We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

Unrelated to the recent hacking, Bluehost changed its hosting package structure. Where once I had unlimited disk storage but a limited file count, I am now both limited to storage (150 gigabytes) and files (1 million files). When I was switched to the new plan structure, I was way over the disk limit and I was basically locked out from doing anything, since I couldn't upload or add to the disk. For instance, I could log into my blog's or this forum's admin section but I couldn't add a new post in either.

I had a backup of the site plus a ton of personal files I was keeping on the server, so I moved them off onto a thumb drive. I am well within the disk limit now, and I was already well within the file count limit.

No emergency or anything yet, but I may need to upgrade again if we approach the storage limits. That day may never come, but I am just keeping it in prayer that I'll still be able to sustain the forum financially if I do need to upgrade.

John's schoolboy Greek grammar should be obvious, but people have debated for the past two millennia over what he says in this chapter. I take the position that the so-called "John's comma" in verse 8 was not in the original letter. This refers to some added lines that don't belong with the message, lines that showed up in the KJV based on very late manuscripts, but is clearly missing in the oldest copies we have of this letter.

John's theme is still the distinction between those who carry the Presence of the Holy Spirit and those who do not. There is no way to reconcile the differences between those two groups. We should hardly be surprised that humans with the Holy Spirit believe in Christ as both man and God, while those without His Presence cannot possibly accept that truth. They will come up with all kinds of silly explanations for who Christ was and what He must have represented, never mind what first-hand witnesses like John could tell you.

The chapter break comes at the wrong place, splitting a paragraph. Thus, this chapter begins with John finishing his comments about how people led by the Spirit cannot avoid obeying Christ's command that we should love each other as He loved us, something the various cults choked on. John says that if you love the Father -- as many cult teachers claimed they did -- then you cannot avoid loving His children. If you love the Father, you will obey the Son's Law to love each other. It's not a burdensome law like the Talmud; it's entirely natural.

He's talking about spiritual birth, the Presence of the Holy Spirit in your soul. If God is your Father in that sense, then you have escaped the authority of Satan, the god of this fallen world. He does not own you any longer because you aren't rooted here; you are rooted in Eternity. We just happen to occupy a fleshly form for a limited time while we represent an invasive divine presence in his domain. Our commitment to Christ is how we overcome Satan's efforts to bring us back under his power.

The people who have broken that curse will consistently proclaim that Jesus was both man and God. The fleshly nature cannot accept that truth. John was there for much of Jesus' life since they were cousins. John was part of the same extended family as John the Baptist, too. While John probably did not witness the baptism in the Jordan (the reference to Jesus coming by water), he would have heard about it from multiple sources among his kinfolks alone. But John was there when Jesus died on the Cross, so he saw how Jesus came by blood.

And all of this is backed up by the voice of the Holy Spirit living in every person who comes to Christ. Thus, there are three witnesses: the water baptism in which the Father spoke bluntly Himself for all to hear, and blood on the Cross that shook the earth and darkened the sky, and the divine Presence of the Holy Spirit who would not have come into hearts in quite the same way without the Ascension. John believes.

And if you can swallow the testimony about the Voice of God at the baptism, and the testimony of miracles from hundreds at the Cross, then the voice of the Holy Spirit is greater still. Without His Presence, you could not make sense of the human testimonies. But with His Presence, you already have all the testimony you need, never mind whether you experienced those miraculous events yourself. God is naturally going to testify of Himself in your soul, but if you can't embrace the truth of the Incarnation, then you are calling God Himself a liar.

Without the Spirit of the Risen Lord in your soul, you cannot claim to have eternal life.

Thus, John wrote this letter to reassure the fleshly minds of his readers that they do indeed have eternal life. Just listen for the Spirit's witness. That Voice is the assurance you have to approach the Throne of God and make requests that He is eager to answer.

Something you should pray for is that any child of God who has gotten off the path, led astray by the lies of the cultists, would repent and return. There are limits of course. John has already specified what he means by "a sin leading to death" -- denying that Jesus was the Son of God. If someone can go that far, they aren't a child of God. Pray for them to get saved, if you feel led, but don't pray like they are just a child of God who got off track. There are plenty of mistakes His children will make without denying Christ.

We know that those who are spiritually born are not going to make that kind of mistake. That's what John means by saying the children of God don't sin -- that particular sin, of course. The Devil cannot reclaim your soul; the Lord forbids it. The Holy Spirit makes us aware that we belong to God, while the rest of the world belongs to Satan. The Spirit also makes us fully aware of who Christ is and that we belong to Him. All those cults are lies; they don't know God and cannot embrace the Savior.

Finally, John says he wants his little darlings to be careful and avoid getting too close to idolatry.

I don't known too many details, but Pam is in the hospital with some sort of infection. She has had blood and stool tests done. I'm rather worried but I don't have much more information than that.

I'll post back her when I know more.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

"What then shall we say about these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?" -Romans 8:31

Let's remind ourselves that John is being somewhat sarcastic about the various heretical cults around Ephesus and their claims of deep "gnosis" by using juvenile Greek grammar to express the real knowledge of God. The revelation of God in His Son does not require a lot of intellectual depth; it requires a lot of commitment, surrendering to the Cross. This chapter sounds very repetitive in English translations, but it's not hard to grasp the message.

