On a Monday
morning early in the summer of 1789 a man rose to address the United States
Congress. He argued adamantly for the
inclusion into the U.S. Constitution of several amendments that would
explicitly protect individual’s rights and freedoms. The man’s name was James Madison. The amendments he proposed that day, 10 of
them, would come to be known as the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Yet, Madison was initially opposed to such clear
and obvious protections. He once
referred to the entire process as the “nauseous project of amendments.” So why did he argue so strongly to include
articles he did not believe were necessary?
One word: politics.
Opponents of
the constitution, known as the “anti-Federalists”, had settled on the lack of a
bill of rights as the rallying call for their cause. They argued that the new government would
become too powerful and abuse the people’s rights if not kept in check with
specific protections of individual freedoms.
But Madison did not believe such a condition would ever come to
pass. The reason was the system of
checks and balances that had been baked into the structure of the new
government. In an article written the
previous year, he laid out his view of government, which included the following
quote:
The interest of the man
must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a
reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control
the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of
all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be
necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls
on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be
administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first
enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige
it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary
control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of
auxiliary precautions.
This article
makes it clear that although James Madison may not have believed that a bill of
rights was strictly necessary, he did emphatically believe that some sort of
precautions against the excesses of human nature must be taken and implemented
into the government of the United States.
You can see this aspect in the nature of the amendments themselves. They are designed to protect citizenry
against tyrannical governmental abuses by implementing certain rights and
privileges that are not to be infringed upon.
This is a reactive approach to liberty which uses external change to
produce internal results.
The point, as it relates to our study of 1st John,
is this. God does not operate in the
same manner as man. He evokes change at
a core or fundamental level. In the
passage today, chapter 4 verses 12 to 21, the Apostle John lays out for us a
series of rights, or guarantees, that come with being a Christian. We might think of them as God’s “Bill of
Rights”. And although this passage is
certainly not exhaustive in terms of what God has promised to those who love
and serve Him, I think it will be helpful in our understanding to think of them
as, at the very least, a partial bill of rights.
The key thing to understand is this. As stated previously, the Bill of Rights in
the U.S. Constitution is designed from external to internal. But the Lord’s version is quite different. Rather than providing safeguards against
opposition it guarantees certain attitudes and behaviors that will spring from
within and result in a positive improvement to one’s life. This is a proactive approach to liberty which
uses internal change to produce external results.
I see four
distinct freedoms, or rights, present in these 10 verses, as follows…
- The Right to Bear Witness
- The Right to Be Loved by God
- The Right to Have Confidence
- The Right to Love Others
We will
begin with verses 12 to 15 and “The Right to Bear Witness”: No one has seen God at any time; 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.
We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the 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.
John begins
with a statement of God’s separateness from mankind. No one has ever seen Him. He is invisible to our faculties of
perception. The perfect tense of
“theaomai” (seen or beheld) is used to convey the idea that this is an ongoing
circumstance. No one has seen God in the
past, this situation persists into the present, and it will continue into the
future.
John
previously expressed this same idea in his gospel account of Christ’s
life. In John 1:18 he wrote: No one has seen God at any time. And then again in 5:37 we find: And the Father who sent Me, He has
testified of Me. You have neither seen
His voice at any time nor seen His form.
Even Moses, a man who was as close to the Lord as just about anyone
in history, could not look upon him directly.
In Exodus chapter 33 Moses asked God to show him His glory. But in verse 20 God told him: “You cannot see My face, for no man can see
Me and live!”
Yet in contrast
to this apparent situation, just a few verses earlier, in Exodus 33:11 we find
the following statement: Thus the Lord
used to speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend. So what’s going on? God is invisible, but He’s not? Moses could not see His face but He could
talk to him face to face? John claims
that no one has seen God at any time?
I think the
answer is this. Before Adam fell, sin
did not exist on earth. It was a foreign
and totally alien concept. All of
creation was pure and pristine, untouched by the ravages of corruption and
evil. Genesis 3:8 gives us the concept
of God actually physically walking in the Garden of Eden: They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool
of the day. We don’t know exactly
what this was like, but it seems to have been a literally physical presence of
God who communed and interacted with His children.
