Triumphant Certainties by Alexander MacLaren and published by Classics.
JOHN closes his letter with a series of triumphant certainties, which he considers as certified to every Christian by his own experience. “We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not... we know that we are of God... and we know that the Son of God is come.” Now, that knowledge which he thus follows on these three lines is not merely an intellectual conviction, but it is the outcome of life, and the broad seal of experimental possession is stamped upon it.
Yet the average Christian reads this text, and shrugs his shoulders and says, “Well! perhaps I do not understand it, but, so far as I do, it seems to me to say a thing which is contradicted by the whole experience of life.”
“We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not” and some of us are driven by such words, and parallel ones which occur in other places, to a presumptuous over-confidence, and some of us to an equally unscriptural despondency; and a great many of us to laying John’s triumphant certainty up upon the shelf where the unintelligible things are getting covered over with dust.
From the Opening Sermon
