Podcast: 1 John: Love as the Cure for Fear

This is a transcript of one of our recent podcasts. To subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, please click here. To listen to the podcast without iTunes, please follow this link.

And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his 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. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for 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. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he 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: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
-1 John 4:14-21

“And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.” So the writer of Hebrews puts it. For some people, this is a very scary thought. For others, it doesn’t concern them that much at all. Oddly enough, it’s usually the people who should fear the most that are not at all afraid. You go talk to people on the streets, and most of them will be utterly confident that God is okay with them, even though they don’t even bother to consider their own sin and how God will react to it.

I’ve been in a couple of conversations recently about our security in salvation with people whom I believe to be true Christians. Of course, I will not be the one to judge that, but I have confidence in their faith. And they often fear that day, even though they know that Jesus has paid that price for them. I wish I had studied this passage earlier. Maybe I could have given them a better answer.

This section almost seems like a summary of the entire letter so far. It’s true that John tends to write almost in a swirl of thought – he goes through his argument, and then he goes through it again in a slightly different manner, and then again, adding a bit more. So in this way, almost every section of the letter is a summary of everything else, but here he begins again with the reminder that he was a witness. This is HIS testimony, what he knows as truth because he was there.

And the summary of that truth is as simple as we can make it. “Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.”

We should linger here for a little while, because this truth is so simple that we often try to add to it just so that it appears big enough to be real. I am currently reading a supposedly Christian book that is a call to service of the poor and needy. A worthy call that is, and yet that service is constantly spoken of in this book as part of the Gospel. That is the temptation, to see the Gospel as something tangible and generous and charitable on our part, and not just on God’s. That is the result of the Gospel, yes, but it is not the Gospel.

In truth, the charity of the Gospel comes from God and Him alone. We are sinners. We do not deserve eternal life. We blow off our sin because we are so used to it, but God does not. He demands that we be good people, and instead we chase after our own selfish desires. The good news of the Gospel is that the punishment we owe has been paid by Jesus. He died the death that we should have died. When we confess Him (and by confessing, we don’t mean something we merely say, but something we believe in faith, and it is not that we just believe that there was a guy named Jesus, but that He is the Son of God, come from heaven to live as a man, to die on our behalf, to rise on the third day, and who is at the right hand of the Father even now), when we confess Him, we are saved. The good news is that we can never earn God’s favor, but that He gives it to His children without cost or obligation.

This is what shows His love for us. And here’s the cool thing about it, that love is exactly why we should not fear judgment, if we are in Him. God loves us so much that He gave His Son’s life for us. Do you now think that He would withhold that love on the Day of Judgment? John Calvin wrote, “Therefore no one can come with a tranquil mind to God’s tribunal, except he believes that he is freely loved.”

Brothers and sisters, we are freely loved. God the Son died for us. We need not fear His wrath again! It is for those who are outside of God that need to fear this day, but we do not. The love of God, expressed in the Cross, perfected in us, drives away our fear.

Now, that is the good news. Let us add nothing to it. Let us not mistake it again. This good news, once applied within us, now produces its affects in how we love one another. God loves the Church, and God’s children, who have God in them, will love the Church too. It is the natural result of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and those who do not produce this natural result of the Gospel may not truly be God’s children.

Jesus uses the analogy of a vine. He is the vine, and we are His branches. Those branches that are in Him will bear fruit. But a branch laying on the ground by itself will have no fruit. God loves the Church, and if we are in Him, then we will love the Church as naturally as a branch of the true vine bears fruit.

We love because He first loved us.

Again, I would like to quote Calvin: “Faith in Christ, makes God to dwell in men, and we are partakers of this grace; but as God is love, no one dwells in him except he loves his brethren. Then love ought to reign in us, since God unites himself to us.”

Do you see? It is not that we are saved by our love. So often is John quoted in an effort to try to tell people that we have to do this and we have to do that. That’s not what John is saying. He never speaks of loving others in any sense except as the natural effect of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. He is telling us how we can be sure that we are God’s children, not telling us what we need to do to become God’s children.

