Preaching Series on 1 John (5 of 6)

Fifth in a 6-week series

Sand art with cross = heart (God is love)
Photo by Neal E. Johnson on Unsplash; licensed under CC0.

July 21, 2024

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Commentary on 1 John 5:1-6



Week 5 (7/21/2024): 1 John 5:1-6

Last week, the author walked his readers through a novel way of conceiving of love and the Law, emphasizing the principle “know God, love the neighbor,” instead of “love God, love the neighbor.” This week he continues his emphasis on love, but leads the reader the opposite way through the problem. Instead of a focus on God’s love making love of the neighbor possible, he casts love for God and obedience to the commandments as the precondition of loving. Within three chapters, the author has presented three different conceptions of love and its relationship to God. Each of these emphases points to the difficulty of describing the flow of the believers’ life. Sometimes it feels as though love for God inspires love for neighbor; sometimes, instead, love from God inspires love for the neighbor. The multi-faceted nature of God’s love and our response defies easy categorization. Despite the twists and turns of his thinking, the author grounds all his thoughts on love on the same foundation: belief in Jesus Christ. This belief in Jesus Christ stretches beyond love and beyond the relationship of people to one another. In fact, the author claims that it has cosmic significance because it allows the believer to overcome the world (Greek kosmos) (5:5).