Having Life

1 John 4:20-5:12

Carl has titled this section, “Having Life,” and it turns out to be a very relevant topic for my family right now as we have watched the life of Lisa’s brother gradually ebb away over the last week and a half. The circumstances have made us all stop and think, What is life? What is death? What is eternal life? What does it mean to pass from death to life? These are deep and important questions – and some things we won’t completely understand on this side of eternity. It is good to stop and ponder sometimes: What does our life mean? It goes to the heart of who we are.

But first we need to talk about love once again. 

Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And He has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.  ~I John 4:20-21

Is this starting to sound familiar at all? Maybe just a little? I can picture the apostle John as an old man, writing this letter. He is thinking back over all that he has learned and experienced, everything that Jesus said, all that God has shown and taught him over the many years of walking with him. John would be qualified to give a comprehensive treatise on the Christian life. But he realizes that it all boils down to something very simple: love. Love for God and love for each other. This is what Jesus had said in Matthew 22 when he was questioned on all the complexity of the law – what is greatest commandment?

Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”  ~Matthew 22:37-40

Love is what links the relationship between God and people, between the unseen and the seen. Love is what makes the connection between attitude and action, between what is in our heart and what we actually do. It makes the link between law and gospel. The foundation of the law is love, as Jesus says. If we love, then we will fulfill the law. And we know that the message of the gospel is love. God is love – and He loves us even when we are unlovable. And we love because He first loved us, as Carl closed with last week.

So John goes back to the basics once again. Do you know what I mean when I talk about an older person “going back to the basics”? I’ve certainly received advice like this. “Just remember this. The most important thing is…” Maybe older people repeat themselves a little? 

“Yes, Mom, I have heard that before.”

Yes, John, we have heard this before. Love God and love your brother and sister. Well, then, just do it.

It’s not complicated – just difficult! We need God’s love, poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, as it says in Romans 5:5. It’s only as that abundant love overflows that we will be able to love as we ought. 

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves His child as well. This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out His commands. In fact, this is love for God: to keep His commands. And His commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.  ~I John 5:1-5

The first verse reminds me of a story that has become quite famous in missionary circles. It is retold in the book Eternity in Their Hearts by Don Richardson. How many of you have read that book? The story is part of the heritage of the mission that we are a part of. Our organization traces one of its roots back to Lars Skrefsrud, a Norwegian ex-convict who went to India as a missionary in 1863. He began working among the Santals, an ethnic group of about 2.5 million people in northern India. He learned their language fluently and began sharing the gospel. When he talked of the God the Father, the supreme creator of the universe, the Santals corrected the term he was using and said that they knew who he was talking about: Thakur Jiu, which means literally “the genuine God.” But they were sad to hear about him, because according to their oral tradition their ancestors used to worship him, many, many years ago, but they had forsaken him when they began to appease the mountain spirits to give them safe passage. So they had some ancient memory of a supreme God who sounded a lot like the God of the Bible, an account of being created by him, and a story of forgetting about him once they started worshiping demons and the sun. They had no idea of how to return to Thakur Jiu, even though they knew that he was “the genuine God.”

Skrefsrud realized his amazing opportunity. He told them that Thakur Jiu had sent His own Son, Jesus, to provide a way for people to return to him. That was great news to the Santals! As our verse says, everyone who loves the Father, loves his Son as well. They came to faith in Jesus in huge numbers. Skrefsrud baptized 15,000 in his lifetime, and the church has remained strong to this day, though there are still many Santals who need to hear the good news.

The Pharisees and other Jewish leaders for the most part rejected Jesus as the Son of God. They thought they knew God the Father, but they had a wrong understanding of how to relate to Him and a wrong expectation of how He would deliver His people. Jesus didn’t fit with how they supposed the Messiah, the Christ, would be. So they didn’t really love the Father, because they clearly didn’t love His Son. They were further from God than the Santals!

Accepting Jesus as Messiah, Savior, allows us to be renewed, born again of God, born of water and the Spirit, as it says in John 3. This belief and relationship with Jesus allows us to overcome the world, all the lies of Satan, all the idols erected in place of God. The world is not just “out there;” it’s “in here,” in our hearts. The biggest lie that we need to overcome is that we are supreme, that “it is all about us” – our needs, our desires, our satisfaction and comfort. Even as Christians, this is not always a settled issue. Even if we say that we are trusting God completely, we live as though we need to hedge our bets. Perhaps there is a small, niggling worry that we might need a Plan B, in case God doesn’t come through. Or maybe there’s an unsettling fear that we might miss out on something if we follow Him outside of our comfort zone. We obey, but perhaps not wholeheartedly.

