Christ is the victory for our present life and for eternity

Christ is the victory for our present life and for eternity

Link to previous sermon

The apostle John is a pedagogue, he recalls certain truths and, gradually, brings an additional idea.

In today’s text, we will again have

• the link between faith in Christ and belonging to the family of God,
• the link between loving God = loving all who have faith in Christ,
• the circle virtuous:
• love God,
• love brothers and sisters,
• love God’s commandments.
  That, we have already seen!
  But here, the apostle shows us the key to living it in our daily life, facing a society that is not on the same wavelength.

Let’s read:
Text
1 John Chapter 5. 1-5
1 All who believe that Jesus is the Christ are children of God.
And those who love God the Father also love his children.
2 How do we know we love God’s children? We love them if we love God and obey his commands.
3 Yes, to love God is to keep his commandments.
And his commandments are not difficult, 4 because all who are children of God can overcome the world. And what makes us conquerors of the world is our faith.
5 Who is the conqueror of the world? It is only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.

Christ is the victory for our present life.
Living faith in Christ is the key to living God in our society.

Impact
Our real faith in Christ has an immediate impact.

It is not only a spiritual aspect with consequences in the hereafter but immediately and forever.

Christ is the victory for our present life.

Living faith in Christ is the key to living God in our society.

Really believe in Christ
Not just intellectually or believe in His reality (the occult forces believe in His reality and they tremble, cf. the confrontations with Jesus in the gospels).

When the Bible speaks to us about believing, it is

to place all our life in HIM, all our trust

• in Him, His person
• and in what He has done for us / His death and resurrection to overcome sin, our sin.
  Who would you blindly trust?
  To believe in Christ is to trust Him,
• more than trusting yourself, personally,
• more than trusting the most reliable person you know.

Another paternity
Believing in Christ has an immediate family impact: we have a Father, God,

• we are torn away forever and definitively from a despot, Satan.

So another family
Who says new paternity, says new family.
Fortunately,

• you are not,
• you are not,
• I am not
  the redeemed one.
  All the redeemed are through Christ the children of God.

A shared love
In this new family dynamic,

• love is not selective,
• it is not à la carte.
  That was before !

In the dynamic of God’s family, love lived with the Father implies love lived with all redeemed by Christ.

True love
Not just the options that feed my selfishness, but a love

• that takes the lead,
• committed, deliberate,
• a sacrificial love,
• a love that gives and gives,
• a relational love (not selfish).
  Seen in chapters 3 and 4 of the epistle.

One of the benchmarks
The objective is high, we come from afar and have the bad reflexes of our life soiled by sin.

So God, through the pen of the apostle John, gives a benchmark to know if we are in the expression of this love.

A benchmark and also a precious help, “the commandments” which give us the thought of God for our lives, which we find in the Bible.

Which commandments
And we have several details concerning these commandments:

• what are they?
• what should we do with it?
• what do they oppose?

Who are they ?
In John’s head, there were surely verses 34 and 35 of the 13th chapter of his gospel:
“I give you a new commandment: Love one another. As I have loved you, so love one another.
This is what everyone will know that you are my disciples: if you have love for one another.”

Jesus + epistles
But not only, all the other commandments that we find in the words of Jesus and in the epistles.

What to do with the OT
The Bible gives many commandments.
Many are found in the Old Testament.
Intuitively, but also with the help of the Spirit of God, we understand that some were temporary and no longer relevant to the redeemed by Christ.

But sometimes we don’t really know what to do with certain commandments, are they still valid?

Christ our benchmark
It’s very simple, there again, it is Christ who shows us how to do it.
He accomplished everything on the cross, in Him every command was lived out perfectly.

So we are going to

• take back
• and take
  (to live them) the commandments coming out of the mouth of Jesus Himself, which we find in the Gospels.

And in the epistles, because the disciples, contemporaries of Jesus, are the guarantors of the correct transmission of the thought of Jesus.

Those of the Old Testament repeated in the epistles and in the mouth of Jesus Himself.

There is “one after the cross” where Jesus accomplished everything.
We rely on the enlightened commandments of Christ’s victory.
It’s simple and consistent.

What should we do with it?
Respect them, in the sense of

• keeping them,
• obeying them and living them.

God had given super-simple commandments to Adam, those to cultivate and keep:
Genesis 2
15 The Eternal God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it.
16 The Lord God gave this command to the man:
We could say this commandment
“You may eat the fruit of all the trees of the garden, but you shall not eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. , because the day you eat it, you will die, that’s for sure.

We know the rest, Adam failed to keep the garden, by letting Eve eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil: • he did not
keep God’s order,

• he did not not obey the command of God.

Nothing has changed, God asks us
to • know

• and obey His commandments (those that are enlightened by the victory of Christ).

Difficult
Obviously, this is not easy on two counts:

• the sin that colonizes our existence (not a fatalism, with Christ and His spirit, we can progress from progress to progress), •
  and also because the commandments of God are out of step with the thought that surrounds us, in the text, the “world”.

