Evidences of Salvation / 1 John / 6. The Continuation Test

1 JOHN – EVIDENCES OF SALVATION

First of all, let’s look at John’s purpose in writing his letter. Look at 1 John 1:1-3:

1 John 1:1-3 ¶ That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life - 2 the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us - 3 that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.

John is writing authoritatively as an eye-witness of Jesus’ life and teaching. John knows how one comes by eternal life, and the nature of such life when one has it. Therefore, he is in a somewhat unique position to be able to proclaim it. His purpose is that those who read his letter might know that they have “fellowship” with believers.

He says, in verse 3, “that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.”

In 1 John 2:19, John will speak fo those who:

1 John 2:19 They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.

John is saying in the first few lines of his letter,

“I want you to know that you are of us. I want you to know that you are part of the fellowship. I want you to know that you share in the eternal life which the Father and the Son possess, and which all genuine believers possess. Everything that I am no proclaiming as an eye-witness of Jesus is so that you might know that you too have this fellowship.”

That’s our hope this morning too. We don’t want to cause genuine believers to doubt their salvation, but to rejoice in their salvation as they test themselves to see whether or not they are in the faith. As Paul said to the Corinthians:

2 Corinthians 13:5 Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you? - unless indeed you fail to meet the test!

So, with that, let’s continue. The sixth and final test which John offers to help us to know that we are part of the fellowship of genuine believers is what we will call, “The Continuation Test.”

6. The Continuation Test

1 John 4:1-6 Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3 and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. 4 Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. 5 They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them….

John has shown that genuine believers are marked by conviction, submission, separation, anticipation, and affection. Now he adds another: they continue. They remain in the truth about Jesus. They do not merely start with the gospel. They hold to it.

The immediate concern in chapter 4 is false teaching. “Many false prophets have gone out into the world.” Not every voice that uses Jesus’ name is from God. So John gives a test: “every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.” The issue is not vague spirituality. It is the real Jesus - the eternal Son who truly became man, sent by the Father, the only source of eternal life. To deny that, or to replace Him with a Christ of our own minds, is not a secondary issue. John calls it the spirit of antichrist.

This is not talking about a one-time confession for salvation. This is talking about one’s on-going conviction. A test of whether one is truly from God is whether they hold faithfully to the confession that Jesus is the incarnate God – the divine Son who came in the flesh.

He has already said the same thing earlier:

1 John 2:22-23 Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. 23 No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.

Genuine believers do not treat the person of Christ as negotiable. They confess Him as He has been revealed:

the eternal Son of the Father, truly God and truly man, who came in the flesh, lived without sin, died as the atoning sacrifice for sinners, rose from the dead, and now reigns as the only Saviour and Lord. He is the Christ, sent by the Father, the only source of eternal life, and the only mediator between God and man.

To confess the Son is to confess this Jesus - not a lesser Christ of our own making:

• not a created being who became a god

• not a spirit who only appeared to be human

• not a good man later promoted as divine by the church

• not one enlightened teacher among many

• not a mere moral example

• not a martyr whose cross did not actually atone for sin

• not a Saviour whose work must be finished by our rituals, merits, or extra mediators

• not a merely human prophet who pointed to God who was not Himself God

• not one valid path to the Father among other equally valid paths

• not a political mascot who exists to baptize our tribe, party, or nation

• not a therapist whose main work is to affirm us rather than save us

A mark of genuine salvation is a continuation in sound doctrine – faithfully confessing Christ as he is revealed in scripture.

THEY WENT OUT FROM US

When John addresses those who get Jesus wrong, he’s not primarily talking about those outside the church, but is warning that some within the church will defect from the faith. Look at 1 John 2:18-19:

1 John 2:18-19 Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour. 19 They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.

This is one of the most searching sentences in the letter. Their leaving did not cause them to lose salvation. It revealed that they never truly belonged. John does not say, “If they had continued, they would have become of us.” He says the opposite: “If they had been of us, they would have continued with us.” Continuation does not create life - life produces continuation.

PARABLE OF THE SOWER

Jesus taught the same reality in the parable of the sower.

• Some hear the word and receive it with joy, but they have no root. “They believe for a while, and in time of testing fall away” (Luke 8:13).

