TRUE BELIEVERS
1 John 5
“Whoever believes in the Son of God accepts this testimony. Whoever does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because they have not believed the testimony God has given about his Son. And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.”
John makes it very clear that the source of the Gospel is God and in the end everything can be traced back to him and all our understanding of the Gospel stems from who God is.
God is light and God is love; we cannot use the Gospel to excuse us from living in the light and walking in love. At the same time we must understand that in order to draw close to God and enjoy the life that he grants through Jesus, we must walk in light and love.
The Gospel of life comes exclusively through Jesus. It is through his incarnation and subsequent sacrificial death on the cross that enables God to release his Holy Spirit to those who believe. All that we understand about the Gospel must therefore stem from our understanding of who Jesus is. John tells us in 4:17, “This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus.”
In this world we are like Jesus.
The clarity that John gives us about how we receive life and how we live this life gives us confidence, knowing that we are indeed God’s children and we have his attention and John calls on us to use this to help one another walk and grow till that day when we shall see our King and “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”
“I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.”