The world
is both the godless thought system that surrounds us and the people involved in it.
The world, this system, is under the tutelage of God’s enemy, Satan.

The thought of God, which inspires all his commandments, is opposed to the thought and ways of doing things in the world, in our society: •
holiness and sin cannot come together,

• there is no way out of root problems (sin) without Christ.

Our opposition
Being attached to Christ, we are confronted with oppositions of ideas, ways of doing things, it can be frustrating and this discrepancy could be frightening.

Defeat

Create discouragement and finally not to be against the current, not having or no longer having the strength to go in the opposite direction, we could let ourselves go in the flow of our society, abandoning the thought and the commandments of God

Victorious
Such is not the tenor of today’s text, the idea is to triumph over the world, that we are victorious over the world, through the One who has already overcome it, through Christ.

By our living faith in Christ.
The more our faith is nurtured with Christ, the less we will become ensnared by the system of thinking and acting in our world.

This maintained link connects us ever more to Christ and what emanates from Him.

It’s Christ
The victory over the thinking and acting of the world is not in the commandments, nor in faith, but in Christ.

Action of faith
The real faith maintained in Christ always brings us closer to Him and we understand more the victory over the world that He puts on our account, His commandments make sense out of love, identity, loyalty, I want to live with His help.

Abandoned faith in Christ distances us, the relationship is distant with Him, we are less aware of His work. We see His victory less, we give up, nothing is readable in us. There is an identity crisis and the commandments of God seem out of place to us and we therefore no longer have the energy to live them, uneasy in our society: instead of being luminous, we are between two …

The key

It was Christ, He had the victory.

Faith
Our faith in Christ makes us born in God, one of whose privileges is to be able to lean on what Christ has acquired, by the same process.

The commandments
So to live by gratitude the commandments of God in a hostile world, it is not mission impossible

• because Jesus demonstrated it,
• because Christ defeated him,
• because we are of the same family,
• and that the victories of Jesus are for our benefit, if we want it by a living and not theoretical faith.

Some thoughtful implications.

Commandments and love:
Obedience to the commandments is linked to the love that binds us to God: a response of love and gratitude, an expression of faithfulness and loyalty, and linked to our identity in Christ.

Victoire :

Victory over the world depends only on Christ and therefore the real and living faith that we cultivate with Him is of great importance.

Make no mistake:
It’s not my biblical obedience that’s going to impact the world, it’s Christ, through my life, it’s because I love Christ, that I live His commandments

I take the time to underline it:
Because there is no effective method in the face of the world or my problems. There is only one victorious person, Christ; methods and commandments gained nothing on the cross.

Then:
Out of love, out of identity, I go and want to live His commandments.

Bad effect of methods:
All methods (even biblical) quantify effects. The results, satisfaction or disappointment depend on the method. If successful, all the credit goes to the method and to the person who applies it, but no longer to God.

We must beware of all so-called biblical methods, they steal the place of God and strengthen our self-satisfaction.

Christian education:

The other reflection that I would like to emphasize concerns the children of believers who are given an education inspired by the Bible and biblical precepts.
It’s brilliant and I benefited from it, God approves and asks to do it: for proof, it is a criterion in the appointment of those responsible for assemblies.

On the other hand, it could have a spiritually harmful effect: the object of education is to set a framework and to express oneself within it, if the framework is inspired by the thought of God, the commandments of His Word, the Bible and that I obey it with satisfaction (which will push me to continue) and my obedience fuels the satisfaction of my parents.

It can create this understanding that by obeying, I am better, victorious and favorable.

Two negative effects?
So two effects, the work of Christ on the cross seems to me less strong concerning me, even redeemed by Christ, I maintain this mechanism which makes me a self-satisfied legalist, boosted by the satisfaction of observance.

Same force of the cross:
Yet Christ is just as dead for me, a child of believing parents.
The power of the cross is just as decisive as for any other person!

Nothing of merit:

There is nothing meritorious in my daily life as a believer, everything is by the grace of God. Realizing this, out of gratitude and with His help, I desire to live in the likeness of Christ, I desire to live His commandments, just like all other believers.

May it help us not to mistake our objective, if we have had an education inspired by the thought of God.

Let this not discourage us as parents in our education based on the commandments of God.

But let it help us to pray that our children will have a right understanding of who God is, of what Christ has done for all men, of our real sinfulness, and that false thinking is just as sinful as visible action.

You came to us
(JEM 553)

And it is because the victory is in Christ over my sin:
1 John 5. 6-12 :
6Jesus Christ is the one who came with the water and the blood. He came, not with water only, but with water and also with blood. The Spirit of God is witness that this is true. Indeed, the Spirit of God is the truth. 7There are three witnesses: 8the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and the three are in agreement. 9When human beings witness something, we believe them. But when God is a witness, it’s much stronger! And this is the testimony of God: he bore witness to his Son. 10Whoever believes in the Son of God bears this testimony in his heart. He who does not believe in God, that one makes God a liar! He does not believe in the testimony that God gave to his Son. 11This is the testimony: God gave us life with him forever, and his Son is the source of this life. 12He who has the Son has life,