• Others hear, but the cares, riches, and pleasures of life choke the word, and their fruit never matures (Luke 8:14).

• The good soil is different: “they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience” (Luke 8:15).

Temporary enthusiasm is not the same as saving faith. Genuine faith holds the word fast. It faithfully continues in the truth of the gospel.

That is why a promising start can still deceive us. A person may make a bold profession, join the church, and speak of Christ with excitement, only to turn away when following Jesus becomes costly, or when the world becomes more attractive than He is. Jesus warned that this would happen. The church should not invent categories to excuse the unchanged life of one who claims to be a Christian, but does not continue in the faith (i.e., “carnal Christian”). Scripture’s explanation is simpler: if they had been of us, they would have continued with us.

LET WHAT YOU HEARD ABIDE

John then turns to those who have remained:

1 John 2:24-25 Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. 25 And this is the promise that he made to us - eternal life.

The test is not whether a person once prayed a prayer, used Christian language, or walked with the church for a season. The test is whether what they heard from the beginning still abides in them. Genuine believers remain in the apostolic faith. They do not outgrow Christ. They do not revise Him into someone less demanding or less divine. The don’t suddenly feel that Christ is not enough and begin adding saints, or other mediators. They continue in the pure gospel.

THE APOSTOLIC WITNESS

Listen to John in 1 John 4:6. He writes:

1 John 4:6 We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

Notice the “we” and “us” in this verse. Who is John talking about? Who must we listen to if we want to be in the truth and not in error? I think the beginning of his letter helps us. He writes:

1 John 1:1-4 That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— 2 the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us— 3 that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. 4 And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.

The “we” and “us” are the eyewitnesses of Christ’s ministry and those commissioned to preach it. These are the apostles. John is asserting apostolic authority and then proclaiming that the test of whether one is holding to truth is whether or not they are faithfully holding to what the apostles taught.

The church does not invent its own Christ. It receives the Christ proclaimed by those who heard Him, saw Him, and were sent by Him.

EVEN IF WE OR AN ANGEL

What we are learning here is that there is a body of truth, preached and taught by the apostles which remains authoritative. There’s a body of doctrine that can’t be altered. There’s a final revelation that shouldn’t be toyed with, or added to.

This is the faith that Jude felt it so necessary to defend. He wrote to his audience:

Jude 3 Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.

There are some religious traditions that don’t see the faith as “once for all delivered” but a body of doctrine that develops and evolves over time. They see themselves as the overseers of the development of apostolic doctrine – allowing them to add just about anything to the faith and claim it holds apostolic authority. There are obviously major problems with this. Paul wrote to the Galatians:

Galatians 1:6-9 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— 7 not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. 8 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. 9 As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

Paul was famously frustrated with the Galatians as they quickly deviated from the true gospel – salvation by grace, through faith alone (which the apostles taught), and to a gospel that mixed in works for righteousness.

What’s interesting in Paul’s warning in Galatians 1 is that even he as an Apostle looked backward to the gospel that was already revealed, and held it up as the unchanging authority. He didn’t allow for further development, additions, revisions, or subtractions. He recognized the unique role of the Apostles, and the unique time period in redemptive history.

God revealed the gospel through the apostles, and once revealed, that gospel was authoritative. That gospel was revealed, established, delivered, and authoritative in the first century so that even Paul deferred to that revelation.

Notice he says, “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.” Not even the Apostles, or those who might claim to be apostles, or those who might claim to be in the line of apostolic succession, or those who claim to be the caretakers of the development of apostolic doctrine should be heeded, if what they are saying contradicts the pure gospel. Instead, Paul says, “let them be accursed.” Let him be given over to God as an object of judgment.

The one who deviates from the Apostolic doctrine – no matter what authority they claim, is not to be counted a brother in Christ, but rather accursed.

THE PULL TOWARD ROME

So, John’s test is not whether a community still uses Jesus’ name, or gospel terminology. It is whether they confess the Jesus who actually came in the flesh: the eternal Son of the Father, the only Mediator, the only Advocate with the Father, the only source of eternal life. To remain in that confession is the line between the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

That is why the present pull toward Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy must be tested, not admired. The instability of the culture and the thinness of much contemporary Protestantism have created a hunger for something older, weightier, and more rooted. That hunger is understandable. Antiquity, liturgy, and a sense of the holy are not sins. But John does not tell us to follow what feels like ancient tradition. He tells us to test the spirits. The question is not, “Does this tradition look older than the church down the street?” The question is, “Does this tradition still confess the Son as Scripture confesses Him?”

