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Born of God (1 John 2:29-3:24)
By David Feddes

Today we're going to hear the last verse of chapter 2 and then all of chapter 3 in 1 John. As we move into this section, there's a new way that John uses to describe Christians compared to what he has in the earlier part of the letter. He uses a variety of phrases for people who are real Christians, and we've seen some of those already. Real Christians are people who walk in the light because God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. Real Christians are people who know God, who are acquainted with God, and who know Christ and have fellowship with him. Real Christians are people who have an anointing from God, who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God.

Today we're going to see another description: children of God, or people who are born of God. There are others as well, but these are some of the main ones for real Christians. They are people who have eternal life, where God’s life dwells in and abides in us. So let's listen now to what John has to say in these verses.

2:29 If you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of him.

3:1 How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. 3 Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure.

 4 Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness. 5 But you know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins. And in him is no sin. 6 No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.

 7 Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. He who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. 8 He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. 9 No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God. 10 This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother.

 11 This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. 12 Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous. 13 Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you. 14 We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. 15 Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him.

 16 This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. 17 If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? 18 Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. 19 This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence 20 whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.

 21 Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God 22 and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. 23 And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. 24 Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us. (1 John 2:29-3:24)

A billboard asks, “Who's your daddy?” That's a sign of the times—that more and more children don't even know who their dad is. It should be obvious: your mother’s husband is the daddy. But in an age when marriage has been disregarded by many and there are so many challenges, that’s the question—who’s your daddy? You can get your DNA tested, and with DNA testing that matches up with a particular man, then you'll know who your biological father is.

What we want to think about today, at least for part of the time, is spiritual DNA testing. There are ways of finding out whether the life in you comes from God or comes from a different source. And so we need to think about what are the marks or signs of being a child of God. How do you know if your spiritual DNA matches up with life that comes from God? For a while we're going to think about tests of spiritual DNA and how we can know that we belong to God—or that we don't.

And then secondly, we're going to look at what are the privileges of being children of God. That is the best and the most exciting part of the message. But of course, you can’t just jump into that. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are” (1 John 3:1). What a wonderful statement that is! And there are other privileges that go with that. But it’s very dangerous to simply assume that I’m a child of God because it kind of makes me feel good—or to think, “Isn’t everybody a child of God?”

Well, no. You read this passage and you might be struck by the fact that there are actually people who are children of the devil. In a spiritual sense, the devil is the one who is the source of their power and energy and who directs their affairs. And so it’s very important to know who’s your daddy—who’s the Father.

When we look at John, we find that there are a number of tests—DNA tests—and each of them describes people who are born of God. The first is belief. “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God” (1 John 5:1). Then there are a lot of different references to belief. “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7). So there’s the belief test, the attitude test. Then there’s also the action test: “Everyone who does what is right has been born of God” (1 John 2:29). And then there’s also the victory test: “Everyone born of God overcomes the world” (1 John 5:4). That phrase “born of God” is used a number of times in 1 John, and these are some of those places that help us identify who actually is born of God.

So first of all, let’s look at the belief test. “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God” (1 John 5:1). A positive belief test indicates that you are born of God because you believe certain things about Jesus Christ. If you don’t believe certain things about Jesus Christ, your belief test is negative. But if you do believe what the Word of God reveals about Jesus Christ and about the reality of God, then that is a very strong positive indicator that you’re a child of God.

Here are just some of the most crucial things that John says about Jesus. Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah. He’s the Son of God. He is without sin. He came in the flesh, in a body, to suffer the penalty for our sins, to take away our sins, and to destroy the work of the devil. He is the true God and eternal life.

All those things deserve a lot more reflection, and I think we’ll do more reflection on that next week when we think about testing the spirits. But these are core beliefs—core realities—about Jesus Christ. If you’re in touch with these realities and you accept them in your mind and with your heart, if you delight in these realities, then that is a sign that you’re a child of God. The Holy Spirit is giving you the ability to trust, to accept, and to embrace the reality of who Jesus is. And obviously, some of these have an impact on the other things we’re going to talk about.

John says if the Son of God came to destroy the devil’s work and you keep on doing the devil’s work, that’s not a very promising sign that you would be a child of God. So a positive belief test is an indicator that you’re a child of God—or not. If it’s a negative test, “anyone who does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because he has not believed the testimony God has given about his Son” (1 John 5:10). “He who does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12).

