1 John 05 (Contemporary English Version)
- If we believe that Jesus is truly Christ, we are God's children. Everyone who loves the Father will also love his children.
- If we love and obey God, we know that we will love his children.
- We show our love for God by obeying his commandments, and they are not hard to follow.
- Every child of God can defeat the world, and our faith is what gives us this victory.
- No one can defeat the world without having faith in Jesus as the Son of God.
- Water and blood came out from the side of Jesus Christ. It wasn't just water, but water and blood. The Spirit tells about this, because the Spirit is truthful.
- In fact, there are three who tell about it.
- They are the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and they all agree.
- We believe what people tell us. But we can trust what God says even more, and God is the one who has spoken about his Son.
- If we have faith in God's Son, we have believed what God has said. But if we don't believe what God has said about his Son, it is the same as calling God a liar.
- God has also said that he gave us eternal life and that this life comes to us from his Son.
- And so, if we have God's Son, we have this life. But if we don't have the Son, we don't have this life.
- All of you have faith in the Son of God, and I have written to let you know that you have eternal life.
- We are certain that God will hear our prayers when we ask for what pleases him.
- And if we know that God listens when we pray, we are sure that our prayers have already been answered.
- Suppose you see one of our people commit a sin that isn't a deadly sin. You can pray, and that person will be given eternal life. But the sin must not be one that is deadly.
- Everything that is wrong is sin, but not all sins are deadly.
- We are sure that God's children do not keep on sinning. God's own Son protects them, and the devil cannot harm them.
- We are certain that we come from God and that the rest of the world is under the power of the devil.
- We know that Jesus Christ the Son of God has come and has shown us the true God. And because of Jesus, we now belong to the true God who gives eternal life.
- Children, you must stay away from idols.
In the opening verses of this chapter John gives obedience as the identifying factor indicating that we love God and love fellow believers. Our love for God and fellow believers is also evidence of our faith in Jesus who is the Messiah. All of this is inseparable. In the previous chapter John makes it clear that if we do not accept Christ we are not of God, and also that if we do not love fellow believers we are not of God. We cannot say we love God if we don't love fellow believers, and if we love fellow believers we are showing that we also love God. But simply saying that we have this love doesn't make it true. The way we know it is true is by our obedience to God's comands. One of His commands is to love fellow believers and our obedience to this command will be evidenced by our willingness to sacrifice for them.
All of this flows out of our faith in Jesus Christ. This faith in Christ enables us to conquer the world because He has conquered the world. We can be certain of the truth of these things because of the three that testify of them: that is the Spirit, the water, and the blood. We are willing to accept the testimony of men, but this testimony that comes from God is greater than that of men and we should be even more willing to accept it. Armed with this certainty, we can also be certain of two other truths: That we have eternal life, and that whenever we ask according to God's will, He hears us.
We are then encouraged to use this confidence in prayer to pray for fellow believers who we see committing sin. Pray that God will give them life. We should also pray that they will abide in Christ. In the closing verses of the letter John says that those who are in Christ are kept from the evil one and thus kept from sin. Throughout John's letter he has emphasized our need to abide in Christ. We must not only believe in Him, but abide in Him to fully benefit from our relationship with Him.
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