1 John 5:15

The word John uses for confidence is parrēsía. At its root it means speaking out freely: frankness, plainness, openness, and by implication assurance. In prayer it means boldness and open access, the freedom to come to God directly and without fear. The confidence is “in him”, and the Greek, pros auton, means “toward him”. It is confidence directed to God and drawn from our relationship with him, a gift that comes by faith through Christ.

That is why verse 14 follows verse 13 so naturally. John wrote “that ye may know that ye have eternal life”, and the people who are sure of their life in the Son are the people who can be sure their Father listens. The assurance of salvation carries straight on into the assurance of answered prayer.

Christ opened this access for us. Hebrews says that we have “boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus” and calls us to “draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (Hebrews 10:19–22). It also says, “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16).

John was writing, probably late in the first century and likely to churches around Ephesus, to believers troubled by false teachers. These are usually identified with an early form of Gnosticism. They denied that Christ truly came in the flesh, made light of obedience, and claimed a special knowledge that left some of them proud and others careless about sin. Against that background, John’s word for confidence speaks of open access for every believer. We come to God through our relationship with Christ, and that freedom belongs to everyone who is in fellowship with him.

The verb for ask, aitéō, is the ordinary word for making a request: to ask, beg, call for or desire. It is often said to be the word for one who asks a superior, as a child asks a parent, where erōtaō can be used of asking as an equal, and that fits a believer coming to God. The scope John gives is wide, “any thing”, and the one condition is “according to his will” (kata to thelēma autou). That condition guides our asking. God’s will is good, and when we pray in line with it we are asking for what he purposes to do.

Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10), and he prayed that way himself in Gethsemane: “nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42). Beside this condition stands his open invitation to ask, seek and knock (Matthew 7:7–8), and James’s explanation of prayers that go unanswered: “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts” (James 4:3). Prayer according to God’s will is the opposite of trying to bend God to our will. It brings our desires into line with his, and so it becomes an act of fellowship and trust as well as a request.

To hear, akoúō, is a broad word that covers hearing, giving audience and understanding. When John says “he heareth us”, he means God’s attentive hearing, the hearing of a Father who welcomes his children’s requests and is ready to answer them. Verse 15 takes this one step further: “if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.”

The little word “if”, eán, means “if” or “when”. John is building on what verse 14 has just said, so here it introduces something his readers already hold as true. The verb “know” is eídō, which properly means to see, and so to know. John uses it twice in this one verse. We know that he hears, and we know that we have, and the repetition underlines how certain this is.

The word for petitions, aítēma, comes from the verb to ask and means the particular things asked for. The verb “we have”, échō, means to have, hold or possess, and it is in the present tense. When we ask according to God’s will, the answer is so sure that John can speak of it as already ours, and it comes from God himself, for these are petitions “desired of him”. We may need patience and persistence before we see the answer, and it may come at a time or in a way we did not expect, yet in God’s purpose the request is already granted. So we can pray for great things, to the God “that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20).

John now applies all of this to one kind of prayer in particular. A “brother” is a fellow believer, so the setting is the church, where we see one another stumble. The verb for sin, hamartánō, means to miss the mark, to err, to fall short of God’s righteous standard, and it covers deliberate disobedience as well as failures we hardly notice. Even within the family of God, sin is real and calls for help. When we see a brother sin “a sin which is not unto death”, John’s instruction is simple: “he shall ask.”

The promise is that “he shall give him life”. The verb is dídōmi, “to give”. God is the giver here, answering the prayer by giving the sinning brother life: restoration, forgiveness, renewed fellowship with him, and preservation from the full consequences of his sin. This is the confident prayer of verses 14 and 15 put to work for someone else, because it is God’s will to restore his children who stumble.

James says something close to this about the one who brings back a brother who has wandered from the truth: “he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins” (James 5:19–20). John has already told us, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9), and “if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1–2).

The life God gives comes from Christ, who said, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live” (John 11:25). Our prayers for one another follow the pattern of his own, for “he ever liveth to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25). Praying for each other is both a responsibility and a privilege, and it is one of the plainest forms the love John has urged throughout his letter can take.

John speaks of a sin, hamartia pros thanaton, that leads to death, and he sets it beside the ordinary failings of believers, which are the sins he tells us to pray about. He leaves it unnamed, and believers differ on what it is. The word for death, thánatos, can mean death of the body or death in a figurative sense, and the two main views follow those two senses.

