1 John 5:6-12
“This is the one who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement. We accept human testimony, but God’s testimony is greater because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son. Whoever believes in the Son of God accepts this testimony. Whoever does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because they have not believed the testimony God has given about his Son. And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” In this passage John emphasizes the truth to listeners that Jesus is the Christ, and Son of God. When I was looking at Dr. Constable’s commentary, it mentioned how many scholars think the “water” here refers to Jesus’ baptism by John, and the “blood” represented his death. A false teaching was going around that said Jesus was only the Christ for a portion of his life, from the time of his baptism until his death. But, John reiterates through the testimony of the Holy Spirit and others that Jesus was the promised Messiah throughout his life and death, and that if we believe in Jesus as being God’s Son we receive life. So, what does this life look like? We are all living, breathing human beings, so what differentiates the life we live now to the eternal life found in Christ? One answer is that we have a glorious inheritance stored up for us in heaven, and we get to be with God forever and ever and ever, as JP likes to say. But in addition to where we end up once we die, Christ came to change how we live our life right now. Many people, especially those not following Christ, would equate money, career success, family, etc, with living a good life. But those things are never guaranteed to us; there is no lasting security in them. But, no matter what we have or don’t have in earthly terms, we still are guaranteed FULL LIFE through Jesus! We see in John 17:3 what this involves when Jesus prays, “Now this is eternal life: that theyknow you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” A passage that has inspired me lately is Philippians 3:7-9 where Paul says, “...whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ...” I love that Paul reminds us how knowing Christ surpasses anything we could have on this earth. In my life today I can certainly tell a difference when I am seeking to know more of Him through His word and prayer, or when I neglect those things and try to push through life however I think it should be done. Many times the busyness of work and the all-too-tempting distraction that social media, food, and other temptations can bring draw me away from close unity with Him and I am more susceptible to believe that having a “full life” involves Jesus and. But in verse 12 of our passage today it says, “He who has the Son has life...” Period. Not the Son and a spouse, or the Son and a well-paying job. Jesus says that He is all we need and there is no life found apart from Him. I have to remind myself daily that the choices I make matters and seeking to invest in my relationship with God and deny quick fixes of pleasure is soworth it. So, to summarize, our inheritance is secure through our belief in Jesus and we will find true life when we seek to know him more. My challenge today would be to see what each of us can do to get to know Him better. Maybe that means adding 5 minutes of prayer to our day, or 10 minutes of Bible reading, or it could be something more drastic. Whatever it is, we can trust that getting to know Him will be the best investment we can make. When we stop looking to things in this world to satisfy us, and start gazing at our Savior who is greater than anything we will find on this planet, we will experience more fully the gift of “eternal life” John talks about. A thought to end on: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. John10:10
0 Comments
As I sit here and write this Devo today it is February 8, 2018 and I have just found out that my mom who has diabetes has just had a seizure. While she has no history of seizures, the doctors have told her it’s because she has not managed her diabetes well. Alongside my mother, my father who is also diabetic and he is losing his vision. I didn’t know what to feel as I consider my parents who are failing in their health. While my parents and I are not the closest, yet maybe you have this type of relationship with your parents. My parents are not ones I go to counsel for, are not ones I go to for affirmation, and they are not ones I seek for security. For me at a young age, my parents worked a lot which made me very independent. My dad only being home on weekends sometimes and my mom who was a full time caregiver was only home to check that I wasn’t burning the house down. From the age of around 12/13 I was driving in my small town of Wink, Texas. I cooked a lot for myself, did my own laundry, made my own choices when it came to my future with college, and even was the groundskeeper/maintenance man for home. I tell you this story because I believe John wants to remind us what a loving father is like.
“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has become a child of God. And everyone who loves the Father loves his children, too. We know we love God’s children if we love God and obey his commandments. Loving God means keeping his commandments, and his commandments are not burdensome. For every child of God defeats this evil world, and we achieve this victory through our faith. And who can win this battle against the world? Only those who believe that Jesus is the Son of God.” -1 John 5:1-5 John in this passage is reminding us that when we believe in who Jesus is and trust that he died for our sins that we now have become children of God. God gave us son for you and when you trust in that you have now become his Child.