Yesterday, I yelled at our dog out of our bedroom window, “Rikka, stop barking!” She immediately stopped. I remarked to Emma, “She knows that she is not supposed to be doing that.” Emma said something that I realized is perfectly descriptive of this attitude that I am talking about, infected by worldly thinking: “It’s not a matter of knowing it’s wrong, it’s a matter of what she thinks she can get away with.”

As a kid, I used to sing the old hymn, “Faith, faith is the victory...O glorious victory that overcomes the world,” and I would imagine myself like St. George slaying the dragon: a knight in shining armor standing atop this dead beast called the world. I doubt now that the glorious victory is typically like that. I wonder if it is more like the runner of Hebrews 12, “laying aside every encumbrance and the sin that so easily entangles us,” running with endurance the race that is set before us. I remember something else I learned as a kid, part of a poem by William Wordsworth:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This is the world, “too much with us,” that we need to overcome by faith. Faith that springs out of our love for God, in thankfulness for what He has done for us, allows us to keep His commands. It is all tied together: belief, faith, loving God, loving others, obeying God, overcoming the world. John seems to write this paragraph backwards to emphasize this interconnectedness. All of these things are part of one experience of walking with God. If following God feels like a burden, then something’s wrong. His commands are not burdensome. They are only a burden if “the world is too much with us,” if our hearts and motives are not pure.

All right, verse 6. The testimony of Jesus. 

This is the one who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth.  For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement. We accept human testimony, but God’s testimony is greater because it is the testimony of God, which He has given about His Son^. 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.  ~I John 5:6-10

We have already talked about how one of the reasons John wrote this letter was to refute the Gnostic heresy, which stated that Jesus was not fully human and fully divine, particularly that it was only the man Jesus who died on the cross, after His divine spirit had left Him. Why does that matter? The Gnostics wanted to make the case that all matter is inherently evil, so that it doesn’t matter what we do in our bodies, only our spirits matter. So they were okay with all kinds of immoral behavior. That might seem weird to us, but actually all kinds of de facto Gnosticism still exists in the church today, when people compartmentalize their relationship with God into just a spiritual thing and don’t examine how it should transform their behavior in every area. That’s what John was speaking out against.

Jesus came by water and blood. His deity was confirmed in His baptism, when God identified Him as His Son, in whom He was well pleased. And His deity was confirmed in His death, because it was the sufficient sacrifice to pay for the sins of the whole world. If Jesus in His death had been merely a man, that event would not have counted for much. John was there; he saw what happened. Plus there is the Spirit testifying to the truth. It is the Holy Spirit that continues to confirm the truth of the gospel in the hearts of those who are willing to believe. 

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.  ~I John 5:11-12

As I said at the beginning, I have been thinking a lot about life this week. God has given us eternal life and this life is in His Son. Jesus said that He came to bring “abundant” life – eternal life that starts right now, that allows us to live like we are truly alive, not just existing. Life is more than breathing and eating and working and reproducing. We have been studying various living things in biology, and there are various defined characteristics that make them “alive,” as opposed to just being a structure of organic molecules. But as humans, created in God’s image, we are meant to be more alive than that.

What is the meaning of life? That is one of the most important questions we can ask. I know that if you ask your iPhone a similar question the answer is “42,” but God created us all with a deep desire for a truly satisfying answer. I am also realizing that He has seen fit to always leave us a little bit unsatisfied with the answer – at least this side of heaven. I am reading a Philip Yancey book with my kids, and it has been interesting to ponder his explanation of why the book of Ecclesiastes is in the Bible – and the irony of its being placed right next to Proverbs.

Yancey points out that if anyone should have been a success in life, Solomon should have. With his divine gift of wisdom and his position of unprecedented wealth and influence, he should have been a shining example of the abundant life. However, he wallowed in sexual excess with his 700 wives and 300 concubines and brought pagan idols into the sacred places of Jerusalem. As Yancey puts it, “The author of 3000 proverbs broke them with an immoderation that has never been equaled.”

What went wrong? How do we end up with the Teacher in Ecclesiastes giving up and saying that life is meaningless? Yancey has a section in this chapter called, “The Curse of Getting What You Want.” The world has nothing to truly satisfy us. Yancey looks at where modern affluence and sophistication has ended up: “Existential despair did not germinate in the hell holes of Auschwitz or Siberia but rather in the cafés of Paris, the coffee shops of Copenhagen, and the luxury palaces of Beverly Hills.” He contrasts the response of the Teacher to that of Job as they wrestle with the same basic questions: why is life so unfair, why do bad things happen to good people?

