Doesn’t 1 John 3:22 Prove That Our Ability to Receive Depends on How Well We Keep God’s Commandments?
You need to read the previous verse along with this verse to get the total picture of what God says in this verse.
1 John 3:21-22:
Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God.
And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.
The subject here is your conscience and how it affects your confidence to approach God.
If you know that you are doing something wrong and you refuse to stop doing it, your conscience will bother you. When your conscience bothers you, it saps you of confidence to approach God. Deliberately violating your conscience makes you feel condemned, even though it’s your own conscience and not God doing the condemning (Romans 8:1). When you feel condemned, it’s hard to receive from God. Besides, I like to say that trying to receive healing while refusing to stop doing something that you know is wrong is like trying to open the door of your home to the Lord while slamming it in His face. It’s hard to receive from God while also resisting His correction. God won’t condemn you (Romans 8:1), but He WILL correct you (Hebrews 12:5-13). He promised you that if you’re “off” in your attitude, He will reveal that to you (Philippians 3:13-15). That is for your GOOD because He LOVES you!
Now let me tell you what God ISN’T saying here. He is NOT saying that your ability to get healed is based on your merits. He is NOT saying that you will get healed or not get healed (or receive any other blessing or fail to receive any other blessing) based on how many commandments you follow or break! If that is the case, Jesus went to the cross for nothing and you will just have to live under the Law to earn God’s blessings by keeping His commandments! Healing is still legally yours by grace – God is greater than your heart and He knows that. The issue for you is that your heart (conscience in this context) will bother you when you’re knowingly sinning and not repenting.
Your conscience should not bother you as long as you are not deliberately planning to engage in things that you know are wrong. That is not the same thing as letting an “unedifying” word slip out of your mouth by accident when someone cuts you off on the highway without a turn signal. You immediately realize that you shouldn’t have used that word. That would be a slip, not something premeditated. In such a case, you acknowledge that you were in the wrong, but because you now agree with God instead of agreeing with sin, your conscience should not bother you. In fact, ANY past sin – as long as you are not deliberately planning to continue in it – should not be “on your conscience.” That is why Paul, who back when he was Saul persecuted Jesus and His Church, could tell the council in Jerusalem that he had lived in all good conscience before God until that day (Acts 23:1)! (In that case, the High Priest illegally ordered that Paul be struck in the mouth, and Paul slipped and had some words for that guy! Then Paul repented of those words. So once again, Paul was in a position to have a clean conscience, so that he could later tell Timothy, “I thank God, whom I serve from my forefathers with pure conscience, that without ceasing I have remembrance of thee in my prayers night and day;” (2 Timothy 1:3).)
He was “sprinkled from an evil conscience” (Hebrews 10:22). An evil conscience reminds you of your past sins from which you’re forgiven. Jesus’ purging of your sins was done so that you would have no more conscience (consciousness) of sins (Hebrews 10:2). Now that does NOT mean, as some teach in error, that as a believer you no longer even know or care if you’re sinning because you’re in the state of innocence that Adam was in before he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil! (Adam didn’t even have the ability to have a guilty conscience before he fell because he literally didn’t know right from wrong. You do!)
So in the context here, the reason that we “receive of Him because we keep His commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in His sight” is NOT because we have earned the right to receive God’s blessings by faithful commandment-keeping. Rather, we receive because we are keeping our consciences pure so that our hearts do not condemn us, which would sap us of confidence in prayer.