Just in case you missed it, there are three times in this scripture that we are promised we can know something to be absolutely true. In this day and time, that’s no small thing. The assurance of absolute assurance. We are promised in this scripture that we can know that God loves us, not because of something we feel or hope, but because of the evidence of history, because of the way God has actually already behaved toward us. "We know love by this," John writes, "that he laid down his life for us."

Maybe you have that part of the gospel already settled. Or not. If not, I would sincerely pray that this would be the day in your life that the truth of God’s love would break into your life like sunshine after a dark, driving rain that lasted all night until the morning sun. Maybe you’ve never doubted that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. But, maybe it’s been particularly difficult for you to believe that "the world" John writes about in John 3 included you. If so, then this promise is for you this morning. God demonstrated his love in Christ, not just for the world at large, but for you, too. There is solid, existential evidence of the love of the invisible, eternal God upon whom no human eye has ever been laid, in the Christ who was seen, to live and die and rise again. That’s Gospel 101.

The next thing this scripture promises that we can also know is this. "By this," John writes, "we will know that we are from the truth." Not only can we know that God loves us, we can know for absolute certain that we are his. A part of him. A part of his plan, a part of his life, a part of his eternity. By what evidence can we know that? We’ll get back to that in just a moment.

The last promise of personal knowledge we are given is similar to the second. "By this we know," John writes, "that he abides in us." That God loves us, that we abide in God and that God abides in us, these three great assurances that are essential to peace of mind and joy in the Christian life are ours in Christ.

The evidence of God’s love for us is the actual fact of the death and even the resurrection of his son for us. The proof of God’s love is not just a verbal commitment to love us, but again, the actual demonstration of that love to us. As Paul later writes in the book of Romans, "God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).

The promise of love is one thing. It is important. Like the promise two people make to each other at the altar. "Do you promise to love her?" the preacher asks of the man. "I do." "Do you promise to love him?" the preacher asks of the bride. She says, "I do." Those are powerful words. In fact, in all fifty states, those words spoken in front of witnesses become a legally binding contract. So binding, in fact, that if you want to break the contract, the only way you can do so is to appear before a judge in a court of law and get his or her approval. The verbal promise is heavy. The deed all the more so.

I know people who have no memory of ever having heard the verbal promise of love from anyone. I know people who have never heard a father or even a mother say the words, "I love you," and have no memory of one of their parents ever touching or holding them in an affectionate way. They live forever crippled by the void of those words and those deeds that no other human being can ever replace.

The words of love are powerful in their own right. Frederick Buechner writes of the power of the spoken word to change the course of human history when he describes how Isaac mistakenly blessed Jacob instead of Esau as he prepared to die. You remember the story from the Old Testament, I’m sure. Just the verbal blessing of the father in Jewish culture was so powerful that, once it was given, it could not be taken back, even by the father who gave it. Buechner goes on to write that "this remains true to this day. We also know that words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion within the human heart that can never be reversed" (Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark, Harper, 2006, p. 3).

We all live with some of those irreversible words, both loving and unloving, that we have both spoken to others and heard spoken to us. On some level, we understand Esau’s sense of being cursed because Jacob got the blessing meant for him. All of us in this room, at some time or another, have sought the blessing from someone we never got.

James affirms the teaching of his half-brother Jesus when he writes in his epistle that words are deeds. In fact, they are such powerful deeds that they not only have the power to change the course of human history every bit as much as bullets and bombs or nails and hammers, we are judged just as much for what we have said to others as for what we have done to others. When we have said, we have done.

It is the spoken word becoming a deed that forms the basis of John’s teaching about two very, very important things. First, the word of God becoming the deed of Christ is verification for us of God’s love. Second, our deeds of love for others become the verification of our love for God. Without the deeds of love for others in need, John asks, what evidence is there that the love of God exists at all within us, either?

Next, our deeds of love become the verification of our relationship with this eternal God. Not just our love for him at a distance, but of our intimate, personal knowledge of him. "By this we know," John writes, "that we are from the truth," that our source of life is God himself and that God’s truth abides, thrives, flourishes in us, because, because why?