John also says at the very beginning, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). He’s an apostle inspired by God. He’s an eyewitness. He’s telling you the truth about Jesus Christ. And he says these antichrists went out from us. They didn’t want to listen to the eyewitnesses. They didn’t want to believe the facts about Jesus. They preferred their own made-up version of Jesus.

So they’re not just rejecting the testimony of the apostles when they do that. If you say, “I don’t believe that stuff in the Bible, that stuff the apostles wrote about Jesus—it makes no sense to me, I don’t like it,” well, that’s a sign that you’re not born of God. Because people who are born of God accept the Bible’s testimony, since it’s not just the testimony of the apostles; it’s the testimony of God. You see the phrasing here: if you don’t believe God, you’re calling God a liar. That’s not a great sign that you have spiritual life. In fact, it’s a sure sign that you don’t.

So belief—doctrine—is extremely important: belief about the central realities and truths of Jesus Christ, about the reality of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Without sound belief, it is unwise to think that you’re a child of God. So there are these beliefs.

The second, then, is the attitude test. “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7). And why would you even need more than one test? Maybe it’s worth asking about that. I just said, if somebody believes these things about Jesus, it’s a pretty good sign that you’re a child of God. But it’s possible to have what’s called dead orthodoxy, or some correct opinions about Jesus, but never actually knowing him or embracing the reality of Jesus for yourself.

That’ll come out in some other tests. It’ll come out if you have oh-so-correct ideas, but there’s no love there, and your behavior hasn’t changed a bit, and you’re exactly like the world around you. Then it indicates that somehow you’ve managed to file away a few correct beliefs in your mental filing cabinet, but the life of God isn’t really in you.

So the next thing to look at, then, is this attitude test. “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7). “This is the message you heard from the beginning: we should love one another” (1 John 3:11). “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers” (1 John 3:14). “If we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete among us” (1 John 4:12).

And one of the tests that John brings is: how do you deal with the people closest to you? If you say, “I love God. I’m full of love for God. God is so wonderful, so fantastic—my heart is filled with delight and love for God,” and then you can’t love the person ten feet away from you, that’s not a good sign. John says if you can’t love your brother, that person close by whom you can see, then don’t try to fool yourself into saying, “I love that God whom I can’t see.” That’s an unreal love if you can’t love the person God put in front of you.

So a key test of your spiritual life is: are you a loving person? Do you truly love God and delight in God and want to know him better and long to see him and be with him? Love for God is vital. We need God’s kind of love if we have God’s kind of life.

What is God’s kind of life? Well, God’s kind of life, as we saw earlier, is Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—in eternal union of love. And if you have the life of God in you, if the Holy Spirit is in you, then you’re going to love Jesus, because the Holy Spirit loves Jesus. You’re going to love the Father, because the Son loves the Father and does everything for the glory and delight of the Father. And so to be caught up in God’s kind of life is to have a love for God, because if the life of God is in you, you’re going to be caught up into the divine loving.

And then also, the love of brothers. Jesus, of course, gave those two great commands echoing the Old Testament: love God above all with your whole being, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37–39). And that’s how you know that you’ve passed from death to life.

There’s also, of course, the negative attitude test. He says, “Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous” (1 John 3:12). They both offered a sacrifice to God—Cain and Abel did—but God didn’t accept Cain’s sacrifice. A ritual apart from actual love for God and trust in God, an offering not made by faith, is worthless.

God gave Cain a warning and said, “Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it” (Genesis 4:7). But Cain ignored the warning, went out into the field, and murdered his brother because his brother made him uncomfortable. And right after saying that, John says, “Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you” (1 John 3:13). If you’re like Abel and you’re serving God and trusting God and you’re not like the world, then don’t be shocked if the world gets uncomfortable around you and hates you.

But the point is, he says to Christians, or those who are testing whether they’re Christians, “Don’t be like Cain,” because he was living wickedly, and that drove him to hate his brother, to kill his brother. “Anyone who does not love remains in death” (1 John 3:14). In other words, you don’t have God’s life in you. “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him” (1 John 3:15).

You don’t have to be like Cain in the sense that you take something and cave in your brother’s skull and kill him. If you hate, you’re already a murderer. And haters don’t have eternal life. “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). That’s a very searching test.

