1 John 5
1 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him. 2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. 3 For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. 4 For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. 5 Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
I am forever haunted by a little story Thomas Merton passed on from the desert fathers.
Abbot Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not be totally changed into fire?[1]
It is a mystical story, to be sure, but one that pushes against the grotesque complacency of my own life. We content ourselves with our “little rule…little fast…prayer…meditation” instead of truly committing ourselves to God and being totally changed into fire.
What would it take to yield oneself to God with this kind of reckless abandon? What would it take for me to do it, for you to do it, for us as a church to do it?
I would like to be totally changed into fire instead of taking sickly delight at the pitiful flickerings of my own inconsistent and half-hearted devotion. I would like to live for Jesus!
In 1 John 5, John continues his critique of the false teachers who left as well as his depiction of what the true Christian life looks like in Christ. In particular, he points to three elements of the Christian life that must be present if we are to be totally changed into fire: faith, love, and obedience.
Faith: Evidence, Love, Victory
We begin with faith. It is the first element of the Christian life mentioned by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:13 in his powerful conclusion to that amazing chapter: “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” We must believe! But what is the nature of faith? John tells us.
1 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him.
Verse 1 is a bit tricky in its wording. Marianne Maye Thompson writes of it:
Born of God, father, and child all have roots in the same Greek verb (gennao). A literal but wooden translation would read, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Messiah has been begotten of God, and the one who loves the one who begets, loves the one who is begotten of him.”[2]
Let us notice a couple of important points. First, if we read this rightly, John is saying that faith is evidence of our having been born again. The issue of Calvinism looms ever large over contemporary Southern Baptist life. Perhaps most of us feel that we are most faithful to the text by living in tension with the more strident extremes of both sides of that debate. I have come to a place of personal peace concerning there being a mysterious and paradoxical relationship between the sovereignty of God and the choosing of man. This means that parts of the Bible sound profoundly “Calvinistic” and other parts sound profoundly “Arminian.”
1 John 5:1 would be one of those texts. It sounds Calvinistic because it appears to say that faith itself is a result of having been born again. I think we should not try to avoid that conclusion or its implications. It says what it says. If you believe, you do so because you have been born of God. You have faith because God has saved you!
Of course, being a “whole Bible Christian” means lifting up the entire witness of scripture, so alongside this we place Paul’s exchange with the Philippian jailer from Acts 16.
29 And the jailer called for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear he fell down before Paul and Silas. 30 Then he brought them out and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” 31 And they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.”
Ah! So there we see that faith leads to salvation.
So does salvation precede faith or does faith precede salvation?
The answer? Yes.
Election and salvation and faith walk hand in hand. The mind wants to pry, to categorize, to order, but why can we not let the beauty of the whole stand? You believe because you have been saved and you are saved because you believe!
Faith is evidence of salvation. To believe is to be saved, but, John says, to believe is also to love.
1 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him.
To love who exactly? To love “whoever has been born [begotten] of him.” And who has been begotten? First, of course, is Jesus, the “only begotten Son” (John 3:16). To believe truly is to love Jesus. To love Jesus is to show that you believe truly. Faith without love is mere mental assent, and that is not truly faith but rather agreement.
Faith loves.
But we are to love not only the begotten Son but all who have been born again through the Son. John is speaking of both Jesus and the Church. A.E. Brooke said, “Everyone who has been born of God must love those who have been similarly ennobled.”[3] That is very well said!
And faith has one more component: victory.
4 For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. 5 Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
In and through Christ, we overcome the world. Put another way, we are not defeated by the world. We have victory in Jesus. We do not overcome it through our own efforts but rather through faith in the Son of God. That is, we partake in the victory of Christ through faith and therefore because victorious because He is victorious.
Love: Vertical and Horizontal
If we are to be totally changed into fire, we must believe. We must also love. And what is the nature of this love?
1b everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him.
2a-b By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God
The love that arises from true faith is vertical (towards God) and horizontal (towards man). It reaches up and it reaches out. Simply put, if you love God you must love the people of God and if you are to love the people of God you must love God. Augustine put it beautifully when he said.
To love the children of God is to love the Son of God; to love the Son of God is to love the Father. Nobody can love the Father without loving the Son, and anyone who loves the Son will love the other children as well.[4]
The implications of this are clear: you cannot say you love God if you do not love the people of God. Again, to love Christ means to love the Church, the body of Christ. Derek Webb’s song, “The Church,” communicates this in ways that are provocative and memorable.
