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.

Over the past week, for me, all the symptoms of Internet surveillance have disappeared. Not only in posting things on blogs, but just trying to read certain news sources is now pretty quick. I'm not in any position to track all the things Trump's administration has shut down, but it looks to me like the bulk of what I was facing stopped when USAid was shut down. That says a lot to me.

We received news from our Son-in-Law, Jeremy, a few days ago that he has a mass on one of his testicles that the doctors believe may be cancerous.  He has been very stressed since he got the news.  His doctor was able to get surgery scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, at 7:30am at the IU Health Cancer Center in Indianapolis.  Your prayers will be appreciated for a successful surgery and a non-cancerous pathology report.  The doctor says his age (42) is a bit in his favor as testicular cancer is more likely in men under 30.  Pray for our daughter and twin granddaughter also as their stress level is very high right now.

THANKS and may God's healing and covering be with my family now!

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.

The unifying factor in the various cults plaguing John's ministry in Ephesus -- Gnostics, Nicolaitans, and followers of Cerinthus -- was immoral living. Each had their own excuse, but it was transparent to any follower of Christ that these former church folks were desperately seeking for an exit back into sin and wanted to drag as many church folks as they could with them.

The Gnostics in particular were arrogant about their "superior insight" and intellectual acumen, so John uses schoolboy Greek grammar to shut them down. He begins the chapter by referring to his readers as preschoolers, using this simple language anyone could understand. The whole point of this letter is to stop sin. Since our fleshly natures are weak, as we see with toddlers making natural mistakes, we can take comfort in knowing that our Lord is patient and indulgent with those who love Him. Jesus walked in the flesh and takes up for us in the Presence of His Father.

You cannot claim to know (gnosis) God without a tendency to act as He requires. Even toddlers can work that out. Maturity is walking in His teaching. And it's not that hard to figure out, just do what Jesus said and did.

On the one hand, it's the same old covenant truth from ancient times: Submit to God as your Father and Lord. At the same time, it's still very fresh in Christ, as He is the New Covenant in person. John chose to write in prophetic terms of how the revelation of God had progressed in steps ending at Jesus. Darkness is being washed out by the light of Christ. So, what did Jesus say was His single greatest command? Love your fellow believers as He did. Walking in the light means you cannot detest those who have escaped the darkness. The light of the Spirit changes our attitudes. You either see your fellow believers as the precious treasures of this life, or you are still blind.

Like children, we love the Father who adopted us. Like elders, we have embraced the ancient truth. Like men of fighting age, we have fought the Darkness and won. John repeats this, affirming that his readers are that kind of people.

You cannot cling to this world. The fleshly nature belongs here and will stay here when you leave it. Fleshly appetites, the expectation of being able to know everything by your intellect, and the arrogance of trusting in the flesh are not spiritual gifts. They are marks of the Fall; if you cling to those things, you cannot understand the Spirit. You'll then die when this world dies, but those who seek to obey the Lord will pass on into Eternity.

We come to that term "last hour" -- a Hebraic concept meaning that God has no unfinished business in this world. Sending His Son was the last step of revelation calling us back to Him. The next time He does something with this world, He will pull the plug. We know this because folks have left the churches and manifested the spirits of anti-christian teaching. This could not happen until there was a Christ to which dark spirits could contrast themselves.

John implies that Satan and his allies weren't fully aware of what Christ would do when He came, and didn't quite realize what kind of handicap they faced in trying to keep men alienated from God. That job required sending people to walk among the Christians and then rebelling from the particular teachings of Christ about subjecting the flesh to the Spirit and walking in holy conduct. Those people left because they were never a part of the Elect, but they would have had no power to seduce if they didn't first absorb some elements of Christ's message.

With the Presence of the Holy Spirit, we can grasp the true gift of relief from the burden of our sinful nature ruling over us. That's the one thing that escaped those who abandoned the gospel. For them, fighting sin by the flesh was a far greater burden than just giving into it. That's why they never belonged to the church in the first place. John's audience understands this. He isn't telling them something they don't know but reminding of them to encourage them to stay the course.

Denying that Christ came in the flesh is a primary marker of the spirit of Antichrist. You cannot claim the Father's peace and reject His Son. If you cling to the Son, you cling to the Father, and you will see them in Eternity. Don't fall for the fancy lies of the heretics. Indeed, you don't need that level of teaching; His Spirit in your spirit will make it obvious those people are lying. When the Lord returns, those liars will run and hide, but we will run to greet Him. And you already have a good idea who will be running alongside you: the people who walk as Jesus did on this earth, like children of the Father.

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 made John unique among the apostles is that Jesus caught him rather early in his life, probably just a teenager. There was a very strong personal bond between as they were first cousins, and Jesus acted as if John were His best human friend. Thus, Jesus' teaching of the ancient Hebraic way versus the Talmudic Judaism of that day really struck John powerfully. He ended up being the most Hebraic of the Twelve.

He wrote this letter around AD 85 from Ephesus. By that time, the city had become the western capital of Christian religion. John had stayed in Judea as long as he could in order to keep his promise to take care of Jesus' mother. Eventually he had to leave the area. Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Roman army in AD 73 and a great many Christians in Jerusalem ended up in or near Ephesus.

Unlike Greek correspondence, John launches immediately into a prophetic warning: John had been with Jesus during His ministry, saw and heard everything firsthand. Thus, it was easy for him to teach what he experienced personally. He freely shared the whole message, not keeping anything secret, so that his audience could be touched by the Lord and commune in the Holy Spirit. The message itself drew the people, and they became part of John's treasure on this earth. He was rich!

Being the western capital of Christian religion, Ephesus was also the home of some major heresies. Most of them shared a basic major flaw in denying that Jesus was the Son of God. By this time the Gnostic heresy of legalistic Platonic Dualism was well established. They insisted the Jesus was a man who worked with the Holy Spirit, but the later left Him before the Cross. And it was all based on speculation and reason, whereas John's message was direct from Jesus Himself.

God does not divide Himself between competing philosophical assumptions. He has only one message, and it is His Son. If anyone keeps walking in the flesh, then they know nothing of Jesus. It has always been God's requirement that people repent and condemn their fleshly lusts. The fleshly nature must be bound and forced to serve the spirit. God is all about holiness in this world and in Eternity. Anyone who taught that God didn't care about what your flesh did was a liar. Those who would become part of His family must join Jesus on the Cross. But how sweet was the fellowship of those who did this!

Thus, you must confess that your flesh is wicked and sinful and then seek to lock it down by the power of Christ's Spirit. Our Lord is faithful in forgiving our sins. His power is sufficient to cleanse us so that we can walk in purity in this life.