Years ago, a woman in our congregation who opened her home to foreign exchange students brought me a question she could not answer on her own. The girls staying with her were Muslim, and they were curious about her faith. One question kept surfacing at her kitchen table: what is a Christian? She wanted something clear she could actually say out loud.

Try answering it in a single sentence, and you will feel how quickly the ground shifts. Ask on a city street, and the answers come back all over the map. I am a conservative American, so I suppose that makes me a Christian. Christianity gave this country its founding principles, and I agree with those, so count me in. I believe in God, and I try my best. I expect He will let me into heaven. I accept that Jesus of Nazareth was a real man in history who died on a cross. I was baptized. Some churches would add that you need a particular haircut, a certain style of clothing, and one approved version of the Bible in your hand. Every one of those answers is popular, and not one of them is right.

Underneath the confusion lies a problem that has nothing to do with religion.

Picture me asking you to come to the front of the auditorium and help measure the platform for new flooring, and I hand you a yardstick I built myself. My “yardstick” is too short. However, I am the one standing on the platform, and you are the one sitting in the pew, so perhaps I get to set the rules. It has the word yardstick written on its side. It even reads, “Litchfield yardstick.” I made it; it is authentically mine, and I am a little offended that you would question it. You tell me it is wrong, I tell you it is right, and there we sit. We could settle it by finding out who is stronger, though winning a wrestling match would only prove that might makes right and would tell us nothing about the stick.

Someone has to have the authority to say what a yard is.

While the men of the Continental Congress were building our country, they ran into a problem. Whose gallon would the colonies use, whose bushel, whose pound? The question never went away. I have read that roughly half of everything produced in this country is touched by the work of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency running well over a billion dollars a year, whose people spend their working lives deciding what a watt is and how many lumens a bulb gives off. Somebody has to be able to say, this one is the standard, and the argument is over.

The early church ran into the same question in far more serious territory. Who gets to define what a real Christian is, and is it even possible for a person to know, with settled confidence, that they belong to Christ? God did not leave that to a vote. God alone holds the authority to set the standard, and He revealed it through the apostles. John states his purpose for writing plainly: that you who believe in the name of the Son of God may know that you have eternal life (1 John 5:13). He wrote so that we could know.

“And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says ‘I know him’ but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.” (1 John 2:3-6)

Knowing Him and Knowing About Him

Everything in this passage turns on one word, and if we get it wrong the rest becomes a checklist that will either flatter us or crush us. John writes about knowing, and the word he uses points to knowledge gained by experience rather than knowledge gathered in a classroom.

Suppose you are told you need surgery. Your first question will be how many times the surgeon has performed the operation, and if the answer is never, though he has read a great many books on it, you will be out of that room before he finishes the sentence. When your life is on the table, you know which kind of knowledge you want.

There was a boy who came running to his mother howling because his baby sister had a fistful of his hair and would not let go. His mother untangled the little hand, told him he needed to be more patient because his sister did not know that it hurt, and left the room. Pretty soon the baby was the one screaming, and the boy called out, now she knows. That is experienced knowledge, and it is the kind John wants his readers to have.

Paul had it and wanted more of it. Writing as a mature believer who had known Christ for decades, he said his aim was that he might know Him and the power of His resurrection, sharing in His sufferings and becoming like Him in His death (Philippians 3:10). He was asking for the relationship to go deeper rather than for more information about Jesus. The word carries the sense of knowledge that exerts influence, reshaping how a person actually lives rather than sitting in the mind as a familiar fact.

Hold onto one more thing before we go further, because it changes how the rest lands. John is not writing to frighten anyone. He keeps calling his readers his little children, the language of a man writing to his own spiritual offspring with real tenderness. I understand that phrase better as a grandfather than I ever did before. During our family reunion, with thirty-some people at the house and more to do than there were hours, my grandson found me and asked for one more ride on the four-wheeler. I told him Papa was busy. He asked again, please, just one more. You already know how that ended. We rode, and he talked the entire time, and between the engine noise and the bumps I could not make out a word of it, and he was happy as a lark, and so was I. That is the posture John is writing from. What follows comes from a father’s heart, and it is meant to give assurance rather than steal it.

