The Preciousness of Faith
What is your most precious possession? What is the one thing you’d give your life for?
Is it your faith? Is it your relationship with Jesus? Is it your belief that he’s the Son of God and that he died and rose again for you? Your trust that you’ll live with a resurrected Christ in a resurrected world with a resurrected body?
In our text this morning, First John 5:1-5, we’re going to see the gift, fruit, and power of faith. First, we’ll see that our faith is a gift from God (v. 1), then we’ll see the fruit of faith (vv. 2-3), and finally the power of faith (vv. 4-5).
This paragraph begins and ends with belief, but in between is further instruction on love and obedience. John is linking all three of his tests together, showing us the unity of his thesis. He’s saying that faith, obedience, and love aren’t arbitrarily connected, but are like a tightly woven fabric made up of three threads that are impossible to disentangle.
The Gift of Faith
Let’s start with faith, because that’s where John starts in 5:1. First, we’ll see the gift of faith. Verse 1 says that faith is the consequence, not the cause, of the new birth. Belief follows birth. This is what Jesus taught: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (Jn. 3:3).
Faith is a gift, not a work. Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” 1 Corinthians 4:7, “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?”
Yes, we must believe in order to be saved. But the question is whether or not we have the ability to believe apart from the Holy Spirit? All the word pictures the Bible uses for salvation highlight our inability to move toward God unless God first moves toward us. It says we’re slaves with darkened hearts, lost, under the domain of darkness, dead, enemies of God, loving the darkness and hating the light, hearts of stone. Do any of these images give the impression that we have what it takes to believe in Christ in and of ourselves?
Arminian friends would agree that grace precedes faith, but they would say that this “prevenient grace” doesn’t produce a complete regeneration, but only imparts the ability to choose Christ or not. I’m saying that God’s grace doesn’t merely restore a kind of free will that makes it possible for us to accept or reject Christ, but that grace actually opens the eyes of the blind and makes us see the compelling beauty and truth of Jesus so that we see him as irresistible and we gladly embrace him.[1] Ironically, Charles Wesley captures this perfectly in his hymn “And Can It Be”:
Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray—
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.
Our condition apart from Christ is so dire that our salvation requires a miracle. This means that everyone who believes in Jesus is a walking miracle! It means we should be begging God to give faith to those who don’t have it. It means we should be the most humble and grateful people in the world. It’s utter foolishness for Christians to think we’re better than anyone else. We of all people know that we only have what we have because it was given to us.
So how do you view your faith? Do you thank God for it? Is it precious to you? Is it something you’d do anything to protect and nourish and grow? Would you give up anything for it?
The Fruit of Faith
In the next couple of verses, John talks about the fruit of faith (vv. 1b-3). The fruit of faith is love and obedience.
The end of verse 1 says that those who love the Father love the Father’s children. What’s true in human families is true in God’s family. If we love our parents, we’ll love our parents children, we’ll love our siblings.
How do we know if we love God’s children? Verse 2 says we know when we love and obey God. Loving and obeying God is proof that we love God’s children. How does that work?
Loving God is How We Love God’s Children
Loving God is only way we can truly love God’s children. This is why Jesus links loving God and loving our neighbor in Matthew 22. It’s impossible to love God without loving his children and it’s impossible to love his children if you don’t love him. In a healthy family, love for parents and siblings are both present and growing.
Why can we only truly love people if we love God? Because as long as our highest love isn’t God, then we’ll end up using people instead of loving them. If God isn’t our highest love, then we’ll always be grasping for something smaller to love, and we’ll find that those things are just out of reach, or that they don’t actually give us what we expected them to give us.
God’s love is the only thing that can satisfy the deepest ache of our hearts. It’s so pure and perfect and consistent and loyal and forgiving and patient and sweet and calming. This is why the psalmist says that God’s love is better than life.
But if we’re looking for our life, our security, hope, comfort, joy, peace, and calm in anything else, we’ll never be able to rest and we’ll always be grasping for something or someone else to be the thing that gives rest to our souls. Our work or career, education, looks, relationships, marriage, kids, gaming, or church can’t provide the rest our souls crave. Only God’s love can.