But then sin
intruded and man was cut off from the presence of God and the goodness of the
garden. In Habakkuk 1:13 the prophet
says: Your eyes are too pure to approve
evil, and You cannot look on wickedness with favor. Sin is so hateful, so repugnant, so hideous
to God that He cannot abide being anywhere near it. It is the complete and total antithesis of
His character, therefore it cannot co-exist in the same space with God, in a
manner of speaking. Because of this
God’s true nature and His unveiled glory have been hidden from mankind ever
since.
Even the
incarnation of the Son of God, in whom “all the fullness of Deity dwells in
bodily form” (Col. 2:9) and who is “the image of the invisible God” (Col.
1:16), was an incomplete image of all that is God. John himself alluded to this back in 1st
John 3:2: We know that when He appears,
we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. The implication of that verse is that we do
not now actually see God as He is, even with the evidence of Christ before
us. Paul is not so subtle as John in
this instance. He bluntly states in 1st
Corinthians 13:12 that: now we see in a
mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know
fully just as I also have been fully known.
All of this
leads to the inescapable conclusion that God cannot be seen by human means, as
John has told us. When Moses talked with
God “face to face” there was clearly still a divide between them. Notice that what Moses asked nine verses
later was for God to “reveal His glory”.
It was that request that God could not grant for the certainty of
killing His prophet and friend. And
although, going back to John 1:18, Jesus “has explained” God to us, there is
still a barrier behind which the completeness of God’s character is obscured.
Now then,
think about what it implies that John makes his opening statement in verse 12
of no one seeing God at any time and then he follows that with clauses about
Christians loving each other and God giving us His Spirit. What is the apostle getting at with
this? What does the one concept, that
God cannot be seen, have to do with the other, that loving one another causes
God to abide with us via His Spirit?
I think John
is subtly telling us that to the extent God can be seen at all in this present
time, He is seen through our lives and the love we share with each other. You see, the Lord has designed things so that
He is never directly beheld due to the presence of sin. Instead, He uses surrogates to display
Himself to the world. First was Abraham
and through him the nation of Israel.
This was God’s first implementation of a mediatorial kingdom who would
serve as a mediating influence between the creature and the creator. Of course Israel failed at this task. So next it is Christ, who was and is the
perfect image of God, who will rule a mediatorial kingdom as it was truly meant
to be. Ultimately there will be no need
of a mediator between God and man because we will be glorified, sin will be
cast into the lake of fire (Rev. 20:14), and we will dwell directly in the
presence of God. But in the meantime,
the primary surrogate that God displays Himself to the world in and through are
Christians who love one another and in whom God’s love is completed.
Frankly,
this should be astonishing. There should
be a form of shock and awe in our minds at the thought that the Almighty God of
the universe has chosen to entrust His image in the world to people like us. Imperfect, unloving, spiteful, filled with
pride, obsessed with anger, and addicted to the world. How can God possibly think it is a good idea
to entrust His name and reputation, even the only means by which He is
presently seen, to us?
Yet this is
exactly what God has done. In verse 13
we find that the means of our understanding that we are one with Him is the
presence of His Spirit. When John writes
that God has “given” us of the Spirit he once again turns to the perfect tense
of the verb to get across the idea of an unceasing, ongoing, persistent state
of affairs.
Then in
verse 14 we find an interesting sequence.
“Have seen” is perfect tense and “testify” is in the active voice. So we continually behold God through the
reality of His appointment of Christ as our Savior. We never cease to be impacted by the ramifications
of this understanding. And it drives us
to action. We testify or bear witness to
this ever present saving truth that has so dramatically changed our lives for
the better. We know and then we do. We understand and then we tell. We are overwhelmed and then we share. We continually behold the truth that the Son
is the Savior, therefore we continually bear witness to that fact. It is like a never ending game of show and
tell on a cosmic scale with eternal consequences.
Just what
exactly is it that we are testifying to the world about? Verse 15 gives us the clue. We are confessing that Jesus is the Son of
God, the Messiah. We looked at this word
confess previously. It literally means
to agree with someone in a public manner.