I pray and hope that you would see how much love your Heavenly Father has for you and if you haven’t seen it, that he would reveal it to you, I pray that you trust in him because his commandments are not burdensome but are instruction to give you life, and I pray that you would rest in your faith the next time trial, temptations, or sufferings come up in your life. “ Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.” -1 John 4:7-21 One of the things that my father and mother tried to instill within me as a child is to do everything to the best of your ability and to work hard. I think those are the values in which every parent would want for their children. The only bad thing is that I was the most selfish and lazy kid you can imagine. In school, I simply did not care. No matter how much my parents told me to work hard and to do well in school, I just did not care about my academics. It wasn’t until my eligibility to participate and play in tennis and band was compromised that I began to start trying in school. My passion to compete and to play fueled my motivation for academics and I worked and strived for my 2.9 GPA which I resurrected from a 2.1 in high school. Though this motivation was before I had met Christ and towards things that are not kingdom focused. Just like my motivation towards academics, I feel like it could be our tendency when we hear the command to love others the way that God has loved us, we can fall into the lack of motivation to do so. We see in 4:11 where John tells us, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” What is the fuel and motivation in order to love others the way that God loves us? We see this in 4:9-10. John tells us, “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” It’s through understanding the price and the enormous cost that God made and took upon Himself to rescue us from the dominion of darkness into His marvelous kingdom through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Understanding that God very well could have let us die in our sin and not rescue us. Understanding that the humility to leave the high depths of His throne to put on human flesh and be both fully God and fully man. Jesus Christ paid the death that we deserve. The love in which Jesus showed us in the cross is what compels us to love others the way that Jesus loved us. In sacrificial love and service to His people is the example in which we are to live as and the fuel in which we are to do this is through the power of the Holy Spirit and the Cross of Jesus Christ. What John tells us in the latter verses of the book is no easy task. Yet, God’s love is what perfects us and casts out fear within us. I would encourage you to read John 17 which is Jesus’ prayer for His people before He went to the cross. Part of Jesus’ prayer is, “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word,21 that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. 24 Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” To summarize, the fuel in which we are to love others is by understanding deeply the depths in which God went to save us through Jesus Christ, to love God and from the outflow of those two aspects, we are to love others the same way. Fear is a sign of not yet being perfected in the love of God. May every difficult moment in which we may encounter in our lives and the times in which it is hard to love our brother throw us into the waves that have us crashing to the Rock of Ages, our Lord. Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore, they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error. -1 John 4:1-6
A couple years ago as I was playing in a valiant and most glorified athletic event also described as non-competitive church league softball. I was describing what the most important muscle is to a friend and I jokingly described it as stating that the most important muscle in our bodies is our biceps and a official nearby overheard out conversation. That official, asked me, really? The official had the look of belief and began to check out her own biceps. If you were wondering, what would be considered the most important muscle in our body is our heart. I tell you that story in a joking manner, but the concept of easy belief is very present in our day and age. Earlier in our 1 John study, we talked about false teachers and how they were prevalent in our churches and culture and the apostle John tells us to look after our doctrine and to be aware of false teachers. We see in this text today that those who do not confess Jesus is not from God and that the spirit of the antichrist is also not from God. John here is telling believers of Jesus Christ that you are from God and you have overcome the antichrist. The same Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead lives within you and the power and the dominion of Satan no longer has control over you. This means that we no longer have to dwell within our sin but that God through our faith in Jesus Christ has given us power through the Holy Spirit to live in righteousness. We know that Satan has been in the business of speaking lies and deceiving God’s people since the beginning in Genesis 3. We know that our culture is of the world and is ruled by the prince of the air and is fallen outside of the realm of God. Yet, God in His providence has set His plan of redemption for the world in motion through the sending of Jesus Christ, His Son. For those whom have trusted in Jesus for the forgiveness of their sins are then transferred outside of the kingdom of the enemy and is then now placed in the citizenship of heaven. Our standing, our identity, our kingdom, our Law by which we have lived have changed if we are in Christ. What we know is that John here is speaking to the church and is reminding them that greater is the Lord who lives within them then the world. It is through the Word of God, His revelation of Himself to us that we are to know Him and to abide in Him. Jesus and His Word are our protection for our souls and to help us identify teachings that are within our culture that we may be swayed from the Word of God. I heard a pastor say it this way that we don’t stand over the Word of God but that the Word of God stands over us. It’s through the power of the Holy Spirit and through the Power of the Word of God that we are to stand upon. Often times we can be blinded by our own desires even though they may be good and we can go against what the Lord tells us in His Word and take control of our lives to get what we want. Our desires may be sinful desires or they may even be good desires. C.S. Lewis says it this way, “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” We know though the Word that Satan is God’s enemy and he prowls around like a lion seeking something to devour. Satan wants us to stay making mud pies in the slum while God through Jesus Christ is leading us towards a holiday at the sea. May we not follow the course of the world and understand the we have overcome the world through our faith in Jesus and may we set out eyes on the Kingdom of God and not settle for anything less. |
Follow us on instagram
Categories
All
|