In today’s passage, John says farewell to his Christian readers, wherever and whenever they may be. He has one final thing to say to them, after reminding them of all he has said in his letter about belief, rebirth, love, obedience, and righteousness that we talked about last week; and that …
We are going to start wrapping up our time in 1 John because the book of 1 John is short, and it’s almost done. What we’ll see in John’s letter now is that he is sort of giving a briefing, a recap of everything he’s already said and making sure that his readers, including us, church, underst…
So far in the book of 1 John, John has used the word “love” 13 times. That’s a lot for such a small letter! The frequency of the word “love” is how we know it is one of the main themes of John’s letter here. Though love is certainly one of the main things John talks about, he gives almost eq…
If you’ll look this morning in your bulletin in the sermon notes, you’ll notice I ask a question I want to start with today. Self-love? Should Christians love themselves, should we have self-love? The answer is no…and yes. No, if you define self-love the way the world does, no, self-love is …
If you haven’t noticed already, John has three main things that he talks about in the book of 1 John: he talks about love for others, he talks about walking in God’s light, and he talks about having fellowship with God and with other believers. Love, light, and fellowship. These are John’s m…
We’ve been in the book of 1 John for a few weeks, and it has been great. So far, John has explained how we can know that we have fellowship with God, how we can know that we really have a relationship with God. He was trying to assure people who maybe had been a little confused by all the di…
About two and a half years ago Jonny and I had coffee with cult members. I actually spoke about that coffee meeting in a message, and it still sticks with me as a fascinating and odd meeting. Did you know that when we were meeting with those cult members, we were actually having coffee with …
Do not love the world, nor the things in the world.
This echoes the words that Jesus prayed for His disciples, including John in John 17:14-16, when He told them that they were in the world, just as He was in the world, but not of the world. This command takes this idea that discip…
Up to this point in 1 John, John has made it a point to let the Christians he was writing to know that they must be honest and humble about their sin, they must truly turn from a life of sin and not have anything to do with the darkness if they are going to truly be in the light of the Fathe…
It is difficult, if not impossible to imagine that Christians who know Jesus’ command to love each other would openly advocate and practice hatred for other Christians. Yet that is exactly what had happened in the church, even as early as when John wrote this letter to Christians in general.…
Do you ever wonder whether you really know God? How do you know that you know Him, and not just know about Him? How can you be sure that you do?
Let me add more to this idea of knowing God before we start to try to understand what that means better. The apostle John uses the word “know”…
I read an interesting and sobering article this week, an insight article called “Pastors and Churches Face Historic Lack of Trust”. It was published by Lifeway research based on a Gallup poll and written by Aaron Earls, and as the research statistics from this article show in the article, an…
One of the Christmas gifts a relative got for our kids last year was a subscription to Kiwi Co. boxes. You might not know what those are, so let me explain. They’re small cardboard boxes, about the size of a shoe-box that come with different educational themed-crafts and projects inside each…
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