To Encourage You

1 John 5:12-13 “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.  I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.”

One of the things that we should understand about the writers of the Scriptures is that they could write from the perspective of an unbeliever, which they once were, and a believer, which they had become. They had “been there and done that,” and so they knew whereof they spoke. 

In the passage above John talks like this.  He speaks very clearly and unmistakably about two mutually exclusive things. He tells us that those who have the Son of God have life. It means they possess Him as their Savior. By faith they have been born again and have His Holy Spirit living within them.  It is because of this that they have eternal life.  It’s a present possession. It’s not something they are waiting for. It’s a quality of life that they didn’t have when they didn’t have the Son.  John could look back at that time in his own life and tell us confidently that those without the Son do NOT have life for he didn’t have life, in this sense, before he believed. Of course, he was breathing, walking around, and taking nourishment before he knew Christ, but he was spiritually dead while physically alive.  He didn’t possess the fruit of the Spirit at one time, and because of that he didn’t know what true “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23) were at that time in his life. He wasn’t spiritually alive. And you don’t know what these things are, either, if you don’t know Jesus Christ.  While you may know what love is in one sense, you don’t know the infinite love that is the possession of those who know Christ. Indeed, while Christians do know the love of Christ in one sense, they will spend eternity growing in that knowledge, for this love is that incredibly vast.

An unbeliever doesn’t know what true joy is.  Although they may be “living” to have a good time, and while they might find great joy in their sin (at least for a time), that joy is a foreign thing to the joy of Christ, for neither He nor any that truly love Him find any real joy in sin (1 Corinthians 13:6).  It is His joy and His alone that is “joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Peter 1:8). It is this joy that is exclusively the possession of those who have Him. 

An unbeliever has no true peace, for that peace is both peace WITH God (Romans 5:1) and the peace OF God. Such peace is that which “passes all understanding” (Philippians 4:7), i.e., it is foreign to the understanding of those who are without Christ, for this peace is exclusively HIS peace which He gives only to those who know Him (John 14:27). And these same people, just like the apostle John, were at war with God before they had believed on Him (James 4:4) whether they were aware of this or not.  They were resisting Him, acting against Him, even hating Him by their actions, and the inner lack of peace that is inevitable for those in such a condition is all that they had ever known.  And the same holds true for all the other aspects of eternal life that only those who have the Son can possibly know. 

Again, every believer was once NOT a believer at one point in their lives, and they can affirm with John that while they were unbelievers, they did NOT have life, i.e., they didn’t have eternal life, abundant life, the life of the Spirit of the eternal God.  But that’s why John wrote his epistles as well as the gospel of John. It was so that the readers might HAVE life by believing what John said, for what John preached was the life-giving gospel, and it is only by belief in this message that eternal life ever comes. 

So, what about you?  Do you have life? Do you think your life is as good as it gets, although you’ve never met the One Who, alone, IS Life (John 14:6)?   Well, if that’s what you’re thinking, know on the authority of those who once were as you are, you don’t know what you’re missing. You don’t know what true life is.