Loving your brother in faith is a sign of our attachment to Christ

Loving your brother in faith is a sign of our attachment to Christ

Reminder

The course of the epistle of the first epistle of John is quite simple,
the apostle clarifies two attitudes:

Opposed to Christ

• Those who are opposed to Christ, who subjugate with breathtaking words, but who do the complete opposite of the thought, the will of God; claiming themselves of God, they demonstrate by their conduct that they are strangers to God and have never been close to Him.

For Christ

• Those who are really attached to Christ:
• the minimum is that they demonstrate by their life their belonging to Christ, that is to say that they seek, love everything that Christ demonstrated during His life and which is reminded of us in the Gospels and the writings of the apostles.

In writing this, John thinks in particular of one area:
verse 10 of chapter 3 of the first epistle had given us the flea in our ears…
This is how we recognize the children of God and the children of the devil :

• he who does not practice justice is not of God,
• just like he who does not love his brother.

It is a question here of loving one’s brother, of brotherly love.

And what the apostle means here is that brotherly love is not a concept, it is the concrete sign which bears witness to our belonging to Christ.

1 John chapter 3 , verses 11 to 24
11 For the message which was announced to you and which you heard from the beginning, is that we must love one another.
12 Let’s not imitate Cain: he was evil and he killed his brother. And why did he kill him? Because his way of acting was wrong while his brother’s way was right.
13 Do not be surprised, my brothers and sisters, if the world hates you.
14 As for us, we know that we have passed from death to life because we love brothers and sisters. He who does not love [his brother] remains in death.
15 Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him.
16 This is how we came to know love: Christ gave his life for us; we too must give our lives for the brothers and sisters.
17 If someone who has the goods of this world sees his brother in need and closes his heart to him, how can the love of God dwell in him?
18 Little children, let us not love in words and with the tongue, but in deeds and with truth.
19 By this we will know that we are of the truth and we will reassure our heart before him.
20 Indeed, even if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart and he knows everything.
21 Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God.
22 Whatever we ask, we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what is pleasing to him.
23 And this is his commandment: that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and that we love one another, as he commanded [us].
24 He who keeps his commandments abides in God, and God abides in him; and we recognize that he dwells in us in the Spirit he has given us.

Brotherly love is the concrete sign that testifies to our belonging to Christ

This text tells us what brotherly love is not, what it is and what it does for believers.

1 John chapter 3 , verses 11 & 12 insists on loving one another (the expression “one another” always relates to the community in the epistles) by a strong term, “duty”. It is not optional. This imperative is anchored from the beginning.

Cain over Abel

Verse 12 reminds us of Cain’s fratricide of Abel, this incident showed us several things:

Cain did not inadvertently make an inadmissible offering, his offering was not accepted by God because he was of the evil one, child of the enemy of God, the prince of this world.
Being of the evil one, he has done works which are of the same nature as his master: inadmissible offering, hatred, murder.

Conversely Abel, a man of faith (according to Hebrews 11/4), did works related to his faith, an offering approved by God, acceptable.

What the apostle is emphasizing here to these brothers and sisters is that as Christians we must aim to live who we are, children of God, living by faith, loving his neighbour.
And do not imitate those who disregard God and Christ, who then belong to the devil and, therefore, what animates them, leads them to acts inspired by their attachment to the enemy of God.

Children of God forever

Here in this text, there is no question for the child of God through Christ, to oscillate between the two states: we are children of God. Point ! We are therefore never again children of the enemy of God.

But bad attitude of life
However, we can still live our old habits and fall into doing the gestures of what we once were. But the apostle encourages us to live what we are, this is all the more understandable in the following verses:
1 John chapter 3 , verses 13 & 14
Why the world (term to designate everything that belongs to the prince of this world, i.e. Satan) hates us? Because we do not belong to Satan but to Christ! This is what verse 14 tells us.

The testimony that I have changed condition,

• passed from death (child of Satan),
• to life (child of God through Christ),
  is that I have love for those who love Christ.

Conversely, those who belong to the world, to the devil, hate us because we belong to Christ.