Two Kinds of Keeping

Read those verses again and watch one ordinary word carry the weight. John says we know we have come to know Him if we keep His commandments, and two lines later he says whoever keeps His word has the love of God perfected in him. The same verb, twice, and most of us slide right past it. The word is doing two different jobs, and taking them together shows us something neither one says alone.

The first job is a careful, watchful obedience.

The commandments John has in mind are not the Mosaic law. I happen to be reading through Leviticus at the moment, and I will tell you it makes a person grateful to be under the new covenant rather than under the law. What John means is the teaching of Christ, the whole body of what Jesus commanded His people. Making disciples includes exactly this, since Jesus told the church to baptize and then to teach new believers to observe all that He had commanded (Matthew 28:20). Part of maturing a disciple is pressing those commands into a life.

Then notice what this kind of keeping does not require. No Christian will keep every admonition of the Lord perfectly, and John is not pretending otherwise. What marks a believer is that he wants to obey and it grieves him when he fails. Obedience here is a matter of direction rather than perfection.

Notice also that John anchors this in what we do rather than in what we feel. Trying to gauge your standing with God by your emotions is one of the more dangerous habits a Christian can fall into, because emotions climb and drop for a hundred reasons that have nothing to do with your salvation. Some Sundays you wake up ready to sing. Other Sundays you wake up feeling nothing at all, and that is normal. My alarm goes off at 5:40, and there are mornings my first thought is not a hymn of praise. The coffee does its work, my Sunday school class is a delight, the prelude starts, and by the time we reach the message I can hardly wait to preach. The feelings caught up. They did not determine anything.

When someone tells me they do not feel God’s love, I want to stop them right there, because Scripture says He loves us, and saying otherwise makes Him out to be a liar. Obedience is observable and measurable, which is precisely why John points to it.

I spent years counseling teenagers, and this came up constantly. A young person would tell me, I do not feel saved. I learned to ask a simple follow-up. Are you living in obedience? No. Are you obeying your parents? No. Good, I would say. You are not supposed to feel saved, and I am glad you do not. A person defying God and living in open disobedience at home should not have confidence about their standing with Christ. Where there is no heart to obey, there will be no sense of assurance, and that absence is a mercy rather than a malfunction.

John sets the counterfeit right beside the real thing. Whoever says I know Him and does not keep His commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. The standard is our lives rather than our lips. He is not describing a young believer wrestling in earnest with weakness while trying to learn how to follow Christ. He is describing someone who lives a deliberate lie, who says he prayed a prayer as a child and has no desire whatever to live for God. Much of American Christianity has settled right there, wanting just enough God to feel good about ourselves and not so much God that anything would have to change. God says that arrangement does not work.

Here is where the second job begins. John changes what is being kept. In the first line it was His commandments, which are particular and specific, and in the next line it is His word, which is all of it. With the wider object, the verb takes on a different color. This second kind of keeping is what a sentry does, a soldier pacing his post, guarding something precious.

Picture the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. If you ever get to Washington, go and watch, because it will move you. Those men are all business in rain, heat, or snow, focused and unbending, and you will see exactly how serious they are the moment some knucklehead drifts toward the velvet rope. They are guarding sacred ground and the dignity of a soldier nobody could name.

I have a friend outside our congregation who restored an old pickup, a deep metallic blue, beautiful down to the running boards. I asked whether he enjoyed taking it to car shows. He told me the shows frustrate him, because parents let their children climb on those running boards. To him, the truck is a treasure. He watches it, guards it, keeps it.

That is the posture John is describing toward the word of God, and it explains the promise attached to it. Whoever keeps His word has the love of God perfected in him, which is a claim about purpose rather than sinlessness. As our devotion and surrender to Scripture grow, the door opens wider for the love of Christ to finish its work inside us.