This letter is written to reassure Christians of their salvation in Christ, and John uses love as a proof of that. Is God’s indwelling Spirit turning you away from yourself and toward God and others? Do you see the evidence of God’s love in your life? If so, then do not fear. Look to His love, proven by the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross, to drive out fear. If His love has had its complete result in us, then we will not fear, for we will be reassured in all times by His love.

If you do not see these evidences of God’s love in your life, then there may be cause for fear. But don’t react to this by running out and trying to love people. This is not a work that will earn us God’s love, but rather it is a natural outgrowth of God’s love. It is God’s saving love for us that must come first. John’s message over and over has been this – look to your heart. Does it testify against you, or do you see the Spirit’s work within it to conform you more to the image of Christ? If it is the former, then turn to the Cross. Repent of your sins. Seek God’s forgiveness and have faith in Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection. We are saved by faith, and not works. It is a free gift that we could never earn.

If your confession and faith are true, you will begin to see fruit of that repentance in your life. It is as natural as good fruit from a good vine.

Podcast: 1 John: All You Need is Love!

This is a transcript of one of our recent podcasts. To subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, please click here. To listen to the podcast without iTunes, please follow this link.

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; 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.
-1 John 4:7-13

I was just listening to an interview with a woman who claims to be a Christian, but is involved in habitual, unrepentant sexual sin. A pastor was invited into the same interview to try to ask her to turn away from this sin and obey God. I was most interested in what she was saying, because, as we’ve heard a thousand times, she kept falling back on the defense of love. She loves her partner, she said, and God would never command against that. After all, God is love! Besides which, if what she was doing was truly a sin, then God would forgive her, because He is love!

We’re going to be looking today at that very verse, so the timing of that interview was surely providential. I’ve heard this phrase quoted so often, and it is usually by those who are not repentant of their sins. They do not want to submit to God. They want to go about their lives and not be punished for what they have done. So they will say, “God is love, right? Then why would He punish me? Why would He not want me to be happy?”

It’s strange that we don’t accept this definition of love in any other area of life unless it benefits us. If your kids misbehave, we all recognize that the only loving thing to do is to discipline them. If a friend is messing up his life, the only loving thing to do is to try to talk to that friend.

But when you are the one messing up your life, you often think it is mean and hurtful to be confronted. See, we want people to love us in a way that always agrees with us, always stands by us, never confronts, never asks hard questions. We’re like a child who gets mad at his mother for sending him to his room, not understanding that the mother did that because love doesn’t always agree with a selfish and self-absorbed kid.

John talks a lot about love here, and he gives a good definition. See, when we say that God is love, we’re not just saying that God will act lovingly. We’re also saying that the actions of God are, by definition, loving. If your definition of love is such that you don’t think Jesus was loving, then you have a bad definition. If your ideas on love don’t line up with His, then your love isn’t love at all. And the truth is that Jesus was kind, compassionate, giving, and also sometimes harsh, insulting, sarcastic, and very willing to embarrass someone in front of a crowd when necessary.

So when John tells us to love one another, it’s not some touchy-feely warm feeling you have in your heart for someone. He’s not saying, “Oh, just hang out together, watch a movie, and always support each others decisions.” No, this love is wholly different.

Those who do not love but claim to be followers of Christ are not following Christ at all. See, God is love. If He is in you, then you have love. That is foundational. Paul gives us a rather detailed definition of love in 1 Corinthians 13: “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” Test yourself. Measure yourself against these truths. Are you growing in love since you were saved by Jesus? If not, then were you saved at all?

John, in this text, gives the ultimate example of love in Christ. “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.” God loved us so much that He sent His Son to die so that we could live. No, this is not a love as this world thinks of love, which is usually just glorified lust or a subjective affinity with someone. This is love that puts others before life itself. God came from heaven in human form, lived as a poor carpenter and persecuted teacher, then was tortured to death on a Cross, and all because He loved us. That, my friends, is love.

