Someone very kindly handed our family a week in a house on Lake Michigan years ago. It was the sort of place we would never have rented for ourselves. Three stories, water out the windows. My parents took the first floor, the girls took the second, and Lisa and I climbed to the loft on the third.

In the middle of the night, there was a boom.

Lisa shook me awake and told me something had happened, and I said the words that will be read at my funeral: “You go find out what.” By then the girls were coming up the stairs, asking whether I had heard it. What I had was a rented house, a family looking at me, and a sound my sleeping brain had filed under breaking glass.

I went down to the basement, which was not technically part of the rental, and came back up with a curtain rod. I bent it in half and went room by room through three floors of somebody else’s house while my daughters hid upstairs. I knew the whole time that I was not equipped for whatever I was about to find. Upstairs the girls were calm, because Dad “had it.” Dad did not have it.

In the morning we found the remains of a balloon draped over a floor register. The air conditioning had kicked on, the balloons had swirled around the vent, and one wore thin and burst. In a silent house at two in the morning, it sounded like the end of the world.

That night holds an important truth. Children take their security from their father rather than from an assessment of his resources, so my daughters were safer in their own minds than I was in mine. The Christian life runs on the same arrangement, with one enormous difference: our Father actually has what the situation requires.

A Pause in the Middle of a Hard Letter

First John is a demanding letter, full of tests: walking in the light, keeping His commandments, loving your brother rather than hating him. John will tell us not to love the world or the things in the world. The pressure in this letter is sustained the whole way through.

In the middle of that pressure, John stops.

“I am writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake. I am writing to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I am writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one. I write to you, children, because you know the Father. I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one.” (1 John 2:12–14)

If you’re looking for something to do from those verses, you’ll leave emptyhanded. There isn’t a single command in the paragraph. Every clause turns on the word because, and each one describes something that has already happened to the reader. In the hardest stretch of his letter, John is telling exhausted people what is already true of them.

He does it by walking through four terms which sound like they’re about age but aren’t: little children, children, young men, fathers. He is describing where a person stands on the road of spiritual growth, and he has a word of encouragement for each place on it.

These are stages, and a stage is a place you pass through rather than a place you settle. A man who was born again twenty years ago and stands exactly where he stood on the first day has not found a comfortable spot to sit down; he has stalled. Growth is not the advanced track for the unusually serious. Where there is life there is growth, and where there is growth there is fruit, which means growth is the evidence that there is life at all. God expects you to be growing, He calls you to grow, and no amount of warmth in these three verses turns that command into a suggestion.

Born Ones, and a Slate Wiped Clean

John’s first word is little children. The Greek behind it carries the sense of “born ones,” those brought into a family by birth. To all who received Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God (John 1:12). Whatever else is uncertain about you, that happened.

What he says over the born ones is that their sins are forgiven. Sin is the breaking of God’s law, pictured in Scripture as an arrow missing the mark and as a failure to reach the standard. It alienates us from God, damages our families and friendships, shames us, and condemns us. Jesus came to save His people from their sins (Matthew 1:21), and the verdict has already been entered.

“as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.” (Psalm 103:12)

David wrote Psalm 32 in the aftermath of the worst thing he ever did, and he called the forgiven man blessed, the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity. Notice where John puts this. The newest believer in the room, the one with the least to show for himself, gets told first that his slate is clear. It is a fact he stands on rather than a hope he works toward.

Children Who Know the Father

John’s second term is a different word, children, describing young children who are still immature and still need care, guidance, and a great deal of reassurance. There is a three-year-old in our family who requires a lot of attention, and none of us holds it against him, because he is three. The church is meant to be exactly that patient with people who are young in the faith. Come to Bible study with me. Let’s get coffee. Tell me what God is doing in your life. That is what a family does with the newly born.

We live among people who will believe almost anything except that everyone is a person of faith. When people are pouring themselves into horoscopes, the occult, the darker corners of entertainment and music, or whole systems of belief about what might be out there, they are excercising faith. The person who calls the Christian credulous has usually not audited his own convictions. God’s people get to say something simpler: I know my Father. I am safe in Him, I am loved by Him, He has forgiven me and accepted me and made me His.

That is what my daughters had on the third floor of that rented house, and it is what I did not have on the stairs with a bent curtain rod. They were secure because their father was their father, and their father happened to be a man with no weapon, no strength for the job, and no idea what had happened. God is not that father. When His children look up in the dark and ask whether we are all right, the answer does not rest on His resources being adequate to the situation, because He is the situation’s Maker.

Young Men, Strong and Already on the Winning Side

The third term, young men, describes those who have come up strong, maturing, gaining discernment, taking responsibility. We expect that physically of an eighteen-year-old, and we should expect it spiritually of anyone who has walked with Christ for a while. I was working on a bollard at the end of the carport recently and called a young man from church to help, precisely because I did not want to be the one doing the heavy lifting. A healthy church has people you can call.

Strength of this kind comes from one place: the word of God abides in you. Peter tells us to long for pure spiritual milk like newborn infants, that by it we may grow up into salvation (1 Peter 2:2). There are people who will happily serve you spiritual twinkies and people who will happily live on them, so sit where the Word is actually taught. Taking it in is the first thing, and receiving it is the second. James says to receive with meekness the implanted word (James 1:21). I can tell from the platform when someone is hearing without receiving, arms crossed, everything bouncing off; meekness is the posture that says, Lord, my heart is open, let it go deep. The third thing is harder, which is wanting to change rather than merely wanting different results (Romans 12:2). The pattern held for Jesus Himself: tempted in the wilderness, He did not square off with the devil, He quoted Scripture, three times, and that was the whole of it.

