John has been speaking on the subject of love. He's told us that if we don't love our fellow man, our hearts aren't right with God. Today he urges us to be guided by our consciences when we examine our hearts. If we are in Christ, we have the Holy Spirit to guide us, and the Holy Spirit will trouble our consciences when we aren't maintaining an attitude of love toward others. The Holy Spirit can also clear our consciences when we're struggling with the memories of things we've already repented of.
We can use the Scripture we're studying today to allow the Holy Spirit to instruct us. He's telling us to examine our hearts to see whether we love others in the way Christ has told us to love them. "This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in His presence: If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and He knows everything." (1 John 3:19-20) Sometimes we can fool ourselves in regard to our sin, but we aren't hiding anything from God. He reveals wrong attitudes to us so we can deal with them. This is why it's so important to read the Bible with the mindset that we are willing to hear anything the Spirit has to say, and why it's so important for our hearts to be open to the guidance of the Spirit while we're praying. During those occasions the Holy Spirit will show us areas in our lives that need work. Sometimes those sins are being committed in ignorance because we don't always realize we're in the wrong. Other times we've simply managed to ignore our sin. But the Lord wants to get it out in the open with so it can be dealt with.
Jesus tells us what to do when the Spirit reveals to us that we're in the wrong: "If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift." (Matthew 5:23) Jesus says that as soon as the Spirit reveals to us that we need to make something right with someone, we need to do it as quickly as possible, even if that means slipping out of a service in the church or synagogue. Doing what the Spirit tells us to do is more important to God than putting an offering in the collection plate. This is because the Lord prefers obedience over sacrifices and offerings. (1 Samuel 15:22) Our consciences won't be at rest in the presence of God unless our hearts are right with those around us. Does the Lord guarantee us that someone we've wronged will accept our apology? No, because they may not obey His command to be forgiving. But if we obey God by making a sincere apology to someone we've wronged, we won't have that nagging sense of guilt when communing with Him in prayer or while reading our Bibles. We will have the relief of knowing we've done all we can do to repair the relationship with our fellow man. At that point we just need to leave it with God.
We have to keep in mind that there are two types of guilt: true guilt and false guilt. Satan loves to cause us to dwell on the past. The devil will keep bringing up things we did before we came to Christ. He will also keep throwing in our faces the mistakes we've made since coming to Christ. As if the devil's attacks aren't bad enough, we sometimes attack our own selves with thoughts like, "How could you have done or said such a thing? You're a Christian! You love the Lord Jesus and yet you've behaved like somebody who has never even heard of Him. You're sorry for what you've done and you've talked to the Lord about it, but still I bet Jesus is so ashamed of you right now." John is about to tell us how to deal with false guilt.
We must remember that guilt is false only when we have already repented of the sin. If we haven't repented of it and allowed the Lord to help us resist it, then the guilt we feel is real. If we have sincerely repented of our mistake, then one of the best things we can do is fight the attacks of the enemy and the attacks of our own minds with the word of God. This is where examining our consciences by the light of the Scripture comes in, and this is why John says, "Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from Him anything we ask, because we keep His commands and do what pleases Him." (1 John 3:21-22)
When we feel guilty, we have to ask ourselves whether we're living in a way that's breaking God's commands. This means we need to study and know the commands of God. Are we living in a way that displeases Him? We need to know what Jesus said about godly living. If anything becomes clear to us that we need to repent of, we ought to go ahead and repent of it right away. Dealing with the problem will give us the "confidence before God" that John is talking about. If it becomes clear to us that what's bothering us is a sin we repented of and turned away from long ago, then we know it's false guilt. Recognizing false guilt for what it is also gives us "confidence before God". In that case we can say to the devil or to our own troubled minds, "That's under the blood of Christ! The Lord Himself will never fling that sin in my face because it's been forgiven and forgotten. If He isn't going to ever bring it up again, then no one else has the right to bring it up."
As the Lord Jesus said, all of God's commandments and laws can be summed up by loving the Lord with all our hearts, minds, souls, and strength, and by loving our neighbors as ourselves. (Matthew 22:40) The Apostle Paul said the same thing by telling us that love is the fulfillment of the law. (Romans 13:10) We aren't living in a way that pleases the Lord if we don't love others. It's important to note that the Lord didn't command us to like everyone but to love everyone. These are two completely different things. There are people who don't allow us to like them because of the way they behave toward us. There are people who are so bitter and angry that it's hard to be around them. But we are to love them because they have an eternal soul, and because Christ loves them just as much as He loves us, and because Christ died for them just as much as He died for us. We should want them to have eternal salvation in Christ. We should want their lives in the here and now to be transformed by Christ. We have no hope of leading them to Christ if we don't show them the love of Christ. After all, the Lord loved us when we were unlikable, didn't He? We're going to look a whole lot like Him if we show love to those whose behavior is unlikable.
If we want to live lives that please God, and if we want to live in close fellowship with Him, we must come to Him through faith in His Son. And after accepting Christ as our Savior, we must obey the greatest commandments which sum up all the law and the prophets: loving the Lord with all we've got and loving those around us by treating them as we want to be treated. "And this is His command: to believe in the name of His Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as He commanded us. The one who keeps God's commands lives 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 3:23-24)
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