But I would like to re-visit it briefly because I think it’s critical to
understand exactly what the Bible is telling us here. Merely mouthing the words “Jesus is the Son
of God” is not enough. Even if this is
done in a public forum, it’s still not what John is going after here. To help explain this I’m going to turn to
John’s fellow apostle, Paul.
In 1st
Corinthians 12:3 we find an interesting statement: Therefore I make known to you that no one speaking by the Spirit of God
says, “Jesus is accursed”; and no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the
Holy Spirit. The word I want to
focus on is lord. The Greek is “kurios”
and it means “he to whom a person or thing belongs, the possessor and disposer
of a thing, or a title of honor expressed from a servant to their master”. With that definition in hand, what is Paul
telling us? He is not talking about
someone just mouthing the words Jesus is Lord.
No, he is talking about someone actually making Jesus the Lord of their
life. Only then do they turn and address
Him with the honorific due His station.
I think this is exactly the same concept that John is driving at in 1st
John 4:15.
It is God’s
gift to us that we are able to give evidence on His behalf. It is a divine right handed down from on high
to the children of the king. Testifying
about the Lord Jesus should not be seen as a duty or even an obligation. It is both of those things. But I think we should view it as a
privilege. I think we should perceive it
as a high honor. I think we should take
pride and joy in the fact that God has entrusted us with the right to bear
witness about Him.
And so we
come to verse 16 and what I am calling “The Right to Be Loved by God”: We have come to know and have believed the
love which God has for us. God is love,
and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. Yet again we need to turn to the original
language to ascertain the subtle nuance of John’s thought here. He placed both “ginosko” (know) and “pisteuo”
(believe) in the perfect tense. So we
continually and unceasingly know and believe that God loves us. This is an ongoing, ever refreshing, ever new
awareness that informs our lives on a deep and meaningful level. Taking into account the preceding verses it
is clear that this perception of the love of God is most principally informed
by an awareness of the atonement of Christ on our behalf. And as the previous verses have told us, this
should lead us naturally to confessing, witnessing, and trusting God publicly.
Notice also
the relationship between the two forms of abiding in the second sentence of
verse 16. The original language
literally (or as close as I can get) says, of the one who abides in God’s love,
that “him in God abides and God in him abides”.
There is a mutual reciprocity inherent in the life of a believer. They enjoy a oneness and a harmony with their
creator that was simply not possible previously, because of the aforementioned
sin issue that divides us from God. So
what changed? The presence of the
ultimate mediator, Jesus Christ. God can
now look upon those who are in Christ with favor because He no longer sees our
sinfulness. Instead He sees Christ’s
righteousness.
This leads
me to another question to pose to myself as well as you. Namely, what does Christ’s death and resurrection
mean to you right now? John has just
told us that our understanding and faith in the love of God should be
continually refreshed and made new in a never ending cycle of spiritual
awareness and appreciation being birthed within us. Does that describe your daily experience of
Christianity?
We will
leave that question hanging for a minute and consider another angle. I looked at this in verses 7 to 11 but I
think it is important enough to re-visit it again because it informs the
question of how much Christ’s sacrifice means to us. I have been calling this component of God’s
Bill of Rights, “The Right to Be Loved by God”.
We have been granted an inalienable, non-transferrable, imperishable
guarantee that if we abide in Christ then we are automatic recipients of the
love of God. Given that truth, the
question should become “why exactly is it that this has been given to us?” 4:10 that we looked at last week, and 4:19
which we will examine momentarily gives the answer. 4:10 reads: In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent
His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 4:19 re-states the point: We love, because He first loved us.
This is
absolutely crucial for you to understand.
The fact that God has poured His love out upon you in all the ways we
have been discussing has nothing whatsoever to do with you. You can take no credit for this love. It is a free gift. It has been given at great expense. And God has staked His reputation on its
permanence. Romans 8:38-39 describes the
ironclad assurance of the love of God that has been granted to those who abide
in Christ: For I am convinced that
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created
thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ
Jesus our Lord. If this promise were
to somehow turn out to be false, then God’s trustworthiness immediately becomes
suspect.