You may wonder why God had to die for us to live. John tells us in the word “propitiation.” You may not know this word, but it is a truly wonderful word. My friends, we are sinners. We are selfish, lustful, hate-filled, ambitious, egotistical sinners whose first instinct is for ourselves rather than for others. We do not love like this! We say we do, but our love is a selfish love that is really no love at all. We love people because what they do for us, how they make us feel. We do not love, and in not loving we prove that we are not of God.

God is love, and His love is one that disciplines, that reproves. It is a love that punishes when someone deserves it, and we deserve it. It is a love that is just, and justice is not on our side.

But it is a love that also sacrifices for us. When Jesus died, what was really happening is that He was taking the punishment upon Himself that we deserved. He was satisfying justice on our behalf. If you are a child of God, then your debt is paid. That is what propitiation means. It is one of the most wonderful words in history, because it means that Jesus died so that I don’t have to. Because of what He did, I do not have to face what I truly deserve.

And it is a free gift. We cannot earn it. When we repent of our sins and believe in Jesus, His Blood saves us. He gives us His Spirit, and with that Holy Spirit in us, we begin to change. God is in us and God is love, and so we begin to love!

It is not a warm and fuzzy feeling in the gut. It’s a love that sacrifices. It is a love that reproves when needed. It is a love that will drive you to beg those around you to repent and believe in Him, no matter what they think of you for it.

No one has ever seen God, but God is love, and so this is our connection to Him. John 1:18 tells us, “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.” Notice how the whole Trinity is involved in this. The Father sends the Son out of love. The Son dies for us so that we can become God’s children. The Spirit indwells us. It is through this process that we have are connected back to the Father, and we are connected in love to one another.

Let me stress that, because we so often forget this. We so often take it upon ourselves to be these great moral people, to be generous and loving, and we so often fail, because we’re looking to the wrong source. We are looking to ourselves, but if we could do that, we wouldn’t need Jesus! We don’t earn eternal life by this love, the love is the evidence of the eternal life. What earned it was the Cross, the fiery center of the Christian faith, the Blood that washes sin away. God works this out in us through repentance, through faith, and the indwelling of the Spirit. If you don’t love, then look to the Cross! That propitiation is everything here, not just the thing that gets us started.

God is love. If you don’t love, then go to God in repentance and faith. He is the only true source of love, so your answer must be there, not in your own efforts to be a better person.

Podcast: 1 John: Testing the Spirits

This is a transcript of one of our recent podcasts. To subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, please click here. To listen to the podcast without iTunes, please follow this link.

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
-1 John 4:1-6

I have to say, I’ve been frustrated lately. My wife and I are trying to a find a church home near us, so I’ve been going through these websites to get a feel for the different churches before we go and visit. After all, there are hundreds of churches around us, and it would take us a few years to actually visit all of them. We’re trying to narrow things down a little before actually going to visit.

Now, we’ve been able to veto a lot of these churches just based on stuff on their website. So many churches just don’t have the focus that I would like in a church. Either they disagree with us on major doctrine or they are more interested in talking about finances and relationships than in the sovereign God of the universe. They may use the Bible, but their focus is off. They’re more concerned with you, while I want to learn about Him.

A lot of the ones we vetoed right away were churches we would probably say were Christian churches, just with different priorities than we have. I expect to see those pastors and leaders in eternal life. We disagree on major issues, but not foundational issues. Other churches give me a totally different feel. They call themselves Christian, but I look at their doctrine, and I can’t imagine that they actually are Christian.

This passage made me stop and think about this whole debate over doctrines. We have disagreements within Christianity, but when would those disagreement actually rise to the level where we would have to say that a certain personality or church is heretical? In this passage, John refers to this as having the “spirit of the antichrist.” That’s a pretty heavy level to lay, just like it is when we say someone is a heretic. But when would that charge be appropriate?

This passage distinguishes these things rather well. We have two criteria that an orthodox view must have. First, a spirit “that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.” Second, “Whoever knows God listens to us,” meaning the Apostles.