Every generation of believers must hold their confession to the same standard that Paul did – the already-revealed gospel.

An example of this gross deviation from the already-revealed gospel is the veneration of Mary. After Acts 1, the New Testament goes quiet about Mary, not because she was unloved, but because the church’s confession was never meant to orbit her. It was meant to orbit Christ.

What later tradition has done with Mary is another matter. Official teachers in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy will insist they do not worship Mary as God. They distinguish adoration given to God from a unique veneration given to Mary. That verbal distinction does not settle John’s question. The issue is not what word they prefer to describe their veneration of Mary. The issue is whether the Mary they have invented threatens the already-revealed apostolic gospel.

THE CATHOLIC “MARY”

Consider the work they assign to Mary and they honor they require one give her.

They give her titles that belong to Christ and to the Spirit. Scripture says we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous (1 John 2:1). Jesus names the Holy Spirit the Helper (John 14:16, 26). Yet Mary is invoked as Advocate, Helper, Benefactress, and Mediatrix. She is called Queen of Heaven, Mother of Grace, salvation of sinners, hope of the hopeless.

In Orthodox prayer she is addressed as one who delivers from dangers by invincible might, and the congregation is taught to cry, “Most Holy Theotokos, save us.” Even when the language is later explained as “through her intercession,” the prayer itself asks her to save, deliver, protect, and grant the kingdom.

They give her a place in the approach to God that belongs to the Son alone. “There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:5–6). This is a statement about who can stand between holy God and guilty people. Christ can, because He is the eternal Son who became flesh, offered Himself as the ransom, rose, and now lives to intercede (Hebrews 7:25).

No creature shares that office. Asking a fellow believer on earth to pray for you is not the same thing as building a standing mediatorial office for a glorified woman through whom grace is said to flow and before whom the faithful regularly bow. One is the mutual help of the body. The other is a wholly unscriptural veneration that relocates a believers trust from Christ alone, to Christ and his Mother.

They give her a maternal economy of grace that Scripture never gives. Catholic teaching has said that, taken up into heaven, Mary “did not lay aside this saving office but by her manifold intercession continues to bring us the gifts of eternal salvation.” That is not the language of a grateful church remembering a saint. That is the language of an ongoing saving function. Even recent attempts to restrain the titles “Co-Redemptrix” and “Mediatrix of all graces” still leave in place the older invocation of Mary as Advocate, Helper, and Mediatrix, and still speak of her maternal role in the order of grace.

The fact that the Catholic church has to make statements to try to restrain their followers from calling Mary “Co-Redemptrix” is itself an admission that they’ve strayed far from the pure gospel. When a church must keep explaining that its not actually praying to, or worshipping Mary, it proves that they’ve introduced so much error that any onlooker can’t be blamed for hearing blasphemy.

This is not a disagreement about secondary issues. John says that whoever denies the Son does not have the Father, and that the spirit which will not confess Jesus as He is, is the spirit of antichrist. You can deny the Son by saying He never came in the flesh. You can also deny Him by keeping His name while distributing His titles, qualities, works, and offices to others.

A Christ who is no longer the only Advocate is not the Christ John preached. A Christ who must be reached through His mother is not the Christ who said, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). A Christ whose mother is addressed as the salvation of sinners is not the Christ of Acts 4:12: “there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

Notice what has happened. Qualities, roles, and honorifics due only to the Son or the Spirit have been assigned to Mary. She becomes, in the lived religion of millions, the accessible one, the tender one, the one who will not refuse you, the one through whom you come. Christ remains official. Mary becomes practical. That is how a fourth figure is introduced into the life of devotion without ever being formally added to the Trinity. The church still says “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” but then trains the conscience to lean on someone else.

John will not allow that. To confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is to confess that the eternal Son has done everything necessary to bring us to the Father. He does not need a co-advocate. He does not need a co-source of grace. He does not need His mother to complete His priesthood. The Spirit does not need Mary to be the church’s Helper. Continuation in the gospel means remaining with this Jesus, not with a revised economy in which His unique glory has been spread to others.