So I just want to ask each of you to search your own heart. Is there hate? Are there people—maybe a member of your own family—that you have zero love for, and you think that’s fairly normal and healthy and you can just plow on through life as a Christian having grudges and a lack of love? Well, it’s a sign, at the very best, of poor spiritual health, and it’s probably a sign of not having been born again if long-term hatred is festering in your heart and you have no love toward people.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you feel warm and fuzzy toward them 24/7, because there are people in our lives who’ve wounded us deeply and who are hostile toward us. The Bible doesn’t say, “Pretend your enemies are your friends.” It just says, “Love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44). You’re still loving them as enemies, praying for them and seeking the best for them, but you’re not fooling yourself that they’re your buddies. You still need to love them, even though they’re your enemies.

And if you don’t have that kind of love, then how can you say God’s life is in you? God is love. God loves even his enemies. God lays down his life for his enemies. And so it’s impossible to say, “I’m a child of God; I’ve got his DNA in me,” and then say, “I hate their guts.”

The next test is the action test. Because once again, we can fool ourselves a little bit. We can say, “You know, I do have some pretty warm vibes toward most people, and I’m overall a pretty loving person. And I, in fact, think that how you behave doesn’t matter all that much. What really matters is love rules. Who cares about rules? Let’s just chuck the rules—even God’s rules. Come on, let’s not get overly legalistic. Times change. It’s time to get into the twenty-first century, and we need different sets of rules and principles. But we’re loving.”

You’ll hear that again and again, where love is made an excuse for not actually doing what God said is the right thing—for not actually obeying commands that come from God.

What does the Bible say? If you have a positive action test, then it’s an indicator that you’ve been born of him. “Everyone who does what is right has been born of him” (1 John 2:29). “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning because he has been born of God” (1 John 3:9). “We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin” (1 John 5:18).

Now, when you read that test, it can be downright frightening, because John seems to be saying, “If you sin, you’re not a child of God.” And if you are at all honest with yourself, you have to admit, “I sin sometimes.” But if you understood him to be saying, “You’ve got to be sinless in order to be a child of God,” and you declared yourself sinless, that would be a sure proof that you’re not a child of God, because earlier John wrote, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives” (1 John 1:8,10).

So he’s clearly not saying that you live in sinless perfection all the time. But he is saying that if the dominant power in your life is sin—if sin is an ongoing pattern, something that you do not break with, something you do not hate, something you are not making progress on at all—then you have to ask, “Am I really a child of God?” Because those who are born of God have a life and power in them that is stronger than the power of sin. That’s what John is saying.

So if there’s a negative action test, he says, “He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8). If the Son of God is in your life and is at work in you, he’s in the process of destroying the devil’s work. He came into the world to destroy sin. So if we are just going and wallowing in it, we cannot fool ourselves and say, “But I do have some correct beliefs and an overall good love vibe.” If you have a disastrous test here, it means you probably misread the other tests. “Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God, nor is anyone who does not love his brother” (1 John 3:10).

So this action test—look at your own life. Look at your deeds, God’s commands. Maybe look at how you talk. What’s your language like? Do you use God’s name in vain? Do you curse and cut down other people, and that’s something you do without thinking, as just a pattern of life? Those are very bad signs. So we need to ask, “Lord, when that happens, am I fighting it, or am I saying, ‘That’s just the way I am, that’s just normal’?”

Well, yes—it’s normal for a certain kind of person, for somebody who hasn’t been born again. That’s who it’s normal for. It is abnormal and contrary to the life and identity of somebody who has Jesus Christ in them. And so, do you have a power in you that seeks to speak what is true and right and in praise of God, and to build others up?

In the world of sexual ethics, our world has gone absolutely berserk in that area. And if you’re going along with that drift, do you have the life of God in you that resists that? Or do you just go along with that? When you’re dealing with pornography, are you fighting it, or is that normal behavior, and you have no intention or belief that it could ever possibly be altered?

There are a whole lot of different areas of your life. I don’t know which ones might be the most obvious in your own life, but this is a searching test: what do my actions show? And one area of action is how you treat your brother—not just do you feel warm toward him, but do you actually help him out when you have the means to do so, and he has the need for you to do so?

So there’s belief, there’s your attitude—are you loving?—there’s action—“everyone who does what is right has been born of him” (1 John 2:29)—and then there’s victory. “Everyone born of God overcomes the world” (1 John 5:4).

What does it mean to overcome the world? Well, at the very least, it means that you’re not exactly like the world. If you’re overcoming something, you’re against it, and it’s against you. So at the very least, the victory test means there’s a conflict going on, and you’re not on the wrong side of that conflict. It also means that you are winning. “The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you” (1 John 3:1,13).

