1 John 5:1-5

“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. 2 This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. 3 In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, 4 for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. 5 Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.”

         •        Introduction

God’s people are not lovely.

Well, they are to HIM … but just as it can be the case that the parent loves the child because of something in the parent and NOT the loveliness of the child, so it can often be with God and HIS children too.

So you see parents loving and being devoted to children whose behaviour makes other children or other people find them quite challenging.

Oh yes, that can happen in human families and it arises in church families too.

So John is laying it on the line to these believers in Ephesus.

He’s doing that to these house churches where false teachers have been troubling the church both. 

He’s saying these people are exposed as false teachers by unloving behaviour … not that they don’t sound lovely to the lovely people, but that the love that Christ has for the unworthy and unlovely has not transformed those false teachers’ own hearts to love the unlovely in their turn.

Now as soon as you say that we SHOULD love one another (in the manner prescribed there’s a pastoral problem.

The problem is that those who HAVE had their hearts and consciences sensitised by the indwelling Spirit of God are going to beating themselves up for their supposed failures in this area because loving the unlovely is hard going and if you want to go down this road, you can always beat yourself up over it!

And THAT is the issue John is speaking to in these few verses.

Beating yourself up as a believer when you don’t quite manage to love people who are being unlovely the way Jesus did.

I need to warn you … John is on a mission in these five verses, and he moves on from one thought to another pretty swiftly … it’s like touch and go landings more than circuits and bumps because he touches down on something then moves quickly on to the next (loosely associated) thing he wants to say!

Here we go …

         •        Reiterating the obligation, vv. 1-2

John starts this section where he’s just taken off from … the obligation to love one another that he’s been dealing with for a while

“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. 2 This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands.”

1 John 5:1-2

Whenever we see the issue of the sensitive conscience addressed in Scripture, it doesn’t get addressed by lightening the obligation to act righteously.

Interesting, isn’t it?

The world we live in says: 

‘Well, never mind, you know … everybody does it’.

‘Nobody’s perfect, right?’

‘It can’t be helped’.

‘You’ve got to have YOUR life, too’.

‘It isn’t hurting anybody’.

John says … something else!

            •          Grounds for assurance, v. 1a

V. 2 “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God”

Phew!

Thanks John.

We were starting to feel a bit non-genuine there when you were telling us that if we are genuine believers we SHOULD love one another, because, well, you know, that’s hard and we don’t match up to that sort of level of keeping God’s commandments, so … thanks for that.

I DO believe … so that’s OK then?

Look closely.

It isn’t the believing that make the task of loving your unlovely ‘one anothers’ bearable.

It’s what your believing indicates about you.

It is the being born of God that enables you to love the unloveable … not the believing.

Now, quite clearly, the new birth bit is what God does in your heart.

To be born from above is to be someone who receives the gift of new birth, who benefits from the blessings in Jeremiah 31.

I would LOVE to read that chapter out for you and take time to chew  it over and savour it!

What happens there is that God describes the days of return to God after the wandering away that led to judgement, captivity and exile in terms that speak in some details of the coming blessings of the new covenant … fulfilled 6-700 years later when Christ came and inaugurated His Kingdom.

It is an ASTONISHING passage of Scripture to chew over on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

But by the time it gets to v. 33 it is going like this:

““The days are coming,” declares the Lord,

    “when I will make a new covenant

with the people of Israel

    and with the people of Judah.

32 It will not be like the covenant

    I made with their ancestors

when I took them by the hand

    to lead them out of Egypt,

because they broke my covenant,

    though I was a husband to them,”

declares the Lord.

33 “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel

    after that time,” declares the Lord.

“I will put my law in their minds

    and write it on their hearts.

I will be their God,

    and they will be my people.

34 No longer will they teach their neighbour,

    or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’

because they will all know me,

    from the least of them to the greatest,”

declares the Lord.

“For I will forgive their wickedness

    and will remember their sins no more.”

Now for our purposes today and the failures and inadequacies real believers sense they have with successfully loving the utterly unlovely, verses 33 and 34 are particularly relevant.

In new covenant times … that is when Christ had come and inaugurated the new covenant in the Gospel … the law of God to love in this way lies inscribed on the hearts of the ‘born again’ new covenant people of God.

Excellent.

To have your heart inscribed with the inclination and the longing and the … heart’s desire … for this will be a GREAT help in dealing with the command to love one another because it’s in your heart and your heart is in it!

BUT … Jeremiah immediately says something that makes it liveable with when the old nature re-surfaces and trip us up again.

““For I will forgive their wickedness

    and will remember their sins no more.””

We continue to live as fallen … though redeemed … human beings.

But for the grace of God we can’t live either with our failure to do what we know we SHOULD do (dear children, we SHOULD love one another) or our failure to do what it is inscribed on our hearts to do.

