Over the last five months I've been studying 1 John with friends here. It has been a big project, but we've wrapped it up now and I've been taking some time to collect my thoughts and boil down five months of thoughts into a few take-away points.
John wrote to a group of churches in southeast Asia Minor. These churches had been battling Gnostic heresy which was a teaching that, among other things, claimed that Jesus was not divine. As a result, in and around the churches John is writing to there were many people who had been caught up in this heresy. It wasn't clear where they stood with God. They claimed to be believers, but were influenced by this incorrect teaching. The faithful among these churches needed to know how to sort out who the real believers were.
I understand John's first letter as his attempt to define what it means to be a true believer and, through three tests, help people to assess their own hearts and then to test the teaching and teachers surrounding them. According to John, true believers are born of God and as children of God with a new nature and new spiritual life they believe in Jesus as the Christ, their Savior (Doctrinal test), they obey God's commands (Moral test), and they love other people (Social test). John does not set out an expectation of perfection in these tests, but instead that they would with live out a pattern of obedience and love. As true believers we can be reassured because of the reliable apostalic testimony that we have of Christ's coming, the evidence of new life in us as we "pass" the tests, the mutual abiding of us in God and God in us, and the certainty that God hears us.
In terms of application I see John's letter primarily as a call to live as a son of God. As a son of God I will be affirmed in the doctrinal, moral, and social tests as I live out the new nature that is mine through being born again. I live out this new nature by cooperating with the Holy Spirit in the mutual abiding. As I do live this out I ought to be confident of my standing before God, loved and righteous just like Christ, belieing God for what He says about me.
John Stott's "The Letters of John" was a helpful resource throughout out study.
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1 comment:
bro, as I was reading 1 John also, I began to ask myself, what does it look like to love the poor? To what level is that part of the social test?
Was this something you guys talked about at all? Do you have any thoughts?
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