1John Chapter One

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"A GOOD MAN...yes...perhaps one of the best who ever lived...but just a man," say many. Others disagree, claiming that he suffered from delusions of grandeur-a "messiah complex." And the argument rages over the true identity of this man called Jesus. Suggestions have ranged from "simple teacher" to "egomaniac" and "misguided fool." Whoever he was, all would agree that Jesus left his mark on history.
    Hearing these discussions, even Christians can begin to wonder and doubt. Is Jesus really God? Did he come to save sinners like us? Does God care about me?
    First John was written to dispel doubts and to build assurance by presenting a clear picture of Christ. Entering history, Jesus was and is God in the flesh and God in focus-seen, heard, and touched by the author of this letter, John the apostle. John walked and talked with Jesus, saw him heal, heard him teach, watched him die, met him arisen, and saw him ascend. John knew God-he had lived with him and had seen him work. And John enjoyed fellowship with the Father and the Son all the days of his life.
    The elder statesman in the church, John wrote this letter to his "dear children." In it he presented God as light, as love, and as life. He explained in simple and practical terms what it means to have fellowship with God.
    At the same time, false teachers had entered the church, denying the incarnation of Christ. John wrote to correct their serious errors. So, John’s letter is a model for us to follow as we combat modern heresies.
    John opens this letter by giving his credentials as an eyewitness of the incarnation and by stating his reason for writing (1:1-4). He then presents God as "light," symbolizing absolute purity and holiness (1:5-7), and he explains how believers can walk in God’s light and have fellowship with him (1:8-10) with Christ as their defender (2:1, 2). John urges them to obey Christ fully and to love all the members of God’s family (2:3-7). He warns his readers of "antichrists" and the antichrist who will try to lead them away from the truth (2:18-29).
    In the next section, John presents God as "love"-giving, dying, forgiving, and blessing (3:1-4:21). God is love, and because God loves us, he calls us his children and makes us like Christ (3:1, 2). This truth should motivate us to live close to him (3:3-6). We can be sure of our family relationship with God when our lives are filled with good deeds and love for others (3:7-24). Again, John warns of false teachers who twist the truth. We should reject these false teachers (4:1-6) as we continue to live in God’s love (4:7-21).
    In the last section, John presents God as "life" (5:1-21). God’s life is in his Son. To have his Son is to have eternal life.
    Do you know God? Do you know Christ? Do you know that the reality of God in your life through faith in Christ, to assure you that you have eternal life, and to encourage you to remain in fellowship with the God who is light and love. Read this letter written by one overwhelmed by God’s love, and with renewed confidence, pass on his love to others.

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VITAL STATISTICS

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Purpose:
To reassure Christians in their faith and to counter false teachings

Author:
The apostle John

To Whom Written:
The letter is untitled and was written to no particular church. It was sent as a pastoral letter to several Gentile congregations. It was also written to all believers everywhere.

Date Written:
Probably between A.D. 85 and 90, from Ephesus

Setting:
John was an older man and perhaps the only surviving apostle at this time. He had not yet been banished to the island of Patmos, where he would live in exile. As an eyewitness of Christ, he wrote authoritatively to give this new generation of believers assurance and confidence in God and in their faith.

Key Verse:
"I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life" (1John 5:13).

Key People:
John, Jesus

Special Features:
John is the apostle of love, and love is mentioned throughout this letter. There are a number of similarities between this letter and John’s Gospel-in vocabulary, style, and main ideas. John uses brief statements and simple words, and he features sharp contrasts-light and darkness, truth and error, God and Satan, life and death, love and hate.

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1) God is light (1:1-2:27)
2) God is love (2:28-4:21)
3) God is life (5:1-21)

    John wrote about the most vital aspect of faith so that readers would know Christian truth from error. He emphasizes the basics of faith so that we can be confident in our faith. In our dark world, God is light. In our cold world, God brings the warmth of love. In our dying world, God brings life.
When we lack confidence, these truths bring us certainty.

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THEME:
Sin

EXPLANATION:
Even Christians sin. Sin requires God’s forgiveness, and Christ’s death provides it for us. Determining to live according to God’s standards in the Bible shows that our lives are being transformed.

IMPORTANCE:
We cannot deny our sin nature, maintain that we are "above" sinning, or minimize the consequences of sin in our relationship with God. We must resist the attraction of sin, yet we must confess when we do sin.

THEME:  
Love

EXPLANATION:
Christ’s commands us to love others as he loved us. This love is evidence that we are truly saved. God is the Creator of love; he cares that his children love each other.

IMPORTANCE:
Love means putting others first and being unselfish. Love is action-showing others we care-not just saying it. To show love we must give sacrificially of our time and money to meet the needs of others.

THEME:  
Family of God

EXPLANATION:
We become God’s children by believing in Christ. God’s life in us enables us to love our fellow family members.

IMPORTANCE:
How we treat others shows who our Father is. Live as a faithful, loving family member.