That’s what underlies Paul’s famous passage in Romans 7 … describing the sort of tangled struggle known to all genuine believers … you know the one?

It’s his ‘wretched man’ passage:

“So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 

For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 

but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 

What a wretched man I am! 

Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? 

Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.”

Romans 7:21-25

Finding this a struggle says John, is not an issue that casts doubt on the faith of a genuine believer.

The genuine believer is in fact the one that struggles because when faced with temptation the inauthentic person is the one who DOESN’T find themselves in a struggle at all because they don’t have God’s commands written on their hearts and they actually don’t fight back!

So, in reassuring the genuine believer over how hard they find themselves fighting to love the unlovely the way Jesus did John does NOT water down the requirement, but affirms that the key issue is the new birth which is evidenced by this heart-inclination to love one another …

            •          Grounds for loving one another, v. 1b

“everyone who loves the father loves his child as well”

Do you notice that isn’t an ‘ought to’ but a ‘does’.

John is now talking not about what ought to be written on the believer’s heart but what IS written there.

The initiative and the responsibility … the driving force if you like in loving the unlovely the way HE does … lies outside of ourselves with the perfected, finished work of God in the conversion (the change brought about by the new birth) of any sinner saved by grace.

Everyone who loves the Father DOES love the child … that is the one another in our life that we’re to love, even the unlovely ones, loves THOSE children of God … as well.

Now it is an IS, but any one who tells me it is an ‘EASY’ one is really asking for a punch on the nose because it ISN’T easy and it hurts.

It hurts sometimes to grit your teeth and do it, for Jesus’s sake.

It hurts sometimes when we fail in seeking to do it, and know that we’ve failed.

But look - it is for the love of the Father that this is done.

Nothing to do with the lovely or the unlovely brother or sister themselves.

It is because of what God has done in our hearts and because we love Him Who loved us when we were unlovely, in our turn.

And THAT is the touchstone of the authenticity of OUR faith, of which John is writing here …

            •          The touchstone of authenticity, v. 2

“This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. “

Oh dear.

What IS John saying here now?

As twenty-first century Western world people we really are pretty linear-analytical in the way we think … we’re more of the sort of water jet you can get out of a pressure washer which is all pretty focused and going one way in a straight line.

John is much more a sort of Jacuzzi or whirlpool bath sort of bloke at this point … and that makes us want to scratch our heads and say ‘What?!’ When John writes stuff like this:

1. Here’s how we know we love the children of God

2. By loving God and carrying out His commands.

And our heads go: hang on … loving WHO is John talking about here?

Surely you love God’s children by … loving on God’s children, not by loving God - and what on earth has that second bit about keeping God’s commands got to do with that first bit about loving God’s children?

There’s a bit of a clash of worldview and thought styles going on here.

Let’s come at it like this.

Do you remember the 1975 hit single by Peter Shelley and Marty Wilde ‘Love me, love my dog’?

(Lyrics and Music here:

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/peter-shelley-love-me-love-my-dog-lyrics.html)

There’s a package in that man’s life and he’s telling his girlfriend that if she wants him in her life then he comes with his existing close friend, his dog.

Now, John Calvin didn’t have the benefit of seeing that the person this song writes about comes as a person with a dog, but that’s where the sort of thinking he helps us with is going.

The two things are a package.

If you are born again you will love God and you will love your neighbour and the two things feed one another …

So Calvin points out (and I’ll spare you a direct quote of the old fashioned language) that until now John has been pointing out that there is no true love to God when we aren’t loving one another: “But he now teaches that men are rightly and duly loved, when God holds the primacy.”

Aha!

Calvin now gets right down to nailing it:

“… he had referred first to the effect {that is, loving one another} so he now refers to the cause …”loving God which is always expressed in the covenant love of keeping His commands.

Smalley in his book on 1 John points out that what looked like a circular argument is actually a consistent package:

“For the fact is that each kind of love (for God, and for others) demonstrates the genuineness of the other, and reinforces it.”

So Von Halde sees this rhetoric as “intended to show the unity of these obligations.”

The command to love one another is given force within our own motivations by the change that God has brought about in the believer’s heart through the new birth.

But … mirroring the way He set His love on us … we don’t love one another because of anything in the object of our love, but because of what He has graciously done in us, that is given us new hearts that incline towards Him and towards the keeping of His commandments.

Those commandments were famously summarised by the Lord as loving God and loving one another.

So the touchstone of the authenticity of our faith rests on the new heart that God unfailingly gives at the new birth, and that shows up in the real world with the desire to obey His commandments.

The ‘heart’ to keep His covenant terms arises from the gratitude for His grace which is the outcome of the new birth).

But those commandments that the new heart longs to keep have a focus.

They actually FOCUS on the command to love God with all you’ve got and to love your neighbour as PASSIONATELY as you love yourself.

