Thursday September 1 2022

 

Thursday September 1 2022


Psalm 1; 2

Zephaniah 1:14-2:3

1 John 2:18-29


Seek the LORD...


John is such a joy to read. He is not writing in this passage anything we have not already read in Paul's letter to the Romans, or anything we have been given as examples to learn from in our recent studies in the Old Testament. But he has such a skill for spiritual poetry.


We can sense his heart breaking for his “little children”, his church, over his concern that they hold tight to Jesus. Some speculate that this letter was written in direct opposition to two specific ancient heresies that had sprouted out of the wake of Jesus' ascension, but John (and his guide, the Holy Spirit) are wise enough to make these instructions general enough that they will be applicable to every age of the church. This morning, John the Beloved Disciple is calling us his little children.


There will always be people who leave the faith. Cultural trends come and go and sweep up Christians in the hubris. What separates the apostate from the faithful is twofold: a fact and a response to that fact.


Jesus is the Christ; the Messiah. He and the Father are One. Jesus is God and Lord. This is the fact. Abide in this truth: this is the response. Abide is a word John seems to like a lot. He picked it up from Jesus: go and look at John 15. Abide is a verb, an action, both our response to Jesus as God and that which we do when we want to hear God's voice of loving encouragement and gentle peace. The word brings forth all sorts of images and emotions in our mind; draw on these, because it is the word that both our Lord and the Apostle have decided to use in order to describe how close we are to God: God, the light of the world, ever-present and ever-loving.

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