THEME:  
Truth and Error

EXPLANATION:
Teaching that the physical body does not matter, false teachers encouraged believers to throw off moral restraints. They also taught that Christ wasn’t really a man and that we must be saved by having some special mystical knowledge. The result was that people became indifferent to sin.

IMPORTANCE:
God is truth and light, so the more we get to know him the better we can keep focused on the truth. Don’t be led astray by any teaching that denies Christ’s deity or humanity. Check the message; test the claim.

THEME:  
Assurance

EXPLANATION:
God is in control of heaven and earth. Because his word is true, we can have assurance of eternal life victory over sin. By faith we can be certain of our eternal destiny with him.

IMPORTANCE:
Assurance of our relationship with God is a promise, but it is also a way of life. We build our confidence by trusting in God’s word and in Christ’s provision for our sin.

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John's Profile

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    Being loved is the most powerful motivation in the world! Our ability to love is often shaped by our experience of love. We usually love others as we have been loved.
    Some of the greatest statements about God's loving nature were written by a man who experienced God's love in a unique way. John, Jesus= disciple, expressed his relationship to the Son of God by calling himself "the disciple whom Jesus loved@ (John 21:20). Although Jesus= love is clearly communicated in all the Gospels, in John's Gospel it is a central theme. Because his own experience of Jesus= love was so strong and personal, John was sensitive to those words and actions of Jesus that illustrated how the One who is love loved others.
    Jesus knew John fully and loved him fully. He gave John and his brother James the nickname "Sons of Thunder,@ perhaps from an occasion when the brothers asked Jesus for permission to "call fire down from heaven@ (Luke 9:54) on a village that had refused to welcome Jesus and the other disciples. In John's Gospel and letters, we see the great God of love, while the thunder of God's justice bursts from the pages of Revelation.
    Jesus confronts each of us as he confronted John. We cannot know the depth of Jesus= love unless we are willing to face the fact that he knows us completely. Otherwise we are fooled into believing he must love people we pretend to be, not the sinners we actually are. John and all the disciples convince us that God is able and willing to accept us as we are. Being aware of God's love is a great motivator for change. His love is not given in exchange for our efforts; his love frees us to really live. Have you accepted that love?

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John's Strengths and accomplishments

1) Before following Jesus, one of John the Baptist's disciples
2) One of the 12 disciples and, with Peter and James, one of the inner three, closest to Jesus
3) Wrote five New Testament books: the Gospel of John; 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John; and Revelation

John's Weaknesses and mistakes

1) Along with James, shared a tendency to outbursts of selfishness and anger
2) Asked for a special position in Jesus= kingdom

Lessons from his life

1) Those who realize how much they are loved are able to love much
2) When God changes a life, he does not take away personality characteristics, but puts them to effective use in his service

John's Vital statistics

1) Occupations: Fisherman, disciple
2) Relatives: Father: Zebedee. Mother: Salome. Brother: James
3) Contemporaries: Jesus, Pilate, Herod

Key verses

"Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shinning" (1John 2:7, 8).

John's story is told throughout the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation.

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John Counters False Teachings

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John counters two major threads in the false teachings of the heretics in this letter:
1John 1:6, 8, 10 . . . They denied the reality of sin. John says that if we continue in sin, we can’t claim to belong to God. If we say we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and refusing to accept the truth.
1John 2:22; 1John 4:1-3 . . . They denied that Jesus was the Messiah-God in the flesh. John said that if we believe that Jesus was God incarnate and trust him for our salvation, we are children of God.

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(1) God is light

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   By the time John wrote this letter, Christianity had been around for more than a generation. It had faced and survived severe persecution. The main problem confronting the church at this time was declining commitment: many believers were conforming to the world's standards, failing to stand up for Christ, and compromising their faith. False teachers were plentiful, and they were accelerating the church's downward slide away from the Christian faith.
   John wrote this letter to put believers back on track, to show the difference between light and darkness (truth and error), and to encourage the church to grow in genuine love for God and for one another. He also wrote to assure true believers that they possessed eternal life and to help them know that their faith was genuine-so they could enjoy the benefits of being God's children.
   John opens his first letter to the churches similar to the way he begins his Gospel, emphasizing that Christ..."the Word of Life"...is eternal, that God came into the world as human, that he, John, was an eyewitness to Jesus' life, and that Jesus brings light and life.

2) Why did they (the disciples) proclaim to you what they have seen and heard (the church)?

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   As an eyewitness to Jesus' ministry, John was qualified to teach the truth about him. The readers of this letter had not seen and heard Jesus themselves, but they could trust that what John wrote was accurate. We are like those second-and third-generation Christians. Though we have not personally seen, heard, or touched Jesus, we have the New Testament record of his eyewitnesses, and we can trust that they spoke the truth about him.

3) Who does John and the church have fellowship with, and why did they write this letter?