This fact,
that God has chosen to love you, completely arbitrarily and at His whim, should
shock us to our toes. Someone who has
been born of God has nothing to offer over the next person in line who has not
been granted the love of God. He has
cemented His love for us into place with such an unshakeable durability that it
has become very much a right that we are now entitled to. It is a Christian’s prerogative to be loved
by God, now that Christ’s blood covers them.
Take hold of this promise! Make
it your own and allow it to inform and undergird your daily life. Be intentional about savoring and delighting
in your right to be loved by God.
The third
article of God’s Bill of Rights as presented in these 10 verses is “The Right
to Have Confidence”. It is found in
verses 17 and 18: By this, love is
perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in 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, because fear
involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. There is a lot to unpack here, so let’s get
to it.
The first
thing I want to point out is the link between this verse and the previous
ones. It is found in the first clause;
by this. It is upon the premise of what
has come before that John is continuing to build his argument. Namely, it is this amazing love of God that
we enjoy when we ourselves engage in love.
John has told us that when we abide in love we also abide in God and He
in us. That is the foundation of the
premise in verse 17. It is by this
mutual shared abiding that love is brought to completion within us. “Teleioo”, or to make perfect or complete, is
placed in the perfect tense by John. He
has been making extensive use of this verb tense throughout the chapter. And here he wants us to know that our
completion is an ongoing, ever-present state of affairs for us when we abide in
love as he has instructed us.
Now notice
what John gives as the result of this completed love. He says we will have confidence when the time
comes for God to judge the world and pour out His righteous wrath on
wrongdoers. If you have been following
along in 1st John for a while now you may recognize John’s
statement. It is very similar to what he
said back in 2:28: Now, little children,
abide in Him, so that when He appears, we may have confidence and not shrink
away from Him in shame at His coming.
The word for confidence is the same in both verses; “parrhesia”. It literally means free speech. We will feel the freedom to speak clearly and
openly when the day of God’s judgment comes.
Isn’t it
fascinating, in light of the tie-in with the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of
Rights, that John has used this phrase?
But notice the major difference in how free speech is interpreted from
that source versus here from God’s word.
In the U.S. Bill of Rights, the right to free speech is seen as more of
a blank check to say anything you please in any manner that seems best to you
about anyone whom you desire. That may
not be how our founding fathers intended the first amendment to be
interpreted. But that is most definitely
how it is construed in the mind of 21st century Americans.
In stark
contrast, the idea here in 1st John of free speech before God has
very little to do with a personal prerogative to speak one’s mind. The principle being taught by the apostle is
that because of our oneness with God and the righteous blood of Christ that
covers us we have no need to be afraid or ashamed when the Lord appears with
His winnowing fork in His hand to thresh the people of this world like
wheat. Instead of terror and
consternation we can approach Him joyfully, as a brother, a king, and a loving
heavenly father. In point of fact, our
freedom to approach God has very little to do with us and any personal
individuality we might have. Instead, it
is tied directly and irrevocably to our relationship of mutual dwelling with
the Lord.
This point
has been made clear already. To be
honest, John has not just expressed this idea; he has pounded it into the ground. Look at just these verses we are examining
today. Verse 12 says that God abides in
us and His love is perfected in us.
Verse 13 reveals that we know that we abide in Him and He in us because
of the presence of His Spirit. Verse 15 points
out that the one who confesses Jesus abides in God and God abides in him. Verse 16 brings up the fact that when we
abide in love we abide in God and He in us.
And now here in verse 17 John equates our union with the Lord to our
confidence before Him. He tells us that
we can have confidence because we share the Lord’s status in the world.
As He was
despised and reviled, so are we. As He
was persecuted and crushed, so are we.
As He was ultimately betrayed and murdered, in many places around the
world, so are we. You may recall the
words of the Lord Himself to His disciples in John 15:18-19: “If the world hates you, you know that it
has hated Me before it hated you. If you
were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the
world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.”
