No Shame in His Game: Abiding in the Righteous One Text: 1 John 2:28-29
Introduction: The Great Divide
The Christian life is lived between two great mountain peaks. The first is the peak of Christ's first coming, His incarnation, His perfect life, His atoning death, and His victorious resurrection. The second is the peak of His final coming, His glorious return to judge the living and the dead. We live in the valley between these two advents. And the great question the apostle John is pressing upon us is this: how are you living now in light of that great day then? How does your conduct on Tuesday morning relate to your confidence on the Last Day?
Our evangelical moment is plagued with two opposite but equally destructive errors. On one side, you have a flaccid antinomianism, a cheap grace that says, "I prayed a prayer once, so I have my fire insurance. How I live now is a secondary detail." This reduces salvation to a past transaction and disconnects it entirely from present transformation. On the other side, you have a kind of morbid, introspective pietism, where assurance of salvation is a unicorn you are always chasing but can never quite catch. Every sin, every stumble, every failure sends you spiraling back into doubt, questioning whether you were ever truly saved in the first place. This is a life of constant spiritual anxiety, a hamster wheel of navel-gazing.
The apostle John, with his characteristic, black-and-white clarity, cuts right through this nonsense. He will not allow us to separate our future hope from our present conduct. He will not allow us to divorce our position in Christ from our practice in the world. And he will not allow us to find our confidence in the shifting sands of our own feelings. The ground of our assurance is objective, it is outside of us, it is in Christ. But the evidence of that assurance, the fruit of it, is a changed life. John is laying down a great divide. There are those who will see Him and have bold confidence, and there are those who will see Him and shrink back in utter shame. There is no third category. And the determining factor is whether or not you are, right now, abiding in Him.
The Text
And now, little children, abide in Him, so that when He is manifested, we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming. If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone also who does righteousness has been born of Him.
(1 John 2:28-29 LSB)
The Great Exhortation (v. 28)
John begins with a tender, pastoral command that has immense eschatological weight.
"And now, little children, abide in Him, so that when He is manifested, we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming." (1 John 2:28)
First, notice the address: "little children." This is a term of endearment, not condescension. John is an old man, the last of the apostles, and he is writing to the church he loves. But it also establishes a crucial reality: we are dependents. We are children of God, not self-made spiritual giants. Our entire life is one of dependence upon our Father, through the Son.
The central command is to "abide in Him." This word abide, or remain, is central to John's theology. It means to live, to dwell, to make your home in Christ. This is not a mystical feeling or a moment of ecstatic experience. It is a settled, constant reality. How do you abide? You abide by faith in His promises and obedience to His commands. You abide by hearing His Word and receiving His Supper. You abide by being knit into the life of His body, the church. It is a continuous, active state of being. You don't visit Christ on Sunday mornings; you live in Him.
And John gives the reason for this command, and it is a stark one: "so that when He is manifested, we may have confidence." The manifestation, the appearing, the parousia, the coming of Christ is the fixed point on the horizon of history. It is not a question of 'if' but 'when'. And on that day, there will be one of two reactions. The first is confidence. The Greek word here is parrhesia, which means boldness, freedom of speech, cheerful courage. It is the attitude of a beloved child running to meet his father, not a criminal being dragged before the judge. This is the birthright of the Christian. We are to have boldness on the day of judgment because as He is, so also are we in this world (1 John 4:17).
The alternative is to "shrink away from Him in shame." This is the language of disgrace, of being exposed, of utter humiliation. Imagine the scene. The sky is torn open, the Son of Man appears in blinding glory, and all your secret sins, all your compromises, all your hypocrisies are laid bare. This is the man who claimed to be a Christian but loved his money more. This is the woman who sang the hymns but harbored bitterness and gossip in her heart. This is the person who wore the name of Christ but lived as though He did not exist. For them, His coming is not a joy but the ultimate terror. They will want the mountains to fall on them to hide them from the face of the Lamb. The abiding Christian looks for His appearing; the counterfeit Christian dreads it.
The Divine Logic (v. 29)
In the next verse, John provides the underlying logic. He connects our practice to our paternity. He shows us how we can know who is who.
"If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone also who does righteousness has been born of Him." (1 John 2:29)
This is a classic piece of Johannine reasoning. It is simple, direct, and inescapable. He begins with an undeniable premise: "you know that He is righteous." Jesus Christ is the Righteous One. He is the standard. His character is perfect righteousness. This is not in dispute for any true believer.
From this premise, he draws a necessary conclusion. "You know that everyone also who does righteousness has been born of Him." The logic is this: like begets like. Apples come from apple trees. Lions have lion cubs. And the children of a righteous God will bear a family resemblance. They will practice righteousness.
Now, we must be very careful here. John is not teaching a doctrine of sinless perfection. He has already told us that if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us (1 John 1:8). He is not saying that our righteous deeds are the cause of our new birth. That would be a damnable heresy. We are not born of God because we do good works. We do good works because we have been born of God. The new birth is the cause; righteousness is the effect. The righteousness John speaks of is not the meritorious cause of our salvation, but the necessary evidence of it.
The phrase "does righteousness" means to make a practice of it. It describes the settled direction and pattern of a person's life. Is your life oriented toward obedience to God's commands, or is it oriented toward gratifying the flesh? A Christian may fall into sin, but he does not set up a summer home there. He gets up, he repents, he confesses, and he gets back on the path of righteousness because the divine seed remains in him (1 John 3:9). The unbeliever, by contrast, may perform an occasional good deed, perhaps out of self-interest or social pressure, but the grain of his life runs in the direction of autonomy and rebellion.
This is a glorious, objective test. Do you want to know if you have been born of God? Do you want to have confidence on the day of His appearing? The question is not, "Do I feel saved today?" The question is, "Do I love righteousness and hate sin? Is the basic trajectory of my life one of growing obedience to the righteous God I claim to serve?" This is not a call to anxious introspection, but a call to faithful living. Your assurance grows not by taking your spiritual temperature every five minutes, but by abiding in Christ and getting on with the business of doing righteousness.
The Gospel in the Text
Where is the gospel in this? It is everywhere. This entire passage is built on the foundation of the good news. The command to abide is only possible because Christ first came to us. We can make our home in Him only because He first left His home to tabernacle among us.
The confidence we are to have on the day of judgment is not confidence in our own performance. It is confidence in His performance on our behalf. We can stand before a holy God without shame because Jesus was willing to be shamed for us. He bore our disgrace on the cross, He was stripped naked and exposed, so that we could be clothed in His perfect righteousness. When God looks at us, He does not see our pathetic, spotty record of righteousness; He sees the flawless record of His Son.
And the new birth itself is pure gospel. We were dead in our trespasses and sins. We were not just sick and in need of a little help. We were corpses. We could no more "do righteousness" than a dead man can run a marathon. But God, being rich in mercy, made us alive together with Christ (Ephesians 2:5). He performed a spiritual resurrection in us. He gave us a new heart and a new nature. He caused us to be "born of Him." This is a sovereign act of grace from beginning to end.
Therefore, the call to "do righteousness" is not a grim demand to pull ourselves up by our own moral bootstraps. It is a joyful invitation to live out who we now are. You have been born of the Righteous One. You have His spiritual DNA. Therefore, live like it! Walk as a child of the light. Practice the righteousness that is your birthright. And as you do, as you abide in Him, your confidence for that great and glorious day will not be a fragile hope, but a bedrock certainty. You will not shrink back in shame, but you will run to Him with joy, and hear those glorious words, "Well done, good and faithful servant."