Anyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ [the Messiah] He is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves the son. In this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. Because the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, because everything that is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith. Who is the one who overcomes the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
~1 John 5:1-5 (NRSV).
John wastes no time in his first sympathetic and contrasting letter. In all of life there are convolutions of connections, most of which are truly invisible, but are even more real than you and me. The entire true life of faith is based on these three following principles:
Love
Love is the first test. John already states earlier in the letter (verses 4:8; 4:20) that we cannot truly love God if we do not love the people around us. If we struggle to forgive and inevitably choose not to through our unforgiving actions, we cannot really love God. His love is not in us… yet. We are members of the same human family. We love the father (God) and we love the son (our fellow human beings–everyone from them). There is nothing more complicated than that.
This love carries us forward, through the notion of obedience, the second test, by explaining the way of faith, the third test, the enduring end point that catapults us headfirst and resilient into the world for the glory of God.[1]
Obedience
In the clutches of love, obedience is a golden emotion, an affirmation wish in us doing the right thing to positively please our Lord Jesus, our Intercessor before the Father. But, before we get carried away with ‘warm and fuzzy’ visions of this wonderful place, we must understand that obedience is a rubber thing that starts up, that it is the only essential demonstration of love.
This is the proof of love; Can the person who professes to love truly obey?
Faith
How can the following happen?
Two men peered through the prison bars.
One saw mud and the other stars.[2]
Faith is, of course, the difference between the two; joyful faith in the second; hopelessness of fear and doubt (anti-faith) in the former. Faith is what wins.
Faith cannot be truly represented without paying due attention to the subject of faith. fidelity–the result and state of faith–and this eternal, living and active… to God.
Our “total vision of this world” must be transformed and different, full of light and the truth of hope in God. Although we are already victorious in Christ, we still must fight; faith gives us that ability to fight with the shining tools of the Almighty.[3]
what’s coming First it is our relationship with Christ; then, necessarily love, because love is action, proof of the holy transformative transaction; then love is tested by our obedience, and this revealing faith.
The New Testament idea of being a Christian is summed up very effectively in the one hundred English words in the previous five verses at the top. We do nothing for our salvation but accept what has already been done. We love each other. We obey his commandments with joy. In this is faith, and the conquest of the world; all for the glory of God.
Believe in Jesus, truly, and conquer the world you seek to oppress. In Christ we enjoy an “ennobling dignity…an unshakable and gifted status that we cannot earn.”[4]
© 2010 SJ Wickham.
[1] Structure taken from: James Montgomery Boice, John’s epistles – An Expository Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1979, 2004), p. 125-29.
[2] Quoted in: Martin Lloyd-Jones, Life in Christ – Studies in 1 John (Five volumes) (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2002), p. 600.
[3] Lloyd-Jones, Ibid., p. 592, 603 (citation).
[4] c. black Clinton, The First, Second and Third Letter of John – Introduction, Commentary and Reflections (New Interpreter’s Bible – Vol. XII) (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1998), p. 437.