It’s a good sign—it’s a good sign if people aren’t approving of you. I’ll take a trivial example. Nowadays, too many churches are evaluating themselves on what the world’s opinion is of them. I’ll hear churches wringing their hands and saying, “Boy, what will the people around us think if this or that?” And there are times when we’re bad and do stupid stuff and hurt people, and the world is right to be offended by what Christians or churches have done. But I’ve also heard, “Oh, the world will be offended if we gather to worship.”

Well, so what? There has to be a point at which you say, “We serve God.” They were happy to throw Daniel to the lions too, when he prayed when nobody was supposed to pray for thirty days. Well, so what? Emperor, you can say you can’t pray for thirty days, but I pray every day. In fact, I pray three times a day. In fact, I pray with my window open so everybody can see it. I might not do that all the time, but I do that when people tell me I can’t. Then I’ll make sure you know that I’m going to pray, and nobody stops me from praying. You can throw me to the lions, and maybe they’ll eat me and maybe they won’t—they may develop a bad appetite—but at any rate, I am going to do what the world tells me not to do, even when the whole rest of the world is going along with that.

So one of the signs of spiritual health is that you have a life and a power in you that makes you different—that your chain is not yanked by whatever the latest worldly power has to say.

In our time, it is patently obvious that those who control the spread of information in our society are hostile to the things of God. It’s obvious that many of the edicts issued by the powers of government are not interested in what brings glory to God or advances his kingdom. So you can’t take your cue from them. You can submit to the governing authorities in the areas where their commands are lawful. You can try to do what’s right in the eyes of everybody as long as you’re not being pushed or pressured to do what is not right in God’s eyes. But at the end of the day, you overcome the world when you follow Jesus no matter what the cost and no matter what the world says.

Overcoming the world, by the way, doesn’t mean that in the next five minutes you change the whole world and it all becomes nice and peaceful. The world is going to be hostile to the people of God until Christ comes again. So figure on that. If you’re a triumphalist who says, “If we just really work hard and maybe get control of a political party, the world’s going to be a really good place,” dream on. “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). “They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them” (1 John 4:5). “The whole world is under the control of the evil one” (1 John 5:19). That’s the final statement John makes about the world at the end of this book.

That realization will have an amazing clarifying power on your mind if you get it through your head that behind all those pressures out there, someone is pulling the strings. Once you realize that you’re dealing with a system that Satan is running, why would you want to cozy up to that system or fit into it so nicely?

So these are four tests that the Lord gives us. And then the question to ask is, are they consistent? Because you could take any one of them in isolation. You might say, “Well, I have correct opinions—that means I’m born of God,” or “I feel warm toward other people—that means I’m a child of God,” or “I try to do the right thing—that makes me a child of God.” And you could easily think that good works are what make you a Christian.

And, well, I hate to say it, but some people are just a little weird, and they get a certain amount of joy out of being obnoxious, out of making other people dislike them. “I’m always against the world. Everybody thinks I’m weird, and I’m kind of a jerk too, and everybody knows I’m a jerk. There’s always opposition. I’m overcoming the world!” Well, maybe not.

But you need to realize that these are tests that are combined by the apostle. I’ve kind of separated them out as distinct just so we can think about them, but they occur in combination. “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16). Now that’s a correct belief—you know what love is by having a correct belief about what Jesus Christ did for you. So love and belief are combined right there. “And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” There’s love and action. “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?” (1 John 3:17). You can’t say you have love if you don’t do anything about it. So belief, action, and love are all linked together there.

“Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God, nor is anyone who does not love his brother” (1 John 3:10). So you have doing right and love together there. “Let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth” (1 John 3:18). So love and action go together.

“This is his command: to believe” (1 John 3:23). You say, “Well, I’ve got to do what’s right—that’s most important to me.” Okay, but what’s doing what’s right? What are you commanded to do? The first thing is: “Believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another” (1 John 3:23). So you have all three in one sentence: believe, love, and obey.

“Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: we know it by the Spirit he gave us” (1 John 3:24). And then in chapter 5: “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves his child as well” (1 John 5:1). “This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. This is love for God: to obey his commands” (1 John 5:2-3). So you see the belief test, the love test, and the behavior test are all together in that same paragraph. And it goes on to say, in that same paragraph, “His commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God” (1 John 5:3-5).

