A Personal Intro to 1 John
Have you ever been confused by religious words you hear from someone that don’t match the lifestyle you see them live? Has that deconstructed your personal faith? Maybe it’s all fake.
Or when your own missteps fall short of what you say you believe, have you hidden in the darkness for fear of being discovered, by people or by God? Have you ever doubted whether you actually believed in the first place? Maybe I’m the fake. How can I know for sure what’s real?
As a teen, I struggled with whether my salvation was real. I used to lie sleepless in bed, tormented by the thought that my faith as a child, when I first confessed that I needed Jesus to be my Savior, may not have been complete enough to seal my eternity in heaven. Were there words I was missing or something I didn’t know that I needed to believe or do or pray? Was there a way to know for sure that the promise of eternal life was real for me?
Most who have had doubts like mine, can’t usually remember the first time they heard the name “Jesus”, because it was in utero and every day after that. Kids who grow up learning the Gospel from the very beginning and then place their faith in Christ at young ages, don’t experience the radical life-change that creates dramatic reports from missionaries or garners applause from church crowds. Drastically changed lives are powerful testaments of God’s grace, to be sure, but a child might wonder whether Christ is real in their own lives if He didn’t rescue them from drugs or jail by age 5. Back then, I didn’t realize the grace it is to know Christ early in life, or the privilege it was to have a dad who could introduce my doubts to 1 John.
As it turns out, the question of Is it real?, isn’t isolated to 21st century Christianity. It’s been asked since the time John wrote this 5-chapter book, addressing a people close to his heart, who, for various reasons, had doubts about their faith. Words and life were mismatched, deception and self-deception threatened, sin was detected, and their confidence was shaken.
The book opens, not with a testimony of how Christ changed John’s life, but with the reality of Christ’s life itself as the basis for our faith. Jesus wasn’t a hologram or optical illusion, so neither was the life he promised. In Christ, eternal life was made audible, visible, observable, and touchable. He was eternal life in real life, and the rest of the book is what His eternal life in us looks like in real life.
