1 John 5
John has brought before us,
o First, the theme of fellowship of Christ, maintaining fellowship; then
o Maintaining truth,
o Maintaining righteousness,
o Maintaining love, and, now, he concludes with the theme of
o Maintaining assurance, or confidence.
The relationship between these five themes is very important. It is instructive to note that the first of these links with the last, i.e., fellowship with Christ ends in assurance or confidence.
You will note that confidence is the kind of life that all men today are looking for. Which of us does not desire to be an adequate person, confident, self-assured, poised; able to cope with life? This is the image of humanity that is idealistically present in every human heart -- we each want to be this kind of person, and this is exactly what Christianity is designed to produce!
To me, the glory of our Christian faith is never that it is religious, but that it is so gloriously secular. It is designed to produce life, to fit us for living, and thus to be the kind of person that God intended man to be when he made him in the beginning -- confident, able, adequate.
This confident life will be manifest in a three-fold way: as truth, as righteousness, and as love. And there you have the exceedingly orderly division of the First Epistle of John.
These three form the test of authentic Christianity: truth, righteousness, and love. John says three specific times in this letter that, if you claim to know God, but yet walk in the darkness of disobedience, you are a liar. He does not hesitate to use this extremely direct term. You are a liar, he says.
1. If you claim to know God and yet you walk in disobedience, you lie and do not tell the truth. There is an absence of righteousness in the life, and this puts the lie to all your claims to be a Christian.
2. In another place, Chapter 2, he says that to claim to possess the Father and yet deny the deity and incarnation of the Son is also to be a liar. There is an absence of truth in the life, and therefore it is not genuinely Christian. There cannot be a genuine Christian life and yet a denial of the deity and incarnation of the Son.
3. Thirdly, to claim to love God while you ignore or mistreat your brethren, is to lie. You are a liar if you say you love God and yet you do not love your brethren, Chapter 4, Verse 20. This is the absence of love. The presence of habitual sin, of a denial of Christ, doctrinally, and of selfish hatred despite a professed Christian experience, will expose all claims to Christianity as phony.
These three must all be present. This is the whole argument of the Epistle of John. They must all be present and in ever-increasing degree. Truth, love, and righteousness; these are the marks of authentic Christianity.
Notice, in Verse 1, that truth and love, John says, belong together. One produces the other. "Every one who believes that Jesus is the Christ is a child of God," or, literally, "Every one who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been begotten of God, and every one who loves the Father loves the child." Thus, he ties together these two great themes, belief in the truth, and love, and one is the result of the other.
Verses 4 and 5 then give us the results that will naturally follow:
For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? {1 Jn 5:4-5 RSV}
John now declares that through these activities to overcome the world, it never is a result of our efforts. Effort is involved, but the results do not come from that. Victory is a sign that we have the Lord himself within us. Our efforts are but a sign of the presence of the life of God, the Lord Jesus himself. Without that, everything else would be futile. It is not we who overcome the world, but it is he in us. All that we contribute is simply the fact that we believe in his life at work in us. Thus, our faith in him overcomes the world.
Now, when you consider what is involved in this term the world, what it is we are up against, you can see what John means. Think of the moral pressures that we face in the world today, the outlook and standards of the godless society that are surrounding us, ambient on every side, pressing in upon us, constantly intruding upon our consciousness with tremendous pressure to make us to conform to these attitudes and standards of life. Think of the temptation to cheat and to lie, to get ahead at all costs, to be dishonest, to overreach;
Do you not feel all this? The world -- the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life -- all this is of the world.
Well, how do you overcome it? How can you manifest the life of Jesus Christ in the midst of that kind of pressure? How can you go on, moment by moment, day after day, year after year, living a life that is absolutely contrary to that, based on totally different standards, totally different objectives, totally different evaluations; how do you do it? And to endure not only for ten years, but twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years, against that kind of moral pressure. How do you do it?
Well, John says it is "by faith," that is all. Not by the faith that you once exercised twenty years ago when you first became a Christian, but by faith in the life of Jesus present in you now. By faith in him at work in you, moment by moment, in the midst of the pressure, countering it with the pressure of his own life.
Remember that story in Exodus 17 when Israel was moving out of Egypt and they came into the desert and the Amalekites came against them and fought with them at Rephidim? The battle waged hot. All the forces of Israel were engaged in combat with this ruthless enemy which was forever standing to thwart their pathway, trying to keep them from reaching the goal of God -- the land of promise. We read that Israel and Amalek fought together and the battle went against Israel until Moses went on the mountainside and took his rod (which was always the symbol of dependence upon the power of God, the supernatural might of God), and lifting it up toward the heavens he found that Israel began to prevail against the Amalekites. Their fighting was then of value, it accomplished something. Moses stood with his arm and rod extended and as long as he could hold the rod up the battle went for Israel and they prevailed against Amalek. But Moses’ arm grew tired and gradually he let it come down. As the rod fell the tide of battle turned. Amalek began to conquer, despite all the fighting of Israel. Moses gathered enough strength to lift his arm again and the tide of battle turned. It became very apparent that the issue of the battle did not lie with the fighting of Israel but in the symbol of dependence on the power of an invisible God. It was this that turned the tide. Remember that at last Aaron and Hur came and stood on each side of Moses and held his arms up, and thus the battle was won.
Now that is a picture of the battle that you and I are engaged in. How do you win? Well, the issue does not lie in your fighting.
· You do need to fight.
· You do need to pray, and read the Scriptures, and study, and know God’s Word.
· You need to apply it in every situation.
· You need to put on the whole armor of God when the enemy comes against you like a roaring lion, sweeping all before him.
· You do need to stand.
But none of this is of any avail unless you are recognizing that it is the life of God within you that makes the difference, it is he who wins. It is he who overcomes.
Our dependence is on the life of the Son of God, moment by moment, his life is in us then, "this is the victory that overcomes the world, even our faith." Who is it that overcomes the world but he who continues to believe that Jesus is the Son of God? The Son of God, the Strong One, the One who could say to his disciples, "be of good cheer; I have overcome the world," {John 16:33b KJV}.
God grant that our faith may be strong in him.
