John is now an old man. Tradition says that he was the youngest disciple, so we have John as an eye witness to first and second generation Christians. They were trying to muddy the waters with false teaching. You remember Gnosticim: all matter is evil....you only got to know God by some secret knowledge. Or there was Docetism which said that Jesus was just a spirit, and not a man....people were having trouble believing that Jesus was both God and man. This is why you need knowledge of the Bible....you have the book...you have the eyewitnesses of what your Lord God is...He loves us. In fact, as 1 John says: God IS love. He came for everyone to buy us back from the power of sin. We must have faith in the Son of God to have eternal life. The thing is: It is for EVERYONE....our lives should give evidence of our faith.....we are to love our brothers...remember, this is a choice, not a feeling (shoot, that helps me some time!). God wants to be in fellowship with His children because He loves them. We are not to be of the world...the devil is in charge of the world and all our temptations are there. We do have the Holy Spirit in us that helps us overcome. He is our deposit of eternal life. We are His children.
The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work.
From my bible:
ReplyDelete1. God is light - To enjoy fellowship with God, we mus walk in light, and as we do, we will regularly confess our sins, allowing the blood of Christ to continually cleanse us.
2. God is love - If we do not love, we do not know God's love.
3. God is life - Faith in Jesus gives us eternal life with God.
I love the Light part....we said at Christmas Eve "you created light out of darkness and brought forth life on earth"
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