This is
frankly an astonishing thought. When we
suffer persecution and face hostility from the world, it is nothing less than a
clear and obvious evidence of our oneness with Christ. That is John’s point in verse 17. It is because of this shared enmity with the
world that we are granted an additional proof of our abiding in God and God’s
abiding in us. Our typical response to
persecution is probably to complain and whine about it. We might spend so much time praying and
asking God to remove the difficulty from our lives that we completely miss the
lesson He is trying to teach us from it.
And at least one of those lessons is our shared identity with Christ
that John is talking about.
The other
element at play in our confidence is found in verse 18. It is fear.
John provides us with an explanation of the relationship between fear
and love. He says that a completed love
that is brought to fulfillment, such as the love we share with God, casts out
fear. But it goes deeper than that. There is a word in the Greek that is
untranslated in our modern English Bibles.
The word is “echo”. It means to
have, to hold, to own, or to possess. In
the original text “echo” is placed just before “ballo” which is the word for
throwing or scattering. So if we take
the Greek and transpose it straight into English without regard for proper
English grammar, we are left with something like the following: “perfect love
takes hold of the casting out of fear”.
I think this
is significant because John’s phrasing carries the idea with it of love taking
ownership of fear. Love steps in and
takes charge, so to speak. It is
demonstrably active in the elimination of fear.
This is not a timid love that merely evades or ignores fear. It marches straight into battle with fear,
grabs hold of it by the throat, and violently hurls it into the abyss of
oblivion. And this is the love we are
guaranteed to have when we abide in “agape” love, thus abiding in God while He
abides in us.
But we still
have not identified the link between fear and love. Why is it that perfect love eliminates
fear? John tells us with the next sentence. Fear involves punishment. What is he getting at with that
statement? To find the answer we need to
once again, as we have done several times throughout this series, turn to the
very beginning of man’s relationship with God.
In Genesis
chapter 3 we read the account of the fall of man into sin and his expulsion
from the Garden of Eden. After Adam and
Eve sinned, their eyes were opened, they knew they had done wrong, and verse 8
tells us that they hid themselves from the presence of God. In verse 9 the Lord asks them why they
hid. And it is Adam’s answer in verse 10
that is remarkably instructive in answering our question: He said, “I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid
because I was naked; so I hid myself.”
Adam was
afraid. This was the very first time
that anything in the created order had experienced the emotion of fear. Prior to this there was nothing to cause one
concern. All the food one could want was
freely available. Work was pleasant and
enjoyable. Love was pure and
sacrificial. Animals were
non-threatening. And a deep, abiding
relationship with the Creator was enjoyed.
But then sin entered the picture.
Immediately the man and the woman realized the ramifications of their
actions. They remembered the command of
the Lord God in chapter 2 verse 17 to refrain from eating of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil. More
relevantly, they remembered the warning as well: “for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”
So what we
have is a situation where fear became inextricably linked with sin and
rebellion. There is a very active and
visceral quality to this situation.
Perfect love actually takes charge, grabs ahold of fear, and hurls it
away. But fear is possessed and consumed
with the concept of punishment.
Punishment is inherently a product of sin. Therefore, the one who fears has not been
brought to completion in love because the threat of impending punishment or
doom is still hanging over their heads, whether they consciously acknowledge
its presence or not.
This is a
terrible situation for a person to be in.
And it is this sorry and horrid state of affairs that elevates the
importance and significance of this third right that God has granted to us,
“The Right to Have Confidence”. Again I have
to ask. Do you appreciate the fact that
you have been blessed with the freedom to approach God’s throne with
confidence? Do you take advantage of
this freedom? Or do you perhaps doubt
God’s promise here? Do you think to
yourself that your sins are too great, your rebellion too incorrigible, to be
able to face the Lord with clear, upturned gaze and a straight backed
posture? Please understand that if you
take this position, assuming you are a genuine Christian, you are thumbing your
nose in God’s face by doubting His promise here.
The fourth
and final right that God has granted believers is “The Right to Love
Others”. Turning back to 1st
John chapter 4, this right is found in verses 19 to 21: We love, because He first loved us.
If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for
the one 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, that the one who loves God should love his brother also.
Picture a loving
set of parents. Their first child is
born to them. Instinctively, this mom
and dad begin to pour out their love upon the little one who has been entrusted
to them. They feed him, they clothe him,
they keep him warm, they hold him close, they talk sweetly to him, they shelter
him from the elements, etc. In every way
the parents are the initiators of love.
