What Matters Most (1 John 3.23-4.6)
This sermon was preached on May 4th, 2025.
What is a good life? A life worth living? Some of us are parents in here, and that may be the question we ask—what values do we instill into the next generation that will lead them on the pathway to what is good and right? Some of us in here are teenagers, and when we think of the future and what we want to be and do with our lives—what are those things? Some of us are older and look back at our lives, maybe with regret or maybe with gladness—probably with both. What is a good life?
I want to get after this question because it matters. We only have the one life that we have here. And we are going to give our hearts, our time, our money, our life to something. Everyone does. And we want that to matter.
In our passage, John is writing to a bunch of people who have had the rug pulled out from under them—and they’re trying to figure out a way forward. So in our passage today, he is pulling their eyes back to what matters most, and in a sense painting a picture of what matters most and the pathway worth chasing after.
Jesus has much to show us, about what we should value and live for in every aspect of our lives. How we should measure what is ‘good?’ How should we—as teenagers, as adults, as parents, as disciples of Jesus—view what’s worth giving our lives to?
Jesus-Centered Belief
John hits this very question. The starting point for a good life worth living: 23 This is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. This is how Jesus summarized it himself when someone asked him about what the most important thing was: to love God and love others. This is the pathway of the good life. To give one’s self over to the good of God and the good of others.
Let’s look at both of those. 1) to believe in the name of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. This is to sign on for everything that he is and everything that he has done. That he was the Son of God who came to save sinners. The Son of God who interrupted the flow of human history into futility and destruction to make something else happen.
John is pulling us back to the core of what the Christian faith is: the confession that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh and is from God. That Jesus is the Son of God and has become fully one of us. The theological term for this is incarnation, and it’s what we mean when we say that Jesus is 100% God and 100% man in one person. He is the Son of God who took on a human nature like ours and so stands as the mediator between us and God.
The church that John is writing to had a group of people who were denying this in some way. Teaching maybe that Jesus was just an enlightened human but not the Son of God. Or that Jesus was God, but kind of just an appearance, not fully human. So John emphasizes over and over in 1, 2, 3 John the truth of the Incarnation. He says it in v2: This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.
John says it this way because a lot of the people that had caused so much havoc and had split this church had said that they were the most spiritual. Maybe they were people that had powerful emotional experiences. Or people that were seen by others as being very “spiritual.” And they were the ones that were denying that Jesus was the Son of God who had come as a Savior for sinners.
But the measure of true spiritual maturity isn’t someone who seems very spiritual— who has the most powerful emotional experiences. I thought this growing up in church: that the people who shouted the loudest or put their hands up the most or spoke in tongues the most aren’t the most spiritual. But often the loudest were the harshest with others. If I’m honest, sometimes those big emotional demonstrations covered up a heart of hatred.
The core of spiritual maturity is necessarily Jesus centered. The Holy Spirit’s role is to point us to Jesus—to make much of him and bring us back to him. That’s the fool-proof way for us to measure something’s worth in the church: is it Jesus-centered?
Is what we’re doing in our church something that points us to Jesus or point us back to ourselves? So many things that churches do can feel like distractions. Think about how churches can train kids. I was reviewing some curriculum for children’s ministry a few years ago and was so depressed. Lesson after lesson was just “be a good boy or a good girl and God will love you.” It was all “do this, do that.” It was something that trained kids to become obsessive in looking at themselves—not training them on the life of looking to Jesus for their sense of self.
Or churches can talk to and about teenagers like the only thing they’re worried about is if the teenagers have had sex or not. They lead with guilt and shame “are you pure?” All the while this is talked about almost completely apart from the fact that the only way we can be pure in anyway is Jesus cleansing us.
That’s what I’m talking about. The church is not meant to be a place that guilts and shames people into sin management. You can’t manage sin. Trying to manage sin on your own is like whack-a-mole. You knock out one but it pops up somewhere else. You can only repent of it and flee to Jesus.
All of this is why John tells us to “test every spirit.” We can’t measure things by whether they sound holy or spiritual to us. We measure things in the church by whether they lead us back to Jesus. It’s the only measurement that matters. Jesus-centered belief and Jesus centered living. That’s it.