Ask the guarding question about yourself. When the word is preached, are you hungry for it, or do you daydream and let your mind wander off? Those who serve in the nursery and find themselves missing the preaching should pay attention to that ache. Take the preacher entirely out of it, because you are not there for a man. During our sabbatical, I meant to visit other churches, and on the first Sunday a houseful of family guests were all coming here, so I came too and sat in the back. That was a mistake, and I have rarely been so distracted. Be close, be fed, and develop an appetite for preaching rich enough to make you think and pointed enough to convict you. If you come week after week and God never convicts you, then Pastor Daniel and I are doing something wrong. Conviction is one of the kindest things that can happen to you on a Sunday, rather than an insult to be resented.

Put the two keepings side by side, and you will see they are one motion. Obedience without affection hardens into drudgery, affection without obedience evaporates into sentiment, and John refuses to let us hold either one by itself. We guard what we love, and we obey what we treasure.

Walking the Way He Walked

The last verse asks something different in kind. The first two ask what you do with His word, and this one asks what you look like.

“…whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.” (1 John 2:6)

A walk is the whole manner of a life, the way a person moves through ordinary days. Do people see Jesus in the way you go about yours? Here is a line worth writing down: your talk talks and your walk talks, and your walk talks louder than your talk talks.

John’s word abide is a favorite of his, and it means to be deeply connected. Jesus used it of a vine, telling His disciples that a branch cannot bear fruit by itself and has to remain in the vine for the life of the plant to flow into it (John 15:4). No connection, no life. That John says whoever claims to abide tells us something sobering, namely that it is entirely possible to make the claim with nothing behind it.

Walking as He walked has nothing to do with walking on water. It means your life imitates His heart, His spirit, His kindness, His joy, His compassion, and that the imitation is real rather than performed.

Ron Hamilton wrote a song asking whether the people around us see Jesus in us. Twenty-six years ago, on my last Sunday at the church I was leaving, the teenagers sang it to me, and I wept through most of it. I was not weeping because I had arrived. I wept because I knew how often it had not been true of me. One of the girls in that group once told me I needed to be more patient with them, since they were teenagers. She was right. Twenty-six years later, I still need to be more patient.

Now go back and pick up the question we started with. The whole yardstick problem was about who holds the authority to set the standard, and here is John’s answer, sitting in the last verse where it is easy to miss. The standard is not a measurement at all. God did not hand us a stick and tell us to prove ourselves against it. He gave us a Person, and He tells us to walk the way that Person walked. Every argument about haircuts and Bible versions and founding principles dies right here, because none of those is the standard and never was.

The Facade and the Building

A well-known pastor once sat in a planning meeting for a building project and grew frustrated with his architects, who kept proposing more than he thought the church needed. They wanted high ceilings in the auditorium. He judged that too expensive, and eventually he offered a solution: lower the ceiling to save the money, then put a tall facade across the front of the building so it would look impressive from the street. The architect told him no. The building you construct reflects what you believe the church is and does, he said. I do not put facades on churches to fool people. That is what carnivals are for. The inside and the outside have to agree.

What is true of a building is true of a life. Our salvation is secure in Christ, and our assurance of it rises and falls in direct proportion to how closely the outside of our lives matches what is actually inside our hearts.

That gets settled on Tuesday rather than Sunday. It gets settled in the tone you take with your spouse before anyone else in the house is awake, in what you do with the message thread sitting unanswered because responding well would cost you something, in whether the man your coworkers see at the job site would be recognizable to the people who watched you sing two days earlier. It gets settled in the small, unwitnessed decisions nobody will ever compliment you for.

The standard was never ours to set. It was set by the One who walked it perfectly, and He now walks with the people He bought. Go into the week with the outside and the inside in agreement.

2026.08.02 / Walking the Way He Walked / Pastor Brent Stille