Well, now we get back to the answer to the question we left hanging earlier. "Little children, let us love not in word or speech, but in truth and action," verse 18 reads. Just prior to that, in verse 17, we are asked to ponder, "How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help?" Then again, in verses 23 and 24, "This is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them." We are commanded to believe in God and demonstrate that belief in the way we treat our fellow man, the others on this planet for whom Christ also died, as a demonstration of the love of creator-God.

This is very important. All these words from scripture, all of them, every one of them, were written to Christians. To people who had verbally said they believed. They contain both a warning and a promise. The warning is that words are deeds. That words of love, however, without deeds of love are words void of meaning. Words of love without deeds of love are acts of deceit.

They also contain promise. Words of love fleshed out in justice and mercy are actions that verify that what we claim to know about God and ourselves is really true. This may apply to you this morning. I don’t know. It seemed to resonate with something in me. It seems that this is where John was aiming his words, to those who, no matter what they have tried to believe, and wanted to believe that they really believed, still find themselves living with a daily sense of condemnation that who and what they are and what they have done will never be enough. "By this we know," he said, even when our very own "hearts condemn us."

If we live with that kind of neurotic sense that something is not right with God, though we’ve said the words and tried to live the life, by what can we know that we are still a part of God, God a part of us? By what can we know? "By this," John writes. By the actions of our lives. By actually doing the loving thing when it makes sense and when it doesn’t. When it feels good and when it doesn’t. When there is evidence that our actions are worth it and when there is no evidence our actions are worth it. When the one we are loving appears deserving and grateful and when the one we are loving, at least from our perspective, is undeserving and ungrateful. When we actually live out the love of Christ toward one another, no matter what, then, John says, "by this we know" that the God who loved us while we were still sinners, and God’s Spirit, actually live in us. Where the spirit of God abides, love dominates. Not just the conversation of love, but the deep, real, existential demonstration of love.

Have you ever doubted that God loved you? In fact, let me be more specific than that. Do you doubt that you are loved by God this morning, just the way you are? If so, my guess is that you probably find yourself crippled and unable to really act out on the faith you want to have. This promise is just for you. The true believer is the one who sometimes doubts and even fears the security of his or her own relationship with God, but even in their doubt, even in moments of self-condemnation, chooses to act in loving ways beyond the way they feel. That’s where I want to live my life.

On any given Sunday, there are a lot of places I would rather be than church. If it’s been a good week, I don’t mind being here. If it’s been a tough week, I’d rather be fishing than have to face people. Sometimes, if I’ve beat myself up, and I’ve done some really dumb things during the week, and I feel bad about myself, I don’t feel at all worthy to come up into this pulpit and say a word about anything, much less to preach the word of God. But, what I’m coming to discover is that faith, true faith, empowers me to act beyond how I personally feel at any given moment. When you can do that, then you can know that whatever it is you need to know about yourself and your relationship with God will come in time.

A ‘60’s group, The Troggs, sang Love Is All Around. I can still hear it even all these decades later. One line, especially. "I feel it in my fingers; I feel it in my toes. Love is all around me, and so the feeling grows." We’d all like to feel like that, wouldn’t we, when it comes to love? Electricity shooting through our fingers and toes, up and down our spine. Do you remember? How long have you been married? Is there still electricity? All the time, has that been what actually carried you through your legally binding vows at the altar? Those who have loved long have learned that love that only feels good won’t see you through when loving means changing your husband’s or wife’s diaper, or nursing them through Alzheimer’s. Like a man I visited in the hospital this week. Having fallen and broken his hip, he says of his wife with Alzheimer’s, "I’m physically depleted. I have nothing left to give." He loved her, literally, until he spent all of his physical resources, and still loves her with what is left in his heart.

It’s the loving you and I do beyond what we feel, when the worship is thrilling, and we feel it in our fingers and we feel it in our toes, and love is all around and the feeling always grows. It’s the loving we do when everyone does it the way we like it, and when they don’t, and we choose to love anyway. It’s the loving we do beyond what we feel that is the truest evidence that we are connected to a God who loved us beyond feelings.

