Snowmobiling on Thin Ice

“Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God.”

One of my friends grew up in a small, northern town with a stepfather whose job description included transporting the dead to the local funeral home. Supper-time conversations during the cold winter months frequently concerned which neighbor, acquaintance or school chum he had just delivered to the mortician. An alarming number of the deceased were fished out of the local lake.

Morbid, yes. But the point is that, like faith, the utility of confidence depends entirely on its object. If the ice is too thin, it won’t hold a snowmobile no matter how skilled and experienced its rider may be. Likewise with confidence misplaced.

Most of the New Testament writers touch on the subject of confidence from time to time. Unsurprisingly, Paul has the most to say about it, but the verse from 1 John quoted above might be one of the more important. The so-called “disciple of love” is talking about his favorite subject again. As always, he starts with Christ. “By this we know love,” John writes, “that he [Jesus] laid down his life for us.” Our Lord’s sacrifice on our behalf is the all-time definitive statement on the subject of love. He confirmed it himself: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”

However, John follows with this practical exhortation, “and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.” He’s not speaking of the ultimate sacrifice there, though love might come to that under extraordinary circumstances. Rather, he’s talking about the practical daily sacrifices, big or small, to which Christians are called and that prove our profession of love is genuine and reliable. “If anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?”

Good question. Genuine love modeled on and fueled by our Lord’s love always results in actions: generosity, kindness, loyalty, compassion, sacrifice. “Little children,” he writes, “let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.” This is where confidence comes in. He continues, “By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before [God].” By what? If context means anything, I believe he’s saying that behaving consistently with our profession of faith by expressing our love to one another practically gives us confidence before God when we pray. We know. We are reassured. Our hearts do not condemn us. We are walking as our Savior walked. Our confidence is not in our own performance or motives, but in the fact that we are following a pattern the Lord Jesus himself established. His example is a solid foundation on which to put our feet. The path we travel is one down which he leads us.

On the other hand, confidence in the flesh is a recipe for disaster. It’s snowmobiling on thin ice. The flesh is a sneaky beast, always trying to convince us to trust in something other than Christ, but it always lets us down in the end. When Paul writes about it, he’s not using “flesh” in the sense of abject wickedness, but in the sense of conforming to the unregenerate man’s religious expectations. He goes on to speak about his own history within Judaism. He could tick all the right ritualistic boxes, including circumcision. He had an impeccable genealogy, being “a Hebrew of Hebrews”. He had all the right religious training and a history of defending his beliefs even to the point of persecuting those who thought differently. Any Jew would have agreed that Paul was at the top of the heap, yet the apostle could put no confidence in such things. He writes, “I count them as rubbish.” It’s knowing Christ and imitating his example that gave him confidence, “becoming like him in his death”.

This, I believe, is exactly what John is saying. When you can get a fisherman and a Pharisee to agree, you might have something.