I have come with one purpose
to capture for myself a bride
by my life she is lovely
by my death she’s justified
I have always been her husband
though many lovers she has known
so with water I will wash her
and by my word alone
so when you hear the sound of the water
you will know you’re not alone
’cause I haven’t come for only you
but for my people to pursue
you cannot care for me with no regard for her
if you love me you will love the church
I have long pursued her
as a harlot and a whore
but she will feast upon me
she will drink and thirst no more
so when you taste my flesh and my blood
you will know you’re not alone
’cause I haven’t come for only you
but for my people to pursue
you cannot care for me with no regard for her
if you love me you will love the church
there is none that can replace her
though there are many who will try
and though some may be her bridesmaids
they can never be my bride
’cause I haven’t come for only you
but for my people to pursue
you cannot care for me with no regard for her
if you love me you will love the church[5]
I believe that is absolutely true: if you love me you will love the church. Notice the direction and movement of v.1b and v.2a-b.
1b everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him.
2a-b By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God
The first verse says that if we love God we will love the children of God. The second verse says that if we love the children of God, we love God.
As with faith and salvation, so with love of God and man: the two go hand in hand and in both directions. They are connected. To love one is to love the other. To fail to love one is to fail to love the other.
Obedience: Love in action
John also depicts obedience as one of the marks of the Christian who would be “totally changed into fire.”
2c and obey his commandments. 3 For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.
“The missing note in evangelical life today,” writes Dallas Willard, “is not in the first instance spirituality but rather obedience.”[6] That is astute and true. American Christianity is strong on spirituality but weak on obedience. We feel more than we do. Even our talk of victory can be used as a verbal dodge to actual obedience. Jerry Bridges writes:
First, we are simply reluctant to face up to our responsibility. We prefer to leave that to God. We pray for victory when we know we should be acting in obedience.
God wants us to walk in obedience – not victory.[7]
As we have seen already in our text, victory is a vital component of the Christian life, but, in John’s estimation, the victorious Christian lives victoriously in obedience.
Interestingly, John says that obedience “is the love of God.” Obedience is bound up with divine love. Out of love, He gives us His law and out of love He calls us to obey. Through Christ, we are set free to obey and through the Spirit we are empowered to do so. Obedience is made possible through the love that God has for us.
What is more, obedience is how we say, “I love you,” back to God! Didymus the Blind said, “The substance and ground of love we ought to have for God is obedience to his commandments.”[8]
I recently read yet another tragic article about yet another minister who fell. This time, it was a young, evangelical, rock star minister who has grown in popularity among young people and, it seems, especially among young women. The article revealed that the minister began to prey on and then stalk a young woman follower of his, pressuring her to date him and then marry him though she barely even knew him. In time, they met. He brought alcohol to their meeting. The seemingly inevitable (given the circumstances) happened and, in the aftermath, the man dropped the girl he had been pursuing so heavily. When he finally responded to her pleas for acknowledgment in light of what had happened, he only responded to ask her if she was pregnant and to tell her that, if so, he could have the situation taken care of.
The heart breaks and the mind reels at such callousness. If obedience is love then disobedience is hatred both of God and of our fellow brothers and sisters. To be sure we all fail, but the staggering amount of stories like the one I just shared surely ought to drive the Church to her knees in deep corporate repentance. Especially within Protestantism it seems that we are prone to assume failure on the front end and then shrug it off when it happens. Our failures therefore become self-fulfilling prophecies, a kind of fatalism to which we have become far too accustomed.
If we are to be changed totally into fire, if we are to be yielded completely to Jesus Christ, we must believe, we must love, and we must obey. One need not adopt the idea of complete sanctification or moral perfection to say that we can do better than we do, that we can walk more closely than we currently walk.
The world needs desperately to see a church that is totally changed into fire. The world needs to see it. The Church needs to see it. God desires to see it.
Faith.
Love.
Obedience.
Do not content yourself with tiny observances, tiny devotions, tiny efforts, and massive collapses. Why not give it all to Jesus? Why not follow Him with no reservations? Why not be totally changed into fire?
[1] Thomas Merton, The Way of the Desert (New York, NY: New Directions), p.50.
[2] Marianne Meye Thompson, 1-3 John. The IVP New Testament Commentary Series. Ed., Grant R. Osborne. Vol. 19 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), p.130.
[3] William Barclay, Letters of John and Jude. The Daily Study Bible. (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1970), p.90-91.
[4] Gerald Bray, ed., James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Gen. Ed., Thomas C. Oden. New Testament, Vol. XI (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), p.221.
[5] https://www.lyricsmania.com/the_church_lyrics_derek_webb.html
[6] Dallas Willard, The Great Omission (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2006), 44.
[7] Jerry Bridges, The Pursuit of Holiness (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2003), 12,22.
[8] Gerald Bray, ed., p.221-222.
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