Okay, there’s a little more to this than just believing that there was this dude named Jesus once. That’s not what John is saying. There’s a lot here. First of all, John uses Jesus’ title, which is the Christ, which is Greek for Messiah. What this is is a confession that Jesus is the Messiah.

Now we’ve opened this up a bit, because the Messiah is something much more important than a mere person. The Old Testament has many messianic prophecies, prophecies that tell us that the Messiah will carry our sin upon Himself. Isaiah writes of this man, “But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned – every one – to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:5-6).

When we confess Him as Christ, we are confessing that He did what we failed to do – lived a life without sin, worthy of eternal life. He alone does not deserve death, because there is no lust, pride, hatred, or ambition in Him. And yet He died anyway, and in that death took our sins upon Himself. He died so that we do not have to.

Confessing Him as Christ cannot be done without confessing ourselves as unworthy, for if we do not believe that we need a Savior, we will not confess that we have one. Confessing Him as Christ cannot be done without resting our entire hope upon Him, for we will have realized that we have no hope without Him.

The second test is whether we believe the Apostles. Now, we as Christians sometimes have honest disagreements about what the Apostles meant. Our disagreements do not usually rise to the level of heresy. But when the Apostles are dismissed, their writings ignored or brushed away, then that is part of the spirit of the antichrist.

I am sympathetic to those “Red Letter Christians” who believe that only Jesus’ words are infallible, and the words of the Apostles could be flawed. I sympathize, but I must call them to repentance. John, James, Jude, Paul, Peter, Mark, Luke, Matthew, and the writer of Hebrews were inspired by the Holy Spirit. All Scripture is God breathed, and we must look to it as the Word of God.

If you come across a teacher who denies the plain words of Paul, then we may be dealing with heresy. Again, I may disagree with an Arminian on predestination, but that does not mean the Arminian is ignoring the Scripture. We have a disagreement, and I would say he is wrong, but I would not call him a heretic. I do not believe in paedobaptism (infant baptism), but I call many Lutherans and Presbyterians my close brothers. We are both studying the Word, and we disagree on this point. It is the rejection of the Word that we must guard against, for that is part of the spirit of the antichrist.

Which means those supposedly Christian leaders who want to call Paul into question. Those who read what the Bible says on homosexuality or fornication and ignore it, teaching others that these activities are okay. Guard against these people.

But above all else, trust God. If you have the Spirit, then you are secured by that Spirit for eternity. You need not fear for your soul. God uses even false teachers for His greater glory and for our good. We may not understand how He does it, but as the sovereign God of the universe, He is more than able.

This is where our security lies. Look, if it were up to me, I may wake up a Buddhist tomorrow, or a Muslim. I have no confidence in my own strength to keep my faith intact. So why should I not worry about the spirit of the antichrist? Tomorrow, that may be something that entices me! But John tells us that we have already overcome these things. How is that so?

“For he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” Listen to that answer. It is God who secures me for eternity, not myself. My faith will stand if that faith is from God. Those who leave the church for heresy prove in their leaving that they were never part of the true Church. They never had a faith that is from God. That is what we learned in 1 John 2:19.

We worship a sovereign God, a God that is not tossed about by the winds of history, but the God who causes them to blow, and in what direction. He is the hand that guides our every moment. And so we have overcome the world because HE has overcome the world, and we are in Him.

So test the teachings of every new fad that comes along. Learn of Jesus through the testimony of the Word so you can hold up every spirit against the truth of Him. Read the writings of the Apostles and have confidence that they are from the Father. If there is teaching that outright denies these words, then they are of the spirit of the antichrist. They are heresies. Beware of them.

But also have confidence in your sovereign Father in heaven. It is He who secures His children for eternity. It is He who will draw all of those He will to Himself. When we have faith – true faith – and repentance of our sins, we prove ourselves to be part of that family, forgiven because of the sacrifice Jesus made on the Cross, and held for eternity by the power of the Spirit. Have confidence not in yourself, but in the Cross.