"Job shakes his fist at God, calls him into account, demands a reply. The Teacher shrugs his shoulders, mumbles, ‘So what?’ and reaches for another goblet of wine. The two define the spectrum of despair, from the anguish of unrelieved suffering to the decadent boredom of surfeit."

Pat's answers don’t work. If we think we have God figured out, He is going to surprise us in some way. Ecclesiastes ends with an acknowledgment that fearing God and obeying His commandments is the whole duty of man, but it does not dispel the fact that some things in life are never going to make sense. Yancey admits,

"Not many sermons get preached on Ecclesiastes, for it is one of the Bible’s most confusing books. Many conservative Christians treat it with polite distaste, as if it had sneaked into the canon when no one was looking. I have come to see Ecclesiastes not as a mistake, not as a contrived form of reverse apologetic, rather as a profound reminder of the limits of being human."

Some things are never going to make sense to our limited minds. We see in a mirror dimly, as it says in 1 Corinthians 13, which means that we always have to maintain an attitude of humility. When it comes to the meaning of life, our human minds will never grasp the whole picture. When I look at the life of Lisa’s brother, I see so much that should have been better. He carried many burdens, the consequences of bad decisions earlier in his life and the challenges of his diabetes and other health problems. He had a good mind for computer technology, he was generous, and he had a gift for cooking, but he could never seem to do the right thing. He never married and even in his mid-forties was still very dependent on his parents.

A week and half ago his blood sugar went very low and his mom found him unconscious in his room when she went to call him in the morning. She gave him a shot, but he was still unresponsive, so she called 911, and he was admitted into intensive care. He never regained consciousness. When we visited last weekend, we saw him there in the bed with all the tubes and wires connected to all the machines keeping him alive. Emma remarked that it just looked like he was asleep, but clearly some major parts of his brain were no longer working. When we prayed over him I thought about what it meant for him to be alive. Was he still alive? Could he hear our pleas for him to call out to Jesus for help and salvation? Perhaps not, but was his spirit still able to respond? He had heard the gospel earlier and had remarked on the change in Lisa when she became a Christian. But as far as we know, he never made a commitment himself. Maybe our opportunity to get through to his rational brain was gone, but was Jesus still able touch him? Some things we just have to leave in God’s hands.

Another week went by. Lisa’s oldest brother flew in from California. Her second brother returned from a trip. So Lisa went down again on Friday so the whole family could be together. Yesterday, together with Lisa’s parents, they made the very difficult decision to disconnected life support. Dan’s higher brain function was clearly never going to return. They had to let him go. As of right now, he is still breathing on his own, but he will not be resuscitated if something happens. He is receiving some palliative care, for as long as his body continues to function. How long will he hang on? No one knows. It could be hours or it could be days. Please continue to pray for all the family, not just for comfort, but for the true peace that can come only from knowing Jesus.

It’s hard as a sibling to lose a brother. It’s even harder as a parent to lose a child. All of us are asking, What more should we have done for Dan? Why couldn’t God have given one more chance to say, “Sorry,” or “Jesus loves you,” or even “Death doesn’t have to be the end.” Even without regrets, a death in the family is a painful experience. Death comes to everyone eventually, but there is something about it that just seems unnatural. We have a built-in desire to live. We tenaciously hang on to life, whether our own or a loved one’s. We don’t really understand what is on “the other side.” If we are saved, then we know that somehow we will be with Jesus. But we can’t know exactly what that will look like.

We have talked a little about faith today. Hebrews 11 tells us that faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. Faith is what allows us to accept the tension of Ecclesiastes, the things in life that don’t make sense, the limitations of being human. It’s because we have faith in God, knowing who He is and what He is like, that we don’t have to understand everything. Faith is what allows us to look death in the face and not be completely overwhelmed. We receive the life of Jesus into our own – by faith. This isn’t just a one-time thing. We need to keep being renewed. If we allow the world to influence our attitudes and actions, as I talked about earlier, it will deaden this life within us. As that familiar verse in Romans 6 says, “The wages of sin is death.” Sin not only deserves death, it produces death. Ultimately this is eternal death, but even now we see the death that is the result of sin, in the world around us and in our own hearts. A sin such as selfishness can result in the death of relationships. Back in chapter 2 of 1 John we read about the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, that come not from the Father, but from the world. So these are also things that work death in our hearts, squeezing out the life of Jesus. Sin takes a heavy toll, but thanks be to God for forgiveness and grace, the free gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Whenever the life gets drained out of us by sin, repentance allows us to be refilled. We reconnect with Jesus, as the source of our life. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son does not have life.