Continuing the Meditation on 1 John

1 John 5: 1 - 5 - Faith Conquers the World

When I think about the life of faith, what speaks to me most is how simple it really is. Not easy, but simple. So much of it comes back to Love, trust, and learning how to live from the One who first loved us.

I sometimes see His ways like the way loving parents teach their children. It is only an analogy, but it helps. Parents don’t give rules to make life heavy. They teach us how to live so we are not swallowed up by everything around us. God’s ways feel the same. They only seem burdensome when we are pulled toward the very things He is trying to protect us from. But when Love is behind what we do, the things that once felt like duty become natural. If we love someone, we don’t want to harm them. That isn’t a burden. That’s just love being love.

When His Love starts to shape us from within, something in us begins to shift. Comparison fades. Jealousy finds no place to stand. We stop wanting what others have or trying to stand above them. Love takes away the need to measure our worth against someone else. And when we truly love, we don’t mistreat people or even creation itself. Trusting His way slowly becomes our way. Obedience stops feeling like rule-keeping and becomes the way we show Love in return.

There is also this quiet truth that whatever God births in us has the strength to rise above the world around us. It isn’t that life becomes smooth. It’s that His life inside us becomes stronger than whatever comes against us. Faith becomes our victory. Faith in His Love. Faith that His way brings peace. Faith that walking with Him is the safest place for our hearts.

Nothing can truly harm us when our life is grounded in that trust. Not the pressures, not the fears, not the noise. His life in us is what carries us through. This is how we overcome the world – not by fighting it outside, but by living from what He has planted deep inside.

And to me, this is the simple heart of it all. Love God. Love His children. Trust His ways. Let His life grow in you. Everything else grows from there.

 

Continuing the Meditation on 1 John

1 John 4: 7 - 21 - LOVE PERFECTED

How divine love transforms fear into compassion.

“If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar.” (1 John 4:20)

This is where it begins - truth confronting illusion. We can’t love God and hate another at the same time. It’s a lie we tell ourselves, and it hides the fear and pain that live beneath our anger.

“He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.” (1 John 4:8)

There are people who seem unable to love, not because they are evil, but because their behaviour appears frighteningly evil. In truth, many have been hurt so deeply that love no longer feels safe. These are the ones God longs for most, to bring them life, and if He abides in us, we’re called to reach them.

It’s easy to move toward those whose kindness we can already see - the ones society calls broken: the thief, the addict, the prostitute, the outcast. Yet many of them already understand love in ways that surprise us. It’s the cruel, the bitter, the hateful that are often hardest to love, and yet they are the ones who most need to meet God through us.

Love doesn’t begin with perfection - it begins with courage, with stepping past our fear of the darkness we see in others.

“If God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” (1 John 4:11)

That’s the measure. Hate feels easier - it lets us run away and call it justified. But love asks more. It asks us to reach through the wall, to stay open even when it hurts. Real love will always involve some suffering, because it breaks through the part of us that still wants to protect itself. But whatever we offer, God takes and perfects.

“If we love one another, God abides in us. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love.” (1 John 4:12,18)

Fear is what drives us to punish and to push away. But when we invite God into the places that fear controls, He fills them with His presence, and love begins to grow there. Soon the need to punish fades, replaced by compassion - not only for others, but for the frightened parts of ourselves.

This is how love becomes perfected - not by our effort, but by letting God love through us.

Continuing the Meditation on 1 John

1 John 4: 1- 6 - Testing the spirits.

When I read 1 John 4:1-6, I remember that these words were written in another time, to people facing different challenges. So I ask - how does this speak to me now, in this moment? At first it can seem almost a pointless conversation with God. Who around me denies that Jesus came in the flesh, except those who do not believe at all? And even they are not mine to challenge - only to witness to. Their disbelief doesn’t shake my faith. Even among those who differ with me in matters of doctrine, most still confess that He came in the flesh. So what is relevant for me today in these verses?

The wonder of contemplative prayer is that I can simply sit with God. Though I’m most often distracted and rarely sense His presence, somehow He still reaches me - quietly, with what He knows is needed in that moment for His purpose. Through this, my direction and faith become clearer.

I’ve come to see that the “spirits” John speaks of are not the people around me who fail to believe, but the inner movements within my own being that resist Christ’s life in me. In prayer, I try to keep all else outside the surface of my awareness - anything beyond the outer layer of my skin, holding to a few simple words that help me stay present to Him. The distractions that draw me away are, in a sense, the denials of Christ. And when I am still, I sometimes sense subtler forces - those inner voices that question love, hope, and trust. What else could they be but the very spirits that deny Him?

These, I think, are the spirits of the antichrist that the scripture warns about - the ones truly relevant today. The testing of spirits begins not in the outer world, but in the inner one - the kingdom within. There lies both the danger and the path to truth.

Continuing the Meditation on 1 John

1 John 3: 11-24 - Hate

A Love Letter to Those I Would Love to Hate.

