I John Chapter 3
Love is by far the greatest ingredient that we humans need. In this chapter John talks about the great love that Jesus has for us, in that He was willing to lay down His life for us sinners. If you are a born-again believer, then you have experienced the love of Jesus in your life. You know what it means to have the peace of God dwelling in your heart. The love of God is so great and so powerful in a person’s life that it changes them. Sometimes when a person accepts Jesus as their Savior, we see an immediate great change in the way they now live their life. In others the change can be more gradual. No matter how God is working in a person’s life we know from scripture, as John depicted here, their life will be forever changed because of the love of God.
The other ingredient in this chapter is righteousness. Love and righteousness work hand in hand. In fact, John describes righteousness as a seed that God has planted in the heart of the believer. See verse 9. No one who has truly surrendered their life to Jesus Christ will make a practice of sinning; because he or she is born of God, they are now free from sin. That’s huge! Christians are never completely free from sin in this life, but we have been given a gift - a seed that allows righteousness or the freedom NOT to sin, to grow within us.
Let's Reflect
1. What is the opposite when someone is not practicing righteousness in their life? See verses 4, 8 and 10.
2. The ingredient of the love of Christ in us is so powerful that when we get ahold of that love, truly understand His love for us, it will cause us to want to purify ourselves as seen in verse 3. This change in us will also do something else that is remarkable. What is it? See the last part of verse 1.
If you are a believer and you still have doubts about the great love of God for you – there is a way to solve that. You may have heard people say to you all your life, maybe even some great preachers have told you that God loves you. But if you’re still struggling with doubt about that, deep down inside, it is so important for you to get that resolved. How? I truly believe that the only way someone can really understand the vastness of God’s love for them, is to allow Him to speak to them directly through His Word. No one can tell you that God loves you and have it sink deep within. You need to be daily seeking Him by reading the Bible and praying. His Word is alive and powerful. Honestly it doesn’t matter what book of the Bible you start reading because as you read, asking God to show you His love, it will become so evident to you that it will knock your socks off. The practice of daily reading and seeking Him is to abide in Him. As you abide in Christ, spending time with Him daily, there will be a beauty of that abiding evident in your life. There will be trust, confidence, prayer-dependence, obedience, and joy. This is the work of the Holy Spirit inside you, that seed, making you more like Christ.
3. Because of the love of Christ for us, we should love others with the same intensity. In fact, John says that we should be willing to do what for another brother?
4. How should we respond when we see a brother in need?
I think the point that John is trying to make here is that we cannot have one ingredient in our Christian Walk without the other. We cannot have love without a deep desire to purify our life, and to seek to live righteously. The security of our faith lies in the fact that we know that Jesus loves us so much that He would lay down His life for us. In that love we know that He abides in us, and by us keeping His commandments we are abiding in Him. We will never be perfect, that we know. But when we do sin, we can confess it, and we can restore that relationship with Him. When we do that work of restoration (confessing our sin before a holy God), John calls it - confidence before God.
5. What is the result of our heart being clean and able to come before Him with confidence?
