Are you a Christian? Now, that’s a ridiculous question from a Christian pulpit to a Christian congregation on a Sunday morning set aside by the Christian Church for Christian worship.

Perhaps so. But there is an important question yet to ask. How do you measure your faith? How do you test your relationship with God? If a person who is not a member of the Family asks you to produce the evidence for your claim to be part of the Family, what do you offer?

What John gives us in his first letter is a test, a means of measuring our fellowship with God. We don’t really care too much for exams when it comes to our faith. We shy away from the subject. We plead a kind of spiritual fifth amendment, knowing only too well that anything we say might incriminate us.

But John will not let us get away t…