The one who doesn’t love.

Here, moreover, there is no question of brother, because this term designates one who belongs to Christ:

• he does not return to death,
• he remains,
• he remains,
• he has not changed,
• he did not accept Christ.
  So he is a child of Satan, he will remain eternally in this condition, separated from God.
  Finality hell.

Consequences

1 John chapter 3 , verses 15 & 16
If any of us, a brother, is found to hate or is found to hate his brother, he is experiencing what a murderer is.
What characterizes the murderer is that eternal life never abided in him.
Conversely, what Christ demonstrated to us is that He gave himself for us, He gave His life. It’s the opposite of a murderer!
It is our turn to be ready to lay down our lives for the brother or sister of the congregation.

Image of the man’s position in the couple: no domination, but giving. Ephesians 5. 25-33

1 John chapter 3 , verse 19
Brotherly love put into practice is a clear indicator that reminds us that we are in the truth, that is of Christ, or of the evil one.

As such, we come before him with confidence.
Here it is a question of coming before Him in prayer (verse 22 clearly alludes to this).

1 John chapter 3 , verses 20 & 21
At this point of what John recalls, we can have two types of attitudes:

I do not do enough towards my brothers and sisters and I feel guilty, my prayers will not exceed the ceiling;
I have a faint conscience of my sin.
“If our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart,” in the sense that His compassion is greater than ours.

We may feel our unworthiness intensely, but God knows that fundamentally we love His people and belong to Him despite all our failings and sins.

“If our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart,” in matters of judgment.

While we have only a very limited knowledge of our sins, God knows us perfectly and completely, He knows all that in us is to blame, while we only know it partially.

Whatever perception we have, God knows the reality.

Let us be quick to be true and honest before God in prayer to recognize our place, our shortcomings and that everything depends on Him in this area.

And that my imperfect judgment is not the foundation but that it is on Him that all this can be seen and that all the condemnations are seen erased because it is He who carried them.

This is not why we should twiddle our thumbs and neglect brothers and sisters but in gratitude to Christ, I want to express the life that Christ has manifested for me.

If the one I hate the most offered me his Euromillions win, the answer I would give would not be to pay back that win but to live with the same generous attitude.

We may not be nearly at the top in brotherly love in regard to what Christ has done for us, but by His example and with His help, we strive for the same attitude in love that we have for one another. .

This is the meaning of the verses that follow.
But if his heart condemns him, he can remember that God takes into account things that his heart ignores at the moment.

What do I learn from God:
Truth between what is of Him and what is not.
Truth He desires in relationships: light. transparency, difference with hypocrisy, with religiosity.

Dakar
To illustrate what we have just seen, I would take the image of the Dakar competition which takes place every year.

What this text tells us is to no longer follow the track of yesteryear, which everyone has traditionally followed forever, stupidly and which does not lead to the desired arrival, but to get out of this rut ​​and take a new course, one that leads to the arrival where we will be forever with Christ.

Even if the vehicle is the same, we are invited to follow the right map, the right “road book”, the Word of God, the Bible. It is a choice of faith, where one must trust what is written:

to support us, to let the co-pilot, the Spirit of God, give us the explanation,
to be in constant communication with the co-pilot, the Spirit of God, in prayer,
and not to race for themselves, but to race as a team with all those who have chosen to take the true direction.
Finally, we have the choice

If we have no choice that we belong to the enemy of God, from our birth, we have the choice to remain in this position by not being interested in God and by not taking a stand for Christ.

We have the choice to recognize that this situation is the opposite of God to whom we owe everything and to recognize that what Jesus Christ bore by His death on the cross was my just condemnation and that He had the victory by His resurrection.

By placing my trust in what Christ has done for me, I become His child, He is my Savior and also my Lord, that is to say that Satan is no longer my master!

Out of gratitude and out of gratitude, I want to discover who my Savior is, because I have understood who directs my life, I want to live according to His advice full of future and hope.

A dear friend said to me one day: “We talk a lot about love in the Church but we don’t see it often! “.