Jesus-Centered Living
What we’re talking about this morning is what it means to say “Jesus is Lord” over what we believe and how we live. He defines what a well-lived life is. And in our passage he tells us what this means. Look at v23 again: This is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us.
To love one another is the horizontal overflow of acknowledging that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.” Here’s what I mean: to love others is to recognize the truth of the gospel in how we live. We have to allow what God has done to form the shape of our lives and how we think, act, and speak to others. For if God so loved the people of the world that he gave his only Son, our growth to be like him is in loving the people of the world.
If the Son of God became a human being to identify with us and save us, how can we despise human beings? If the Son of God became poor, we cannot disdain the poor. If the Son of God became a refugee, we cannot disdain the refugee. If the Son of God became a brown-skinned man, we cannot hold on to our racism. To hold on to bigotry or hatred is to deny the reality of the gospel in how we live.
The reverse is true, and that’s our calling—to love and serve others is to affirm the reality of the gospel. It’s what John was talking about just a few verses earlier in verse 18 when he said “Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.” A life worth giving yourself to is one that is Jesus centered in how you believe and in how you give your time and service and heart to others.
The Promise
And here’s the promise to all of it, in verse 24: The one who keeps God’s commands lives in him, and he in them. This commitment to Jesus-centered living and Jesus-centered belief is the only way of life that guarantees your life will not ultimately be lived in vain.
Every other way of belief and life will chew you up and spit you out. No other way of life comes with the promise that we will live and God and we will live in him. No other way of belief and life comes with the promise that we see in verse 4: that we will overcome.
Do you ever fell beaten down? Like you’re going to be swallowed up by life? Like your faith in Jesus is foolishness and admitting a weakness? Hear the promise of the gospel: you are joined by faith to Jesus, the victorious one. And his victory is your victory and will fully become your victory in every way.
You are not alone. You are not foolish. Or, let me say it another way—you are foolish in the eyes of a world who cannot see the glory of Jesus. You are weak. But your weakness is your secret strength. You weakness means that Jesus becomes your strength. It means you are who Jesus talks about in the sermon on the mount—the poor in spirit. And to you belongs God’s kingdom, where He is all in all.
From the earliest days of Christianity, people have claimed that our religion is a crutch. Something that weak people cling to because they don’t have the moral strength to stand on their own two feet. But that doesn’t need to be something that brings shame. Yes, I absolutely, desperately, and without question need the grace of God. Without it, I’m lost. Without it, I will devolve into selfishness and ultimately hurt myself and everyone around me.
But the grace of God? It’s not just a crutch. It becomes the whole thing that drives us forward—that gives my life meaning and purpose. It becomes not just something that lifts me up and brings me to life, it becomes the banner under which I live my life. It becomes my mission, the force that propels me into whatever future will unfold.
And believe it or not, this is the good life. Not hustling to earn early retirement or climbing the ladder of success rung by rung. Not trophies in your cabinet or medals around your neck. Not a GPA. Not a perfect legal record. Not being debt free or admired or famous. For even if you are the richest person in the world, it will never satisfy you, and you can’t take it with you anyway. Jesus talks about that when he warns against building treasures here on earth. They will rust and break and be destroyed.
Even if you become the strongest person in the world, your strength will eventually wain. If you become the very best at what you do, someone will eventually do it better—and the identity you’ve build on your own strength will crumble into nothing.
But realizing that you don’t need to be anything to receive what you’re longing for anyway—that you can simply receive God’s love completely apart from any earning? That is the good life. Realizing that you can hold all the resources that God is given to you with open hands—knowing that part of the reason he’s given them to you is so that you can spend them for his glory and the good of others (which is your good as well)—That is the good life. This is the life that is worth giving your life to.
Let’s jump in. Together. All the way in. I know you want to see transformation in yourself and in your home. I know you want to see transformation in your neighborhood and in this city. And pursuing this Jesus centered living and belief, founded on the promise that he has made—this is how it will happen.