Mary’s own song still rebukes the later Marian cult: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior” (Luke 1:46–47). She magnified the Lord. She did not recruit worshipers for herself. The church that remains in what was heard from the beginning will do the same. It will call her blessed. It will refuse to make her an office-bearer in salvation. It will not treat the veneration of Mary as a mark of depth. It will treat the undiminished Christ as the mark of truth.

So, the trend must be named for what it is. Some are leaving thin evangelicalism for what they believe is the ancient church. But leaving a shallow church for a church that relocates the honor of the Son is not a return to the apostles. It is another way of going out from us. Continuation is not loyalty to the oldest institution still standing. Continuation is remaining in the apostolic gospel. The same gospel that Jude defended as once-and-for-all delivered, and that Paul said even an apostle couldn’t alter.

THE TEST APPLIED

So examine yourself:

• Have you remained in the Jesus you first received - the Son of God who came in the flesh, died for sinners, and is the only source of eternal life?

• When teaching arises that diminishes His person or redefines His gospel, do you recognize it as error?

• Do you still listen to the apostolic Word as binding, or have you grown comfortable setting it aside?

• Has time revealed a deepening hold on Christ, or a slow drift from the truth you once confessed?

• Have you remained with a Christ who needs no other mediator, whose glory can’t be shared with another? Or are you entertaining religious traditions that have altered the gospel, because they have an air of ancient authority?

The one who belongs to God does not merely begin with the gospel. He continues in it. That perseverance is not the price of salvation. It is the evidence that the life of God is in him, and that what he heard from the beginning still abides in him.

CONCLUSION

John didn’t write these things so that genuine believers would doubt their salvation, or so that anyone would try to manufacture fruit in order to earn God’s favor. He wrote “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). The tests we have considered are not a ladder into the kingdom, they are the marks of those already made alive in Christ.

When the Father gives new life, the Spirit does not leave that life hidden.

• He produces a persistent sensitivity to sin that leads to repentance.

• He produces a humble submission to the Word and a desire to keep the commands of Jesus.

• He produces a growing dissatisfaction with the world’s sin and a refusal to make a home there.

• He produces a living hope in Christ’s appearing that purifies us now.

• He produces a sacrificial love for the brothers.

• And He produces a continuance in the Jesus who was proclaimed from the beginning - the eternal Son who came in the flesh, died for sinners, rose, and now reigns as the only Savior and Lord.

Those marks do not appear in a vacuum. They are what God grows in us through the ordinary means of grace.

• He uses His Word to convict, to command, to separate us from the world, to fix our hope on Christ, to teach us how to love one another, and to keep us in the truth.

• He uses prayer as the place where conviction becomes confession and where weak faith asks to be kept.

• He uses the ordinances to press the gospel on us again and again - that we belong to the crucified and risen Christ, and to His people.

• He uses the fellowship of the local church as the very setting in which love becomes visible, error is tested, wanderers are restored, and perseverance is not attempted alone.

So if you look at these tests and see the gracious work of God, however imperfect, do not treat that as a reason to grow careless. Stay under the means He has given. Keep coming to the Word. Keep confessing your sin. Keep walking with Christ’s people. The same grace that began the work is the grace that will finish it.

If you look at these tests and find little evidence that you belong to Him, do not soothe yourself with an old profession, a prayer you once prayed, or the fact that you still know the language of the church. John will not allow that. But do not despair either, as if the answer were to try harder at producing fruit you do not have. The answer is Christ Himself. Come to the Son whom the Father sent. Confess your sin. Trust His sacrifice. Take your place among His people. Then remain where God has promised to keep His own: under the Word, in prayer, at the Table, and in the fellowship of the church.

We must avoid two errors. One is the idea that a person can be genuinely saved and then lose that salvation. The other is the idea that a person can be genuinely saved while showing no evidence of it. Scripture teaches neither. Those who belong to Christ are kept by God, and that keeping becomes visible over time. If they had been of us, they would have continued with us. And those who continue do so because the Father guards them, the Son intercedes for them, and the Spirit uses the means of grace to hold them fast until the day they are found blameless at the appearing of Jesus Christ.