Verses 21-22: Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and whatever we ask we receive from Him, because we keep His commandments and do the things that are pleasing in His sight.
John addresses this passage to fellow believers, the beloved. It is a term of endearment, the “object of one’s affection,”1 and the only time he uses it in this epistle. We who are believers in Jesus Christ are part of the beloved members of the Body Of Christ.
Content of Our Heart
The heart does not refer to that vital organ within our body, but as defined in the previous post it refers to the “center and source of the whole inner life, with its thinking, feeling, and volition.”2 This is where the believer does his thinking and meditating upon the Biblical truth he has stored.
Based on this, a conditional statement is now presented: if our heart does not condemn us, then we are assured to have confidence before God. In order to establish that our heart does not condemn us, we must examine ourselves to determine that we are obedient to His commands and are consistently in fellowship—walking in the light, having confessed our sins (1:6-9). However, this is contingent upon an accurate understanding of Biblical truth in order to correctly align God’s divine standards with our practice of His truth (1:6). We cannot afford to deceive ourselves by using false standards (emotions, feelings, public opinion) in examining ourselves—only God’s Word is all-sufficient.
As in 2:28, John again aspires that we attain confidence before God. The Greek word for confidence means courage, boldness, fearlessness.3 This is the character of the mature believer, one who acquires the boldness to live and speak their faith, being in fellowship with his Lord and guided by the Holy Spirit. For John does not want us to be unfaithful in our spiritual lives, resulting in being ashamed of ourselves and hesitant in approaching Him in prayer, as he focuses upon in the next verse.
Whatever We Ask
With the confidence we achieve before God in mind, John now directs our attention to the matter of prayer. The writer of Hebrews explains the significance of confidence in our approach to God in prayer:
Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:16)
We approach prayer with confidence when we know that we have a clear conscience, that we have confessed our sins and humbly submitted to His divine specifications of effective prayer requests. This particular verse has been distorted and has misled believers throughout Church history. It has falsely been interpreted that God provides a blank check and all the believer needs to do is fill in whatever he asks and God will impart unconditionally whatever is desired. Also, the following phrase has been misconstrued as an exchange of favors, as if God is saying: “If you keep My commandments and do pleasing things then and I’ll do something (anything) for you.”
However, this perception of prayer is not in harmony with other Scripture passages. A fundamental rule of Biblical interpretation is that “Scripture interprets Scripture.”4 In order to arrive at the correct understanding of a Biblical principle, the Bible student must compare each Scripture passage with others that pertain to the same matter so that God’s intended meaning of a doctrine is clear and unambiguous.
For instance, when our passage is compared with what James wrote, it is apparent that whatever does not include all of our personal cravings:
You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures. (James 4:3)
And by looking further into John’s epistle we discover the most important prerequisite of prayer: that what we ask must be according to His will (5:14). We have Our Lord as our perfect example of this when He agonized over His coming Passion. He prayed that the Father might remove His time of suffering, but added: “yet not My will, but Yours be done” (Luke 22:42b). This should be our attitude in whatever we request from God, to regard the accomplishment of the will of God to be the utmost important outcome of our prayers.
The logical question now is: How do we know what His will is so that we can pray accordingly? Our Lord provided the answer during His Upper Room Discourse.
“If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” (John 15:7)
There are two important stipulations given here that we must not ignore. First, the certainty that we are abiding in Him is to be factual. To abide in Him is expressed here as a completed activity, characteristic of our position of being in fellowship with Him at the moment we pray.5 If we expect for God to “hear us” (5:14) then we must first confess all known sins to be assured we are on proper prayer foundation, as the Psalmist stated: “If I regard wickedness in my heart, The Lord will not hear” (Psalm 66:18).
The second condition is the confirmation that His words abide in us. This implies that our thoughts are to be formatted by His thoughts. The Apostle Paul characterized this as the transforming renovation of our minds (Romans 12:2). Through the prophet Isaiah, God explained the reason for this need:
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways And My thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8–9)
The Evidence of Abiding
In the final phrase of verse 22, John contemplates the conclusive evidence that we abide in Him and that His words are in us: “because we keep His commandments” and the practice of our Christian life consists of doing “the things that are pleasing in His sight”—His “penetrating gaze.”6 For we can never escape His presence (cf. Psalm 139:7-12).
Do we have confidence that our prayers are heard or even answered? Only when we truly seek His will for whatever we ask in prayer can we claim the promise of this verse.
[1] Louw, J. P., & Nida, E. A. (1996). In Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains. New York: United Bible Societies, 1.293.
[2] Arndt, W., Gingrich, F. W., Danker, F. W., & Bauer, W. (1979). In A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 403.
[3] Arndt, et.al., p. 630.
[4] Couch, Mal, Gen. Ed. (2000). An Introduction to Classical Evangelical Hermeneutics, Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, p. 166.
[5] Dana, H.E. & Mantey, Julius R. (1957). A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament, Toronto, Ontario: Macmillan Co., p. 196.
[6] Wuest, K. S. (1997). Wuest’s Word Studies from the Greek New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 13.157.
© 2025 David M. Rossi
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