Overcoming The World

What we do today isn’t very exciting. For we’re just a small church in a big world. We’re reading an old book, and we’re talking about an old story. Yet a Christian has been given different eyes, and we look at things in a different way. Beneath the surface, God helps us to see things as they really are. So we look at what we’re doing today, worshiping God, hearing his Word, and professing faith, and we say: this is momentous. It’s something incredible!

That’s not over-hyping what happens today. Just listen to what John asks in his first letter, “Who is he who overcomes the world?” (5:5). Now, you’re supposed to think when you hear that question. About whom could that be said? “He overcame the world. She conquered all. They had the greatest ever triumph.” That’s not said of powerful presidents. Not said of those savvy people who market their products to the four corners of the world. Not said of the celebrities who are the great influencers, who make or break people with a single tweet.

Who overcomes the world? This is said of us. It’s said about all who humbly put their faith in Jesus, the Son of God. This is our theme from God’s Word in 1 John 5:5,

Who is the one who overcomes the world?

1) the one who believes in Christ

2) is the one who overcomes

1) the one who believes in Christ: First John is one of those ancient documents that make up our Bible. It’s a bit of private correspondence that we’ve been allowed to read. The letter was written by John, an apostle of the Lord, and sent to some Christians in the first century, probably a group of believers in and around Ephesus.

Keep in mind that when this letter was first put in the postbox, the New Testament church was very young. It was so young that a number of Jesus’s first followers—the twelve apostles—were still alive. The apostle John was busy, like Paul and Peter were, founding churches here and there, then keeping in contact by letters.

Now, when they did this work, John and the others came to a sobering conclusion. They realized that not everyone has faith. The message of God’s grace goes out far and wide, and some people happily receive it, but others don’t.

Any Christian missionary soon learns the same lesson today. It’s probably the reality that is faced by any of us if we get up the courage to talk about the gospel with our neighbour next door, or with a colleague at work. You might bring the message of God’s love, reach out with sincerity, yet the only response is a shrug of the shoulders: “Not right now. Not interested.”

I recently read a good book about why there is so much apathy toward the gospel these days. Sometimes even in the church there is apathy, a sense of not really caring about the Lord and his Word. The author pointed out a few factors. Our immense prosperity is one reason for apathy: if you are relatively rich, then money seems to provide all we need. We just don’t feel like God provides us with anything we don’t already have.

Distraction is another factor: if you are always busy, and often bingeing your entertainment, you simply don’t have time to think about the big questions like who God is. And then a lot of people don’t care about God because He’s kind of outdated. Science has given all the answers to life’s biggest questions, like where we’re from and where we’re going.

And so in countries like ours—in the world that we’re growing up in and studying and working—there’s a pandemic of apathy. God is irrelevant. People don’t have a reason or the time to care about him. So it has always been true: not everyone has faith in Jesus as Lord! It doesn’t just happen.

When he went around preaching, John found out something else too: that even when people do believe in Christ, they might believe the wrong things about him. A quick scan of this letter shows that. Some people’s faith was badly confused. For example, some were claiming that Jesus wasn’t a true man, and that it wasn’t necessary that He be a human like us. They preferred to think of Jesus as more of a spirit, a bodyless soul.

These same false teachers were saying that a Christian could live however he wants. You could head over to the pagan temple for an orgy or go to a drinking party, then stop in at church on the way home. This is how John describes them, “They are still walking in the darkness.” Some people were claiming that the sins we do in the body don’t really matter, since God is only worried about saving our souls. Sounds attractive.