So you have belief, you have attitude (love), you have action (doing what is right toward others), and you have victory (resisting the world rather than being overcome by it).

So ask yourself: how do I measure up in each of these tests, and are they consistent? Now, I know there are different means people use to determine whether they’re a Christian or not. Some may say, “Well, I was baptized.” And baptism is very important—but baptism alone does not make one a Christian. One could say, “Well, I’ve been a member of a church for a lot of years; that certainly means I’m born of God.” It’s a good thing to be part of a church and actively involved with God’s people, but you know the old saying—being in a garage doesn’t make you a car. Just being in the building doesn’t make you a child of God.

You could say, “Well, I once walked an aisle in response to an invitation,” or “I once said a prayer that somebody told me to repeat after them, and that made me a Christian.” But simply repeating something after somebody else or having walked somewhere or had an experience once upon a time—those may be wonderful moments in our journey with God, but they are not the test of whether you’re born of God.

In fact, you might have none of those things. You might not ever have had a dramatic moment when you said, “I know that day is when I became a Christian. On that day, I know that’s when I was born again.” You might know that; you might not. It doesn’t matter. John doesn’t say, “Now I want to tell you how you know you’re a child of God—you had an experience once upon a time and you know the exact date it happened.” That is not how you know you’re a child of God.

You know you’re a child of God if you believe the truth about Jesus Christ, if you love others, if your behavior is obedient to the Lord, and if you’re overcoming the world. Those are the tests. The other things can be helpful and nice, but if you really want to test your spiritual DNA, then don’t reflect on whether you had this or that experience at some point in the past. You can do a check right now. You don’t have to go back thirty years or thirteen months or whatever it is. You can do a check right now.

You say, “Who’s my daddy? What’s my spiritual DNA look like?” Belief, attitude, action, victory—and are those tests consistent with each other? Dead orthodoxy believes certain things and then neglects love, behavior, and opposition to the world. Sentimentalism thinks that you’re a really loving person, but you don’t do the one thing—you don’t love God above all and have your faith in him.

The action test—some people are sticklers for doing the right thing, but it’s not motivated by love, and they’re not really doing the right thing. I know a lot of people say, “You can be a good person without believing in God.” Well, what’s good? John says, “This is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ” (1 John 3:23). That’s his command. Now, you say you’re a good person. The biggest and most central command he gives you is one you say you can skip? What if his command is to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and you say, “I can be a good person without that”? You are dreaming, because you have a different standard of good than God does. Goodness is obeying his commands, and the first one is to believe, and the second one is to love.

Again, we have to determine whether those tests are consistent. The important thing then is not to be chewing our nails and saying, “Boy, I know I’m a little shaky on this belief,” or “There’s something I do wrong now and then,” or “I know I’m supposed to love, but that person really ticks me off sometimes.” You could let these tests undermine your confidence, but John gives them to build your confidence. He says, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13).

If you’re believing the truth about God—even if you’re sometimes shaken by doubt—if you are loving others, even though you struggle to, if you’re set on a course to obey and serve God and grow in grace, if you’re in opposition to the world, then you know you’re a child of God. And the privileges of the children of God are yours. That’s what we want to think about now.

You take these tests—and why does it matter? If you’re not a child of God, it means that the devil’s running the show and you’re just going along with the flow of the world, and that ends in catastrophe and hell. But if you are a child of God—if these spiritual DNA tests indicate that you are a son or daughter of the Father—then you have amazing privileges. I just want to highlight a few of them that come at the beginning of the chapter and then some others that come at the end.

“If you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of him” (1 John 2:29). You have God’s seed in you, as John phrases it, and that seed is understood by some to refer to the living Word of God that brings you life, or to the Spirit of God, or simply to that divine life itself. But however you express it, the life of God is in you, and there is a resemblance to God that’s going to come out of you. That life of God is indestructible, eternal life.

There’s a lot of debate around this—about whether you can lose your salvation—but a child of God has God’s life, and God’s life cannot be destroyed. Once you have that life, John says, “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him” (1 John 3:9). You can’t just go on sinning as though nothing’s happened, because God’s seed is in you. And kids who have their parents’ DNA tend to resemble their parents.

The Bible portrays the childhood of God in at least two ways—the best of adoption and the best of being born biologically. Adoption is one of the pictures, and a beautiful one, of the status we have with God. When God adopts you and brings you into his family, sometimes you notice—if you blindfold yourself, adopted kids might not look exactly like their siblings or parents, but they sure sound like them. Even their voice, tone, and pronunciation start to match. Sometimes they even start looking like them—not so much in facial features, but in expressions and mannerisms. The life rubs off on them.