John says one more thing twice over the young men: you have overcome the evil one. If you asked most people what Satan’s primary purpose is, they would say to make people sin, and I would put it differently. His aim is to get you to give yourself to anything other than the one true God. God made us in His image, and inside every person is the capacity to pour a life into something. God says: pour it into Me, you were made to worship. Satan says: pour it anywhere else, and he does not care much where. False religion will do, or pleasure, or power over other people, or possessions. Even a life of good works will do, if it convinces you that you are acceptable to God as you are. Satan only requires you to be occupied.

Overcoming the evil one means the lie has lost its cover. You still struggle, but you see clearly while you struggle because God has given light to your heart. It is like watching a rerun of a movie you love: the first time through, the hero is finished, while the second time you enjoy every minute because you know how it ends. We know how it ends.

Fathers, and the Steadiness of Knowing Christ

John’s last term is fathers, and he is not asking about your children. He means the seasoned saints, grown and stable and worthy of imitation, who have wisdom and know the Word and can instruct others. A healthy church holds all four groups at once: the newly born, the young and needy, the strong and responsible, and the seasoned.

What John says over the seasoned is that they know Him who is from the beginning, and he says it twice in nearly identical words. If you wonder how we know that refers to Christ rather than the Father, listen to how this man opens his other two books. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1). That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes (1 John 1:1). “The beginning” is where John goes when he wants to talk about Jesus.

Your Savior is an everlasting sovereign. He came as a carpenter from a village nobody respected and went to the cross as a suffering servant, and He existed eternally with the Father long before any of it. He lived, He died, He conquered death, He ascended to glory, and He is at work on your behalf and on mine at this moment. He is the Alpha and the Omega, which means He will not fail on a cosmic scale and He will not fail in your particular life either.

You can see what that does to a person over forty years. The ecstatic highs are not so high, and the catastrophic lows are not so low. Hard things arrive and the person keeps pressing on, and people watching from outside say they cannot imagine how that family is holding up. I can tell you exactly how. It’s grace. It’s Christ standing in the room with them. A seasoned saint has one testimony which a young believer cannot yet give: my Savior has never failed me, and He never will.

The Foundation of Encouragement: For a Name That Is Not Yours

I am writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake. (1 John 2:12)

Your sins are forgiven so you can go to heaven, which is true but not what the verse says. Your sins are forgiven so you need not carry guilt around, which is also true but not what the verse says. Your sins are forgiven for His name’s sake.

This may come as a surprise, but God did not primarily forgive you for your sake. He was not in heaven feeling lonely, deciding to make some people and rescue them so they could keep Him company; He has no deficit for you to fill. Wherever you see the phrase His name, you may fairly substitute the word fame. God intends to be known throughout eternity as the God who forgives, and He intends it because forgiven people cannot stop saying so.

If your forgiveness were finally about you, it would rest on something in you, and you know better than anyone what that foundation is worth. Instead, it rests on God’s determination to be glorified as a Savior, which means your eternal safety carries His signature and not yours. The born one at the start of the road and the seasoned saint at the far end of it are standing on the same ground, but neither of them poured the concrete.

That also settles what heaven will sound like. The song of the saints will not be a comparison of accomplishments, with somebody strolling the streets of glory pointing out that he collected five crowns and you collected one. Every one of us will be saying the same thing, and we will keep going back to the throne to say it again, “Can you believe He saved us!”

You can see the same generosity of God in far smaller things. The evening sky turns pink when the air is clear and red when smoke drifts down from the fires up north, and in a few weeks every tree on the road into town will blaze for a a month before winter shuts it down. Why did God do that? The world would run without a single autumn color in it. I take it as a gift handed over with no strings, offered so that we would look up and say, “Thank you.”

A God who spends that kind of care on a hillside nobody is watching is a God worth trusting with a soul. Salvation works the same way. That is the wonder at the bottom of all four stages: whichever one you are standing in, you were forgiven by a God whose glory and your good turned out to be the same thing.

Somewhere in your week there is a commute, a load of laundry, a shift you are dreading, a person at work you have been avoiding, and that is where all of this either holds or not. You will be tempted to measure your standing with God by how the week has felt, and John hands you a better measure. Your sins are forgiven, and forgiven for the sake of a name that will be famous forever. You know the Father personally rather, not by reputation. You are strong, the Word is in you, and the enemy’s best lie has lost its disguise. The one you belong to was there before the beginning and will be there after the end.

Those glorious truths don’t mean that you get to stay where you are. The stages of maturity are milemarkers on a road, and roads lead us closer to the destination. The encouragement in these verses is fuel rather than a place to park. Ask yourself which of the four names John would use for you, and then ask what it would take to be further along in your spiritual walk a year from now.

Some days the right prayer, whispered at a red light or over a sink full of dishes, is simply this, “Lord, would You encourage me?” He has already answered it in writing. Take the truth in, let it get down into the soil, hang onto it, ask Him for strength, and go run the rest of the day.

2026.08.16 / Encouragement for the Journey / Pastor Brent Stille