   John writes about having fellowship with other believers. There are three principles behind true Christians fellowship. (1) Our fellowship is grounded in the testimony of God's Word. Without this underlying strength, togetherness is impossible. (2) It is mutual, depending on the unity of believers. (3) It is renewed daily through the Holy Spirit. True fellowship combines social and spiritual interaction, and it is made possible only through a living relationship with Christ.

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Walking in the Light

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   Light represents what is good, pure, true, holy, and reliable. Darkness represents what is sinful and evil. The statement "God is Light" means that God is perfectly holy and true and that he alone can guide us out of the darkness of sin.
    Light is also related to truth in that light exposes whatever exists, whether it is good or bad. In the dark, good and evil look alike; in the light, they can be clearly distinguished. Just as darkness cannot exist in the presence of light, sin cannot exist in the presence of a holy God. If we want to have a relationship with God, we must put aside our sinful ways of living. To claim that we belong to him but then go out and live for ourselves is hypocrisy. Christ will expose and judge such deceit.

   Here John was confronting the first of three claims of the false teachers: that we can have fellowship with God and still walk in darkness. False teachers who thought that the physical body was evil or worthless taught one or two approaches to behavior: either they insisted on denying bodily desires through rigid discipline, or they approve of gratifying every physical lust because the body was going to be destroyed anyway. Obviously the second approach was more popular! Here John is saying that no one can claim to be a Christian and still live in evil and immorality. We can't love God and court sin at the same time.

6) What purifies us from all sin?

   How does Jesus' blood purify us from every sin? In Old Testament times, believers symbolically transferred their sins to an animal, which they then sacrificed...Leviticus 4. The animal died in their place to pay for their sin and allow them to continue living in God's favor. God graciously forgave them because of their faith in him, and because they obeyed his commandments concerning the sacrifice.
   Those sacrifices anticipated the day when Christ would completely remove sin. Real cleansing from sin came with Jesus, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. Sin, by its very nature, brings death-that is a fact as certain as the law of gravity. Jesus did not die for his own sins; he had none. Instead, by a transaction that we may never fully understand, he died for the sins of the world.
   When we commit our lives to Christ and thus identify ourselves with him, his death becomes ours. He has paid the penalty for our sins, and his blood has purified us. Just as Jesus rose from the grave, we rise to a new life of fellowship with him.

7) If we claim to be without sin, what do we do to ourselves, and what is not in us?

   Here John was attacking the second claim of the false teachers: that people had no natural tendency toward sin, that they were "without sin," and that they were then incapable of sinning. This idea is at best self-deception and at worst a bold face lie.
   The false teachers refused to take sin seriously. They wanted to be considered Christians, but they saw no need to confess and repent. The death of Christ did not mean much to them because they didn't think they needed it. Instead of repenting and being purified by Christ's blood, they were encouraging sin among believers. In this life we are always capable of sinning, so we should never let down our guard.

8) What will God do if we confess our sins?

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   Confession is suppose to free us to enjoy fellowship with Christ. It should ease our consciences and lighten our cares. But some Christians do not know how it works. They feel so guilty that they confessed the same sin over and over; then they wonder if they might have forgotten something. Other Christians believe God forgives them when they confess, but if they died with unconfused sins, they would be forever lost. These Christians do not understand that God wants to forgive us. He allowed his beloved Son to die just so he could offer us pardon.
   When we come to Christ, he forgives all the sins we have committed or will ever commit. We don't need to confess the sins of the past all over again, and we don't need to fear that God will reject us if we don't keep our slate perfectly clean. Of course we should continue to confess our sins, but not because failure to do so will make us lose our salvation. Our relationship with Christ is secure. Instead, we should confess so that we can enjoy maximum fellowship and joy with him.
   True confession also involves a commitment not to continue in sin. We wouldn't be genuinely confessing our sins to God if we planned to commit them again and just wanted temporary forgiveness. We should also pray for strength to defeat temptation the next time we face it.

9) What do we do if we claim we have not sinned, and if so, what has no place in our lives?

   The false teachers not only denied that sin breaks our fellowship with God and that they had a sinful nature, but they also denied that their conduct involved any sin at all. That was a lie that ignored one basic truth: all people are sinners by nature and by practice. At conversion all our sins are forgiven-past, present, and future. Yet even after we become Christians, we still sin and still need to confess. This kind of confession is not offered to gain God's acceptance, but to remove the barrier to fellowship that our sin has put between us and him. It is difficult, however, for many people to admit their faults and shortcomings, even to God. It takes humility and honesty to recognize our weaknesses, and most of us would rather pretend that we are strong. But we need not fear revealing our sins to God-he knows them already. He will not push you away, no matter what we've done, instead he will draw us to himself.

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Answers to 1John Chapter 1

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1) That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched...the life...the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us
2) So that you may have fellowship with us
3) The Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ...to make our joy complete
4) God is light...no darkness
5) If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in darkness
6) The blood of Jesus
7) Deceive ourselves...the truth is not in us
8) Forgive our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness
9) We make him out to be a liar...his word

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