Especially in relationships, as long as we’re looking for another person to complete us or define us or be our security, we’ll never be able to truly love them. Why? Because we’re using them. And as long as we’re using people, we aren’t free to love and serve them.
But when God’s love starts to work its way deep down into our hearts, we’re freed to truly start loving people around us. Because we don’t need them we can truly love them. Because God’s love is what animates our lives, we don’t need their approval or affection. We have everything we need in God, so our relationships become places where we give, not take.
This is why one of the keys to overcoming any kind of addiction is serving. We were made to be vessels of love and blessing, to be givers, not takers. Serving is better than consumption, more gratifying than addiction. So if you’re battling addiction, ask God to help you know his love and to practice his love. Love is what sets us free.
Obeying God is How We Love God’s Children
Verse 2 says we can know that we love God’s children when we love and obey God. Loving and obeying God is proof that we love God’s children. What does obeying God have to do with loving his children?
In verse 3, John says that loving God doesn’t just create obedience, but is obedience. As John Stott says, “Love for God is not an emotional experience so much as a moral commitment.”[2] Real love, according to John, whether toward God or other people, is always practical and active. It expresses itself “in deed and in truth” (3:18). It’s demonstrated through sacrificial service (3:17).
Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (Jn. 14:15). You see the order? Love for Jesus, then obedience. That’s the only way to truly please God with our obedience. Otherwise, we’re trying to impress him, buy his favor, or work our way out of debt. But when we start to love him, we’ll start wanting to please him and then our obedience will be truly pleasing to him.
It’s like the teenage boy who won’t wear deodorant when his parents ask him to, but when a young lady says he should, he suddenly wants to because he wants to please her. In the same way, God delights in obedience that’s the result of delight in God.
This is one of the most strategic things we can pray is, “God, help me love you more.”
“His Commandments Are Not Burdensome”
John even goes on to say that we shouldn’t find it hard to express our love through our obedience because “his commands are not burdensome” (v. 3). But isn’t it hard to obey? Yes, incredibly hard. Why is it hard? Because in our hearts we believe that our way is a better way. We don’t trust the goodness of God.
This is what happened in the Garden of Eden. God only gave Adam and Eve one command, “Don’t eat from this one tree.” Isn’t that kind of arbitrary? Not at all. It wasn’t about the tree. God wanted to see if they would trust him. It was simply a test of their faith. The serpent came along and said God couldn’t be trusted, poisoning their hearts with the thought that God isn’t good and therefore can’t be trusted.
This poison still flows through our veins today. We all struggle to trust God because we wonder whether he’s really good. We assume that his ways will hinder our joy rather than increase our joy. So we often don’t obey him because we don’t trust him, and we don’t trust him because we doubt his goodness.
The Goodness and Kindness of God
Do you believe in the fundamental goodness of God? Or do you see him as austere, demanding, a joy-killer, or as Thomas Goodwin says, that God is “so holy (that he) is therefore of a severe and sour disposition against sinners, and not able to bear them”?[3] Have you projected onto Jesus your skewed instincts based on how the world works? How can his commands not be burdensome when commands in this world always feel like a burden?
Jesus says plainly that his “yoke is easy and his burden is light” (Mt. 11:30). The word for “easy” here is translated as “kindness” elsewhere (cf. Eph. 2:7). Jesus’ yoke is “kind.” He didn’t come to heap up guilt and shame and burdens on us like the Pharisees. He came to show us the goodness and kindness of God.
He’s not saying that life with him is carefree and painless. So what is he saying? A yoke is the heavy crossbar laid on oxen to force them to pull farm equipment through a field. When Jesus says that his “yoke is easy” he’s using a kind of irony. He’s saying that his yoke is a nonyoke, because his yoke is a yoke of kindness.