Sometimes adopted kids will say, “Somebody rejected me.” But that’s actually a misunderstanding, because an adopted child is not rejected. Sometimes the biological parent was rejecting their own capacity to give that child a good life. It’s not that they thought the child was worthless—they thought, “I can’t give this child what he or she deserves. I’m going to carry this child long enough to give them life, and then give them to someone who can do a better job than I can right now.”

So sometimes there’s a misunderstanding when you’re adopted, thinking, “Somebody rejected me.” No—somebody wanted you. Your biological parents wanted you, but they didn’t think they could do very well, and your adoptive parents obviously wanted you very much.

Whatever the case with our adopted or biological human parents, the Bible says that when God adopts us, it’s the best of both, because he wants us by choice and he gives us his life. So we have both his life within us and his deliberate choice of us.

What all that means is: we are lavishly loved by the Father. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!” (1 John 3:1). The Bible does say that when God makes us his children, we have a new status, and that’s a wonderful thing. But it would not be very comforting to be a kid in a family going through a rough patch, wondering whether Mom and Dad love you, and they whip out a piece of paper and say, “Here’s your birth certificate—it proves you’re ours.” Well, thank you very much. That’s a relief to know. But you might want more than the certificate. Whether it’s an adoption certificate or a birth certificate, that proves you’re officially their kid—but a hug once in a while might be a good idea. To say, “I love you,” might be an excellent idea.

To lavish your love on your children is one of the greatest things you can do for them. And John says God has lavished his love on us. That’s why he calls us his children—not just because we’re officially his (though that’s true, and we shouldn’t underestimate the value of that official status as children of God), but because he loves us. He cherishes us. He loves us with the same love that he has for his own Son, Jesus.

Another great privilege is to see Jesus and be like him. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are. What we will be has not yet been made known, but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:1–2). Somehow, when you see Jesus, you can’t see him as he is without becoming what he is.

There’s already something gradual about that—as you come to know Jesus better in this life, he rubs off on you more and more, and his life comes out in you more and more. But the Bible says when we see him as he is, we’re going to be exactly like him. One way we’ll be like him is that we’ll have a body just like his. The apostle Paul says that he’s going to take our lowly bodies and exalt them to be like his glorious body (Philippians 3:21)—a body with the amazing powers Jesus displayed in his miracles, his walking on water, his ability to ascend into the skies. That’s not just his divine power; that’s his exalted human power. We’re going to have bodies of immortal life and tremendous strength because we’ll be like him.

The great privilege is not just being like him physically, with that magnificent body like his, but being like him morally. We’ll be perfect like Jesus. We’ll be sinless, with no mixture of anything but love in our hearts and in our lives. To be made like Jesus—and the great joy of seeing him as he is—that’s the supreme hope.

There are many things we can look forward to about the heavenly future God has prepared for his children. John doesn’t list them all, but other parts of the Bible do: the streets of gold, the tree of life, the river of life, the magnificent city, the reunion with loved ones. So much can be said about eternal life with God. But John focuses on one: “We shall see him as he is.” As John writes in Revelation, “They will see his face” (Revelation 22:4). John mentions many other blessings in that book, but the central one remains: “They will see his face.” And when you see Jesus’ face, you’ll be made like him in all his beauty, goodness, might, and power.

The family privilege is that the Son of God became one of us so that we could become sons and daughters of God—so that we would be exalted. Jesus even said, “They will sit with me on my throne” (Revelation 3:21). Those are the staggering privileges of being a child of God.

Meanwhile, we sometimes struggle. John says, “If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything” (1 John 3:20). I’ve given you these tests of spiritual DNA, he says, because sometimes your heart will condemn you. You’ll say, “I can’t see how I could even be a Christian.” Then think about this: do you still believe that Jesus is the Son of God and the Savior from sin? Don’t you still love God and love others—or at least want to love them more than you do? Don’t you still want to obey God and grow in obedience? Don’t you sense there’s something different going on in you than what dominates the world?

So realize that even when your heart condemns you, God is greater than your heart. He knows all things, and he gives you these tests so that even if you’re not yet a fully mature child of God, you know you are a child of God. Set your heart at rest, because your heart will be all over the map at times—but there’s someone greater than your heart: your Father. And when you’re a child of the Father, it ultimately depends on him, not on how you’ve been feeling lately.