So as the child begins to grow his concept and understanding of love is
directly informed by what they experience from their parents. Now consider a situation in which the parents
do not properly demonstrate genuine sacrificial love to this little child. The child would have no frame of reference
with which to understand what love is.
That state of affairs, either to the positive or negative result, is
John’s point in verse 19.
And this is
precisely the situation the human race is in.
If God does not love us first, we have no way to understand His
love. We have no concept of it. It is not even remotely within our ability to
comprehend. And in fact, the word that
John uses in verse 20 that is rendered as cannot is actually two words in
Greek. “Dunamai” means to be able, to
have power, or to be capable. But “ou”
that John places in front of it means no or not. So he is saying literally that the one who
does not love his brother is not even capable of loving God. It is not that we might possibly love God and
we choose not to. John is emphatically
stating that we have no ability whatsoever to accomplish this.
Now, why
exactly would this be so? I mean, what
if someone were able to love their brother on their own? Wouldn’t that logically enable them to love
God, according to John’s rationale? No,
because that situation is impossible, based on the clause from verse 19 that
God always initiates His love. Taking
John’s entire flow of thought into account and not cherry picking bits and
pieces of it gives us the following two scenarios:
- God loves us
- We experience His love
- We channel that love to others
Or:
- God does not love us
- We have no accurate understanding of genuine Godly love
- Therefore, we are incapable of extending to others what we ourselves do not possess
The fact of
the matter is that you just cannot twist this passage around to indicate some
sort of potential within the human to seek after God in love on his own, unless
you are willing to throw John’s clear intent to the wind in order to satisfy
your own need to be in the driver’s seat.
With that
being said, think about the enormity of what the apostle is communicating
here. Because of God choosing to love us
first we who abide in Him in love are granted the gift, the right, of being
conduits of God’s love to others. As I
mentioned several pages ago in regard to witnessing, I think sometimes we
perceive loving others as a duty or a requirement or an obligation. And in a sense it certainly is. Paul literally says as much in Romans 13
verse 8. Yet at the same time, this
ability to love is a privilege. It is a
God-given right that no Christian can be deprived of. Do you think of the command to love that John
has expressed repeatedly throughout this letter as onerous or liberating? Is your desire to love waxing or waning? If it waxes anew then God be praised! If it wanes into obscurity, then I think were
John here he would exhort you to dwell and meditate upon the reality of what
God’s love means for you.
In summary,
I think one way of understanding this passage in 1st John is to
think of it in terms of a Bill of Rights that God has granted to every born
again Christian. These are inalienable,
non-transferrable, imperishable guarantees that we are given at spiritual birth
just as the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution are given to every American
citizen at physical birth. The rights
God has granted to us in this passage are as follows:
- The Right to Bear Witness – Our lives should be the very image and our speech should be the very words of God. The expected and necessary effect of this should be an authentic public witness and testimony of God’s character. (v.12-15)
- The Right to Be Loved – Our lives are continually refreshed with the knowledge, understanding, and perception of God’s love through the atonement of Christ (regardless of circumstances, what does Christ’s death and resurrection mean to you right now?), leading naturally to confessing, witnessing, and trusting Him publicly. (v.16)
- The Right to Have Confidence – Freedom of speech before God is wrought of a twofold nature: of the completion of His love in us through a shared hostile relationship with the world, and of the absence of fear as it relates on a fundamental level to the presence of sin. (v.17-18)
- The Right to Love Others – Our love is not born of ourselves. It stems first from God, takes root in our souls, and blossoms into new spiritual growth. If the garden of our spirit is in full flower, then we are shown to be recipients of this divine love. If our fields lie fallow, we are shown to be frauds. (v.19-21)
So as we
leave chapter 4 and turn our attention to the final chapter of John’s letter,
we must ask the question. Do we
appreciate these rights? Do we even
acknowledge them? Further, are we
intentionally incorporating them into the fabric of our lives? If the answer to these questions in your life
is no, then the need for change should be apparent to you.
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