It’s not about you.

It’s not about your neighbour.

It’s about HIM, and His transforming grace that’s been shown to the believer in the new birth.

And because THAT’s where it’s come from, this love for the unlovely as well as the lovely ‘one anothers’ is the touchstone that authenticates genuine Christian faith … I trust, yours and mine.

         •        Loving = command-keeping, v. 3

So now, loving God is keeping His commandments, not because we OUGHT to but because of how much he has loved me, the unworthy one … and how radically my heart is changed by being born again.

Here’s the thing, then, the big point that we need to get hold of:

v. 3 “In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome”

Can we just stop there a minute and ask ourselves … ‘is that true’?

I mean, it’s in the Bible right?

So it IS true.

But if I hadn’t just pointed THAT out, would you think it was true?

Because I suspect our attitude to that statement will determine whether we make heavy weather of our living for Jesus or not.

Is it BURDENSOME to keep God’s commands or not?

And we’re thinking that through particularly here in the context of John’s ‘love one another’, and the Lord’s ‘love your neighbour as yourself.

So IS it, John, what do you say?

            •          Love for God = keeping His commands

Scripture has a well-worked theology of this: that love for God means the keeping of His commandments.

Not legally … ‘them’s the rules, get in line!’

But gratefully … in the context of having ourselves received such great love from our God while being utterly lost, undone and unworthy.

I want to suggest that there is something in the background to this text that bears consideration here.

Not in our culture, perhaps, but in John’s and in the Lord’s during His earthly life, it was the utterly reasonable, gladly accepted context of being the loyal clients of our very great patron that underlay what John is saying here … and cast in the role of the patron here is the Lord God Himself.

Now look, we’re keen enough on the idea of grace, right?

The idea of receiving the unmerited favour of God in the teeth of our sinful undeserving.

But the key words that early Christians used to explain God’s salvation came from the social world of patronage and benefaction.

Our theology needs to take account of the fact that key New Testament words come from this social world of patronage.

Here’s what I mean:

In ancient documents the word sōtēr (Saviour) refers to benefactors and sōtēria (salvation) connotes patronage!

And that Greek word charis (grace) also comes from this ancient social context of patronage and loyalty.

That word ‘grace’ sometimes refers to the willingness of a patron to grant some benefit to another person.

It also sometimes refers to the gracious gift itself, so in 1 Corinthians 16:3 Paul describes the gift from the Gentile churches to relieve the famine experience of the church in Jerusalem using the word charin … the gift that initiated a relationship of reciprocity and dependence.

But finally grace occasionally describes the recipient’s response to a gift … the client’s ‘gratitude’ and ‘thankfulness’.

So

“Early Christians, socialised in the matrix of patronage, would have understood God’s grace as the basis of a new relationship with mutual expectations.”

(Jason Georges, ‘Ministering in Patronage Cultures, p. 100)

Now, of course, God’s grace is unconditional because it doesn’t come with any prior conditions.

But that does not mean that it isn’t free of any subsequent expectation of the gratitude of the recipient of God’s grace because it is quite impossible (the reasoning goes) to be genuinely given the new heart that the new birth brings and not be moved with proper and appropriate practically expressed loyalty and gratitude to the giver.

What is John saying here to our culture of ingratitude from his culture of patronage and loyalty?

He’s saying this love for one another is not burdensome both because we DO have new hearts in Christ by virtue of the new birth, but also that this is utterly REASONABLE loyalty to the benefactor Who has so utterly and undeservedly blessed us.

So he flows straight into his next comment …

            •          Loving God in this way isn’t burdensome

John is preaching in this book as we’ve stressed quite a lot, and a good preacher is a good anticipator of what his hearers will be thinking and what they’ll be objecting to.

When John wrote back in 4:7 “Dear friends let us love one another …” the hackles would have gone up in those congregations, hackles on the necks 

BOTH of those who found certain people in the congregation struggling to cope with T.L.A.S. (The Lord’s Awkward Squad … as some would see them)       

AND on the necks of those who felt marginalised and alienated in the congregations.

Hackles will go up because once John sets this in the context of their patronage culture they KNOW they’re going to be behaving scandalously if they don’t love these people that they find it the hardest to show love to.

Now, yes, I know that given the broader context of this book and what we know of the situation in those little house church around Ephesus that he’s addressing, John was warning against those who were trying to lead them astray … false teachers who had abandoned the faith and were out to split people off from the Gospel they had received.

But it is delivered to those in church that morning and it rubbed up against everybody and amongst those giving this teaching a sensitive hearing, you can reckon these responses existed.

They would in ANY congregation where this exhortation is heard.

So there would be GOOD people, genuine people, hearing these words of John’s read out aloud there in the church as it gathered who needed to be reminded that God’ commandments are not a burden on their backs.