The people in this world are driven by spirits. If you are not driven by the Spirit of Christ, then your spirit is dead and you are driven by the spirits of this fallen realm. When you deal with someone who has a dead spirit, you can tell from the conversation because they don't know God. Their claims to know God mean nothing if they speak poorly about His Son (implying they speak poorly of God's other children, too).

Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. God's Spirit is not going to say anything different from that. People who fail to confess that Jesus came as a human Son of God are not driven by the Spirit of God. Those people are driven by a spirit of Antichrist. We were warned about the Antichrist; that spirit is here. It is the same spirit that drives the rest of humanity who don't serve Christ. Their chatter makes sense to this world, but the people who know God would prefer the testimony of John and his associates.

Another signature of spirits is the power to love when there is no human reason to do so. The Spirit of God gives us to power to love His children regardless of all the good human reasons not to care at all. Don't walk in the flesh, but in the Spirit; show His love to His children. Let Jesus live and walk in your flesh. He sacrificed His flesh for us, so we should offer up ours for His use.

Again, if God loved us that much, how can we not express His love for each other? As long as you are in this fleshly existence, you've certainly never seen Him with your eyes. How can you claim to love Whom you have never seen, if you cannot love your fellow believer that you have seen? If His Spirit lives in you, you cannot help but love each other. That's the primary signature of His Presence in your life. John reminds his readers that he speaks from a personal acquaintance with the Messiah, so he knows what he's talking about.

With all the people running around denying that He was a real human and also the Son of God, let's not complicate things. You should assume that someone carries the Spirit God if they confess Jesus as the human Son of God. John notes that his sole source of confidence is the power to love in the way Jesus taught about His Father's love. The sacrificial love of the Cross is our covenant with God. We can stand before Him on the Day of Judgment because we allow His Spirit of love to overwhelm us. Whatever Jesus was in this world, that's what we are. That cannot fail.

His love chases out all our human sorrows and fears. People who worry about the Judgment haven't tapped into that love yet. We are able to love because He loved us first. Honestly folks, His love in us really is that powerful. Give yourself in love to others and your sorrows will evaporate. Your situation might not change, but how you feel about it will be different.

So, anyone who can resent or detest a fellow believer is not operating in the power of God. The only way you can love the invisible God of Creation is to love Him where He lives in His children here where you can see them. That's our law in Christ.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

I laughed.

John refers to his readers as the progeny of God, His beloved brood. The world at large is the brood of Satan, so it recognizes neither our Father nor us. While we are His children already, the fullness of what that means has not yet been revealed. Somewhere out in the future, this will be fully manifested. When Christ returns for us, we shall see His eternal form, and simply seeing this will transform us to be eternal like Him. People who are looking forward to that day work hard to shed their fleshly nature as much as possible, trying to be like Jesus.

(The pseudo-Christian cultists didn't fight their fleshly nature at all.)

It's one thing to miscalculate what God intends; that's the nature of childhood. Nobody's children are perfect. Otherwise, we'd call them something other than "children". But people who sin habitually are diving deep into injustice. They are rejecting the Father's dominion. They aren't His kids; they are foreigners. Jesus came to open the divine covenant and rescue people from their fleshly natures. He had no sin; He was the mature adult Son of His Father. Thus, we who have accepted His offer aren't habitual sinners. Habitual sinners have never encountered Jesus.

So there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who belong to Jesus strive to live just and righteous like He did. Everyone else belongs to sin; they are children of the Devil, because the Devil rejected his Creator's will for him right from the start. That's why God sent His Son -- to clean up the damage the Devil had done. When God reclaims a soul from Satan, He gives that soul a spiritual nature it did not previously have. That soul can no longer be at peace with habitual sin; it's contrary to who they are. Moreover, those who lack that spiritual nature, who still belong to the Devil, are quite obvious by how they live. They have no interest in pleasing the Father. Keep your eye out for anyone who treats any believer with contempt.

We should hardly be surprised that the spiritually dead folks don't like us. Do you remember Cain and Abel? They were two different kinds of men; Cain had no power to overcome his fleshly annoyance at this brother's holiness. Our power to love each other is the proof that we have moved from the Abyss into the Kingdom of Heaven. Those who fail to manifest that kind of sacrificial love for believers are still dead. That kind of self-centered spite is the root of murder. People who can hate believers have never experienced spiritual birth.

The reason we have any grasp on love at all is because of the example of Christ taking up His Cross. Following Him means having that same level of commitment; we are ready to die for our fellow believers. How would you call it "sacrificial love" if someone is unwilling to sacrifice so much as a little of the material goods of this world for a brother in the Lord? It's not enough to say the right words, but we must act on those words and live that truth.

The power to sacrifice for a fellow believer is all the assurance we need that we belong to Christ. Don't listen to a condemned fleshly conscience; God's voice in our spirits is louder than such a false testimony. Eventually the conscience will learn the truth and cease to condemn us, and we will see clearly God's favor on us. It gives us the confidence to bring our requests before Him, knowing that He wants what is best for us.

His will for us is that we submit fully to His Son, swearing our undying allegiance. And His Son said His royal law for us was to love each other as He loves us. The folks who keep that law can do so only because of His Presence in their souls. When we can recognize that Presence in our souls, it becomes our assurance in serving Him.