It is easy to look at fellow Christians and feel the weight of judgment - their words, their attitudes, the way they treat others - and it stirs something sharp in me. I call it hate when I see it in them - yet I see it in myself as well. I measure them against God’s word - but perhaps they do the same with me. Some would call me “woke” - as if that alone made me unfaithful. I cannot find such a thing in Scripture - but still I know this much: if hate rises in me, it does not come from God but from the world. And I cannot know their hearts - that belongs to God alone. Who am I to judge?

And yet here is the dilemma we all carry. I see these things in others - and I want to push back, even to hate. But I also long to help them see - without condemning. How do I speak truth in a way that is love? How do I reach others as Jesus would - when my own heart is tangled with fear, frustration, and pride? Perhaps you feel this too - the urge to condemn, the struggle to love, the weight of wanting to be faithful but stumbling all the same. It is hard to be a Christian.

Still, the truth whispers - love is not in words alone. Love is not even in indignation or anger. Love is in truth and in action - and it calls us back to humility. Our hearts may condemn us - showing the failures we cannot hide - yet even here God is greater. He is love - holding us, holding you, holding me - even in our blindness, even in our struggle.

And so - to those I am tempted to hate, and to anyone who reads this - we are not so different. We are caught in the same search for truth, the same longing to love, the same stumbling toward faithfulness. Let us not condemn each other. Let us allow love itself to do the work in us. And in the quiet that follows - perhaps we can feel God’s presence between us - not as a solution we control, but as the still point where judgment falls away and love simply abides.

Continuing the Meditation on 1 John

1 John 3: 1-10 - Mirror

He is the Way. He is our Hope. To fully realise Him – to become like Him – is not instant, but a lifelong process. It is a path of humility, where pride is stripped away and the heart is purified. In that purifying, we are sanctified. This is our hope: that as we walk in Him, His likeness slowly takes shape in us. It is never by our own striving, but by yielding, by being made low, that His life becomes clearer within us.

When He is revealed, we will be like Him. Even now there is a glimpse of that reality. Every moment, every encounter, is a mirror. What we see in others, in nature, in words, in art, in the small events of daily life – from atoms to our own backyard vegetable patch – can reflect something of Him in us. If the eye is clouded, the reflection is distorted. But as we are made pure, as humility clears our sight, what we see becomes clearer. Then all creation becomes a mirror of Christ – not because it changes, but because our seeing does and we do (1 Cor 13: 12).

Yet the reverse is also true. Those who do not know Him can only see themselves. Everything becomes a mirror, but not of Christ – only of their own desires and fears. Possessions become extensions of who they think they are - cars, houses, careers, even their families. Other people are weighed as assets, obstacles, or threats. The world is measured by what it adds or takes away from the self. Nothing is received as gift, nothing is joy, except what they can grasp and claim.

So, the choice is before us - to walk in humility and be purified, seeing Christ in all things and letting His reflection form within us, or to remain bound to the self, seeing only our own desires mirrored back in the world.

 

Continuing the Meditation on 1 John

1 John 2: 18-23 Secessionists

John warns us that deceivers will come. They leave the fellowship and return with teachings that do not build up but tear down, seeking to divide us from one another and weaken the body of Christ. But John reminds us we are not left helpless. We have the anointing of God. The Holy Spirit lives within us, and because the Spirit knows all things, we can see through the lies. Our safety is not in strong leaders or clever arguments but in abiding - abiding in Jesus, in the Father, and in the Spirit.

When I look at the Church today, I see the marks of two thousand years of deception. Forty-five thousand churches, split apart, sometimes violently. But I also see forty-five thousand churches that, in their own way, are still clinging to God. They hold on to something of what they heard at the beginning - that Jesus is Lord. Even if it looks like ashes, there is still a spark of the truth that was always there.

That is our hope. Not that the church has been free of deception, but that that the anointing still abides - what we have known from the beginning. The Spirit still guides. The truth has not been lost. Anyone who calls on the name of Jesus carries it, even if the divisions have blurred it.

So, the task is not to despair. The divisions are real, but they are not final. Our work is to let go of the lies that keep us apart, to see through deception, and to hold to the truth of Christ. In God’s time the Body will be whole again. The Spirit will help us 're–member' - not just recall, but bring back together, the Body of Christ. And once more, we will all abide in Him - whole.

Desire 1 John 2 12 - 17

Desires are a tool. The desire to eat, to escape the cold, to love, for security, to protect love ones – these are given so we may live in this world. But when desire stretches beyond this, it ceases to be holy. No longer prompted by the Spirit, it turns to the desires of the flesh, which soon rule over the Spirit.

The Father loves all His children, yet not all walk in step with Him. Only those who are overcoming the world, whose hearts are rooted in His Word, are truly aligned with Him. The fruits of the world cannot sustain the life that endures forever; like their father, they slowly decay. The Spirit within us, however, does not decay – it is life from God, eternal and unshaken.