The love for God that drives this is a product of the Christian’s immense gratitude that when we were absolutely unlovely to Him, God loved us; 

and the love that drives loving one another doesn’t come as a grateful response to that ‘one another’ person’s behaviour towards us 

but as our loving response to the God Who has SO loved us!

It is WORSHIP for His grace shown to us, shown to us in the condition we were in when He first saved us.

         •        Burden free loving, vv. 4-5

When it comes to showing loyalty and gratitude to your human patron in a patronage culture, yes, you recognise it is your obligation, duty and burden to bear.

You bear it - but it is burdensome.

But look here at vv. 3-5.

Vv. 3b -5

“His commands are not burdensome, 

4 for everyone born of God overcomes the world. 

This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. 

5 Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.”

The burden of the client in a patronage relationship is carried in THIS world, with this world’s things and in this worldly loyalty.

Things in THIS world.

But where God is concerned, the Lord turns out to be no-one’s debtor.

He has given us what we need to overcome the difficulty of what those who belong solely to this world would lose in obeying His commands.

Trying to meet those out of our resources rather than His … that would be burdensome!

Oh yes, if you are trying to overcome the sense of how much it is costing you to obey God’s commands (in this case by loving your neighbour) because you are only deploying your own resources to show Him this covenant loyalty … in THAT context, yes His commands will feel burdensome to you.

But look at the things here that the patron (God) has given His clients to enable them to meet a loyal clients’ obligations of gratitude:

They HAVE overcome the world … whereas if they were living bound by and obligated to this world it would be different.

But the values of this world are overcome in the believer by virtue of the new birth and new heart God has given them (that’s the first thing), and then also by virtue of their faith.

Their faith … that dynamic trust in God for everything we have and stand in need of … that God Himself has also given.

Yes, for humans who CANNOT put their trust in Him unaided He also gives faith … faith is the gift of God according to Ephesians 2:8.

To a totally ‘this world’ way of thinking, loving your neighbour is a one-way street to nowhere that’s good.

According to a ‘this world only’ set of values, love for your unlovely and unrewarding neighbour here seems to hold nothing at all in it for you.

But that ‘this-worldly’ set of values is of such temporary value, and the mutual love of the Saviour of the world and the One Who holds the keys of death and hell means that trusting Him completely changes the equation.

Being born again (and given a new heart that delights in a new quite different range of things) and being given the gift of trusting God rather than the things and the useful network of acquaintances you can assemble and leverage … both those things 

the change of heart at the new birth and 

the trust in God and nothing else for your needs and destiny 

mean that this ‘loving one another’ thing which seems so costly on a this-worldly calculation is actually NOT burdensome at ALL in the genuine Christian’s new outlook … not at all.

What we’re being called on to demonstrate is burden-free loving, because we don’t value the things that it ‘costs’ us at all.

Our values and therefore our costs come from somewhere else entirely now than that … in fact, living counter-culturally in this context is both liberating and a joy to those who follow Him.

Try seeing things that way, says John, and watch what blossoms from it.

         •        Conclusion

Loving one another is one of the touchstones of authentic Christianity that John highlights as he warns and counsels his readers against the troublers who have arisen in their congregations.

The Lord Himself had summed up the most important obligations of human beings before God as being to love God and love one another.

He’d also taught His disciples the night before He was betrayed that in future people would know they are His disciples by their love for one another.

It’s clear then that John has good reason to teach this principle set out in 4:7 “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.”

He’s been dealing with that ever since chapter 4, right through until our passage today in 5:1-5.

And today he comes to dealing with how BURDENSOME it can seem to love one another.

Fundamentally, John seeks to reiterate the way that the changes brought about by God in a believer’s heart by receiving His great grace to ourselves as undeserving of His love, and by the change in attitude in the genuine believer receiving a new heart at the new birth (regeneration - being ‘born again as prophesied in Jeremiah and Ezekiel) …

These lead to this ‘obligation’ not being at all burdensome but quite reasonable and rational … part of what Paul describes in Romans 12 as presenting our bodies to God as a living sacrifice which is our REASONABLE service … something that may have been naturally easier to grasp in a patronage culture rather than in our ungrateful one.

The problem for people who find loving one another difficult and burdensome, John is saying, is having not overcome ‘the world’ … the attitude that is at home in a world ordered in opposition to and without being changed by the grace of God in the Gospel.

But the victory that has overcome that as our dominant pattern of thinking is ‘your faith’ … your living in a posture and a cultivated attitude of putting all trust in the gracious God Who has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Christ from the dead, into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade, kept in Heaven for you who are shielded by God’s power … ready for the resurrection that is due to be revealed in the last days.

May God grant us a clearer mental focus on His grace, our new nature in Him and the Glory that is waiting to be revealed in us as we commit ourselves to authentic Christian love for one another.