• A final turning away from Christ. Many believers understand the sin unto death as apostasy, a deliberate, settled and unrepentant rejection of Christ and the Holy Spirit after a person has known the truth. On this view it is a hardened state of rebellion more than a single act. It is compared with Jesus’ words about blasphemy against the Holy Ghost (Matthew 12:31–32), the warning in Hebrews about those who fall away (Hebrews 6:4–6), and the warning about sinning wilfully “after that we have received the knowledge of the truth” (Hebrews 10:26–27). John has already written about those who deny the Father and the Son (1 John 2:22–23) and about those who go on committing sin as a way of life (1 John 3:4–10), and Jesus said that “he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (John 3:18).
• A sin judged with bodily death. Others hold that John means a sin within the church that God judges with physical death, as he judged Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1–11), and as Paul says happened when the Corinthians abused the Lord’s Supper: “For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep” (1 Corinthians 11:30). On this view, prayer for that person is set aside because God’s judgment has already been decided or carried out.

The setting of the letter fits the first view well. False teachers were drawing some away from the faith, and John writes of those who “went out from us, but they were not of us” (1 John 2:19). Whichever view we hold, the contrast between life and death in this verse shows how much is at stake, and the sin unto death is a rare and extreme condition.

Verse 17 holds two truths side by side. The first is “All unrighteousness is sin”. The word for unrighteousness, adikía, comes from adikos, “unjust”, and means injustice, wrong or wickedness, anything contrary to God’s righteousness, whether it shows in a single act or in a person’s character. The word for sin, hamartía, means “a sin”, and it is properly an abstract word that takes in sin of every kind: thought, word, deed or omission, anything that breaks God’s law or falls short of his character.

So every wrong counts. God is light, “and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5), and “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). This line answers any teaching that treats sin lightly, as the false teachers of John’s day did when they set the spiritual apart from the bodily and concluded that how a person lived hardly mattered.

The second truth is the comfort: “there is a sin not unto death”. John has just said that every wrong is sin, and now he says that the daily failings of God’s children leave their eternal life secure in Christ, though those failings are real and must be confessed. The verse reaches back to 1 John 1:9, where God promises “to cleanse us from all unrighteousness”. The same “all unrighteousness” that verse 17 calls sin is what God cleanses when we confess. “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23), and that is why it is such good news that for those in Christ there is sin that does not end in death.

Everything in these verses rests on Christ. Our confidence in prayer was secured by his death, which opened the way into the holiest (Hebrews 10:19), and he intercedes for us at the right hand of God (Romans 8:34), so that our prayers come before the Father through him. He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29) and “the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 2:2). He “knew no sin”, and God made him to be sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21), so that the wages of sin were paid in full for all who believe. Faith is counted for righteousness (Romans 4:5), and his intercession continues for his people’s daily failings (Hebrews 7:25).

That is why there is “a sin not unto death”. In Christ, sin has lost its power to condemn, and Paul can say, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Corinthians 15:54–57). The warning about the sin unto death points the same way, because it concerns a persistent rejection of the very One who gives this life.

The prophets show how seriously God takes wilful, persistent rebellion. Jeremiah asks whether Israel has brought her troubles on herself by forsaking the LORD “when he led thee by the way” (Jeremiah 2:17), and he condemns the burning of children as offerings, “which I commanded not, nor spake it” (Jeremiah 19:5). Through Isaiah, God tells a people offering worship from unrepentant hearts, “Bring no more vain oblations” (Isaiah 1:13). Yet the same God has carried his people from the womb and will carry them to old age (Isaiah 46:3–4). He is “a merciful God” who will keep his covenant with them (Deuteronomy 4:31), and in the new covenant he says, “their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more” (Hebrews 8:12). With Paul we can only marvel, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Romans 11:33).

You can bring any request to God with the freedom of a child, because Christ has opened the way and the Father hears. Let his will shape your asking, through his word and the help of his Spirit, and then rest in what John says: when God hears, the petition is already yours, even while you wait to see it.

When a brother or sister stumbles, the first thing John asks of you is prayer, and God promises to give life in answer. And when your own sin weighs on you, hold on to both halves of verse 17. All unrighteousness is sin, so confess it honestly. There is “a sin not unto death”, so confess it with confidence, because God is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.