Why would we want to resist this? Dane Ortlund explains it this way in his book Gentle and Lowly: “It’s like telling a drowning man that he must put on the burden of a life preserver only to hear him shout back, sputtering, ‘No way! Not me! This is hard enough, drowning here in these stormy waters. The last thing I need is the added burden of a life preserver around my body!’ That’s what we all are like, confessing Christ with our lips but generally avoiding deep fellowship with him, out of a muted understanding of his heart.”[4]
The fruit of faith is a growing love for God that results in a growing trust in the goodness of God that creates deeper obedience to God.
The Power of Faith
Finally, we see the power of faith in verses 4-5. The word “for” at the beginning of verse 4 tells us that obedience is actually possible. He’s saying that those who’re “born of God” can actually obey because they’ve “overcome the world.” The new birth moves us out of the domain of darkness and brings us into the kingdom of God. It takes us out of the sphere where Satan rules and brings us into God’s house. As Stott says, “The spell of the old life has been broken. The fascination of the world has lost its appeal.”[5]
In The Lord of the Rings, when someone puts the ring on, it influences them, it makes everything blurry and fuzzy. When they put it on they come under its spell. Same with the horcrux necklace from Harry Potter. When someone wears it, it influences them, making them see things differently.
But when the ring or the necklace is taken off, the spell is removed and its power broken. Things become clear, more vivid, evil is less enticing. Faith is like taking the ring off. It brings us back to reality, makes things clear, shows us what’s beautiful. It’s how we “overcome the world.”
This phrase “overcome the world” is used three times in these two verses. John is clearly trying to get a point across. The second one is in the past tense, meaning it’s pointing back to a definite point, probably either their conversion or their decisive rejection of the false teachers (4:4).
The other two occurrences are in the present tense meaning that it’s describing the continuous victory which Christians have. What is this victory? It’s over “the world,” which is how John sums up all the things opposed to God which make obedience difficult. Things like moral pressures from a secular culture, the cravings of our sinful flesh, or physical persecution.
John says that whoever believes that “Jesus is the Son of God,” the preexistent divine and human Christ and Ruler of the universe, will triumph over the world. If we’re linked to the one who wins in the end, then we win too.
Winning by Losing
The way Jesus won was by losing. His death looks like defeat but it was actually how he defeated sin and Satan. Then he rose to defeat our final enemy, death. And he did it for us, as a Substitute. He did it to give us a victory that we could never accomplish on our own. His victory is the victory of everyone who understands who he is and sees his goodness and trusts in him and loves him.
The claims of these verses are amazing in the 1st century or the 21st century. To claim in the first century that the victory doesn’t belong to Rome, who reigned supreme over the world, but to an obscure Jewish itinerant preacher-peasant from Nazareth who was crucified by the Romans, and to everyone who follows him, was daring to say the least.
It’s just as daring now in 21st century America. It doesn’t look like we’re winning. But this text says that no Supreme Court or President or Political Party or war or disease or disaster or pandemic or anything else will ultimately win. It says that we win because, in faith, we’ve rejected the world and its lies and chosen to follow the Man from Nazareth.
Our faith is how we overcome the world because it enables us to see the hidden realities of God’s Kingdom, a kingdom silently working its way through the nations. Faith helps us see that Christ will have the nations, will save his people, will return and establish his rule on the earth again.
Has the Spell Been Lifted?
We’ve seen the gift, fruit, and power of faith. This paragraph begins and ends with belief, but in between he links all three of his tests together. He’s saying that faith, obedience, and love aren’t arbitrarily connected, but are like a tightly woven fabric that’s difficult to disentangle the threads.
What’s the link between these three tests? The new birth (vv. 1, 4). Faith, love, and obedience only grow in the soil of the new birth. The new birth attaches us to God and detaches us from the world, and the result is always a desire to keep God’s commands.
Has God come to live in you? Has the spell of the world been lifted?
[1]See John Piper, Providence (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 550-7, for a discussion on prevenient grace.
[2]John R. W. Stott, The Letters of John, The Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1988), 176.
[3]Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 23.
[4]Ibid., 22.
[5]Stott, 176.