Jesus did—so she pursued the people in her town for their good, to bring them to Jesus too.
We stop chasing reputation and status and comfort, and we start measuring things by the kingdom of God. Which is wonderful news for us—because here’s the thing that it talks about in v11: what belongs to those who live like Jesus? eternal life.
If I work as hard as I absolutely can in whatever career or job I have, the very best I would gain would be more money. And I could be the richest man in the world and when I die take zero cents with me. Meaning, living like a Nicodemus, with eyes closed to the reality of the kingdom of God, is to aim too low. It’s to expend ourselves for things that do not last.
But to follow Jesus? It means that the treasure that our hearts is chasing and after is something that does last. AND it means that the reward that is mine isn’t one that I earned, and God is always glad to reward good works by grace, so that the goodness that is ours in following after Jesus is much more than we have deserved and worked for. It is something that does not run out. In truth, it is God himself—the eternal God, who is love, giving himself to us. There is no other way of life in this world that promises that. There is no other pathway in this world that will lead you there. It is only what John says in verse 12: “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” Do you want your life to matter beyond your lifetime and maybe the lifetime of your kids and grandkids? Do you want to be about something that lasts? Follow after Jesus and leave it to him.
I want to close this morning on a note of hope for Nicodemus. The conversation in John 3 is not the last time we see him in the gospel of John—in fact he appears two more times.
The first one is in John 7 as the leaders are starting to plot against Jesus—Nicodemus defends Jesus against their accusations, begging for the other leaders to hear Jesus out for themselves.
And the last time is in chapter 19, immediately after the death of Jesus on the cross. We’re told that Nicodemus went with a man named Joseph of Arimathea, to Pontius Polite to ask for the dead body of Jesus.
Nicodemus brought incense and aloes, I can’t help but to think that he did it in part to tend to the wounds on the body of Jesus. And the amount was extravagant. It was Nicodemus pouring out wealth for the burial of this man he had earlier questioned—burying him as he would a king. A king that I can’t help but think Nicodemus was expecting to rise from the dead.
Not everyone hears the words of Jesus the first time and throws all in, like the woman at the well. A lot of us are more like Nicodemus—we hear the words a number of times and it takes time for them to sink into our hearts.
The offer stands to us this morning, whether we are Nicodemus or the woman at the well or somewhere in the middle: Don’t hold onto your status or despair at your lack of status. Don’t hold onto your wealth or despair at your lack of wealth. Don’t hold onto your resume or your rap sheet. Throw it all aside and come to Jesus.