This morning, those words are more than just a promise. They’re powerful words. Because if I have lived with one feeling all of my life that has been more powerful than any other feeling, and it probably had something to do with being raised in a religious culture that was very moralistic and rigid in its ways of thinking about God, it is a sense of self-condemnation. It’s pretty easy for me and for others to plug into, if they ever want to, a sense of judgment, a curse that I’m just not good enough. If I just were this or that. It comes in different forms and different ways. Sometimes it comes from the voices from the past, memories of old sins and old failures that I know for a fact God has forgiven, but for which I’m still working on forgiveness for myself. Especially the times I’ve failed those I have most wanted to love and who were most counting on me to love them.

Sometimes voices of condemnation come in stranger forms. Not because of something we have done, but in the form of the fear of something we might do wrong. You see, there’s the condemnation of past failure, but there’s also the condemnation of the fear of what might be. If you believe this morning that God is calling you to something more than what you’re currently living and being and doing, it might well be that you have experienced Satan’s condemnation. Not as he kicks in the door, carrying a pitchfork and wearing horns on his head, but as he simply whispers over your shoulder, "What if you fail? What will others think about you, if you try and you blow it?" Sometimes, just the fear of the condemnation of others is all it takes to keep us from moving out in love that is greater than our feelings.

The voices of condemnation from the outside pale in comparison to the voices that haunt from within, when our own hearts condemn us. I’ve shared with you before that I have this buddy on the sixteenth green at Tenison Highlands Golf Course, a red-tailed hawk. He must nest near there, because virtually every time I play, he shows up to circle overhead and watch me putt, usually for par. The other day, he showed up and, as always, just fascinated me almost to distraction. I had a little time, because, of course, I had gotten to the green before all the other guys, and I was just waiting for a moment or two. He’s beautiful, especially with his red-feathered tail all fanned out. He must have a four-foot wingspan bird. I’ve gotten so close to him, I feel like naming him, something like, "Hawk."

The other day, as he circled above, about a hundred feet or so, he never once, in the three or four minutes, flapped his wings. As he circled the green, he was riding the thermals, the updrafts of the warm air from the earth. Then suddenly, these two little birds, about 1/20 his size, appear out of nowhere and start dive-bombing him and pecking at him and screaming at him. Apparently, the hawk had gotten near their nest and they were worried that the hawk might be wanting to eat their young. I stood there and watched Hawk. Someday, I’ll preach about the two little birds and their spunk and their courage. That’s another story. But, Hawk caught my eye most the other day. The whole time those two birds were pecking and dive-bombing and screaming at him, he never once let it bother him, not even enough to flap his wings, not once! He knew they could irritate him; he knew they could make his life noisier, but he also knew, if it came to a battle, he was, well, shall we say, more than a conqueror.

All the while, the little birds kept dive-bombing and pecking, it made me think of this scripture. During the day, any day, the voices of condemnation from without and from within dive-bomb my spirit, trying to distract me. Whispers of Satan. "What if you fail?" Reminders of past sins. "You did fail." Fears, anxieties, reminders that I’m not adequate. Voices from without, voices from within. I don’t have what it takes. Then I am reminded that, unless I choose to let them, the only thing those voices can do is the same thing those little birds did to that hawk. They can irritate me, they can district me, they can peck away. But, unless I let them do otherwise, if push comes to shove, in Christ, I am more than a conqueror.

Condemnation comes, and whenever condemnation comes from Satan, from others, or from within, whenever, wherever, this is the promise of God’s word. By the choices we have made to act in loving and just and merciful ways beyond how we feel even about ourselves, in moments of self-condemnation, despite what is going on around us, by the evidence of the choices we make to live beyond how we feel about ourselves or about others, the Bible says we can rest our heads at night, knowing that no matter what, we are God’s, he is ours, we are in him, he is in us, enough said.

If this very day the voices of condemnation are pecking away at you, failures from the past, voices and whispers of failures you might yet experience, things you’ve done wrong, things you might yet do wrong, if the voices of self-condemnation are about to eat you alive, if the fear of condemnation that if you move out and do what you believe you’ve been called to do and be what you’ve been created to be, you might not make it, if those things are about to peck you to death, may I remind you? There may well come a day when someone will say about you, "I saw her, I saw him, circling high above the conflict, being pecked at and assaulted, never once having to flap his wings, because he was riding the thermals of God’s hope that kept him flying when everything else tried to bring him down."

When you’ve lived like that, then you’ll know. By this you’ll know. You are God’s. God is yours. You are in God. God is in you. And, in the end, nothing else will really matter, will it?