When we’re going through struggles, it’s reassuring that God is greater than our hearts and knows all things. “If our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him” (1 John 3:21–22). When we’re in tune with God and his life is in us, our prayers have power. We pray for things within God’s will because we understand his will better. We pray in Jesus’ name because we love Jesus’ name, and we seek what glorifies him. We pray in his authority, and above all, we come to our Father knowing that he wants to give us what is good for us.

Jesus said, “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:9–11). In another place Jesus says, “How much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13). That’s the greatest family privilege of all.

You can have confidence in prayer that when you ask God for his Holy Spirit to live in you, when you ask his Spirit to take over more and more of your life and transform you to be more like Jesus, God never says no to that prayer. He will always answer that prayer. To yield more of your life to his Holy Spirit—to have his Spirit giving you more of his life, shaping you to be more like Jesus, drawing you closer to him—those are the great privileges of being a child of God. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are” (1 John 3:1).

Prayer

Dear Father, we thank you that you are our Father, that you have adopted us through faith in Jesus Christ, and that you have given us your own seed, your own life, your own DNA, as it were, to make us truly like you—in our life, in our actions, in our love, in our opposition to the world. We pray, Father, that as you’ve given us these searching tests, each of us may examine ourselves and find in ourselves these signs that you are our Father. And then, Lord, may we take courage, confidence, assurance, and joy that we belong to you, that we have these wondrous privileges of being loved by you, of having a destiny of seeing Jesus and being made like him in every way, of having this divine life within us mature, grow, and develop so that more and more we may bear the likeness of the very Son of God.

Dear Father, help those here who are shaky and unsure, or even are sure that they aren’t children of God. Lord, draw them to yourself, put your own life in them, draw them to a powerful and living faith in you, and give them a life that is indestructible, that lasts forever as sons and daughters of the King. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.


Born of God (1 John 2:29-3:24)
By David Feddes
Slide Contents

Phrases for real Christians in 1 John

  • Walk in light
  • Know Father/Christ
  • Indwelt/anointed by Spirit
  • Children/born of God
  • Have eternal life

Born of God

  • Spiritual DNA tests
  • Family privileges


Spiritual DNA tests

  1. Belief: Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God. (5:1)
  2. Attitude: Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. (4:7)
  3. Action: Everyone who does what is right has been born of him. (2:29)
  4. Victory: Everyone born of God overcomes the world. (5:4)


Positive belief test
Jesus is the Christ (5:1), the Son of God (4:15). He is without sin (3:5) and came in the flesh (4:2) to suffer the penalty for our sins (2:2, 4:10), to take away our sins (3:5), and to destroy the devil’s work (3:8). He is the true God and eternal life (5:20).

Negative belief test
Anyone who does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because he has not believed the testimony God has given about his Son… he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. (5:10-12)


Positive attitude test
This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another… We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. (3:11-14) If we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. (4:12)

Negative attitude test
Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him. (3:14-15)
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. (4:7-8)


Positive action test
Everyone who does what is right has been born of him. (2:29) No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God. (3:9) We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin. (5:18)

Negative action test
He who does what is sinful is of the devil…. This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother. (3:8-10)


Positive victory test
The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him… Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you. (3:1, 13)
You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. (4:4)

Negative victory test
If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. (2:15) They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. (4:5) The whole world is under the control of the evil one. (5:19)


Are tests consistent?

  1. Belief: Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God. (5:1)
  2. Attitude: Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. (4:7)
  3. Action: Everyone who does what is right has been born of him. (2:29)
  4. Victory: Everyone born of God overcomes the world. (5:4)


Combined tests

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. 17 If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? (3:16-17)

Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother. (3:10)

Let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. (3:18)

And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us. (3:23-24)

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. (1 John 5:1-5)


Are tests consistent?

  1. Belief: Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God. (5:1)
  2. Attitude: Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. (4:7)
  3. Action: Everyone who does what is right has been born of him. (2:29)
  4. Victory: Everyone born of God overcomes the world. (5:4)


Born of God

  • Spiritual DNA tests
  • Family privileges


Family privileges

  • Life/DNA of God’s seed
  • Lavishly loved by Father
  • See Jesus and be like him
  • Reassurance in struggles
  • Confidence in prayer
  • Indwelling by the Spirit


Last modified: Tuesday, November 11, 2025, 2:48 PM