Belief Matters

Anyone who has spent time in a more traditional church will be familiar with the creeds – which all start with “I believe”. Knowing what you believe seems to be imortant. Consider this from Mahatma Ghandi when put on trial:

 

 

What is the first article of your faith? What is the last article of your creed?

 

·       Your beliefs become your faith.

·       Your faith affects your choices.

·       Your choices become your behaviour.

·       Your behaviour becomes you, your personality and your character.

What you believe matters

 

The Chair: I don’t believe this chair is going to hold me up if I sit on it. I lose faith in chairs. I choose not to sit on chairs. I become someone who stands a lot. I am an upstanding citizen.

 

Competition: If I believe that competition is a good thing then I develop a belief in being involved in things that have an element of competition. I choose pastimes and jobs that give me an opportunity to compete. I become competitive. Eventually I am known as someone who loves to win.

 

Money: if you believe that everything, including your money, belongs to God, then that affects your choices about what you do with money. Over time that affects your financial behaviour and eventually it leads to who you are and what you are like.

 

What you believe affects your choices, which affects your behaviour which affects the person you are.

 

So what you believe is really, really important.

 

One of the motifs that weaves its way through the letters of John (as well as his gospel and the book of Revelation) is centrality of a belief in the truth about Jesus.

 

It is a bit like a repeating motif in a symphony or song. You hear a theme which goes away and then it comes back slightly different but recognisably the same theme.

 

John's writing style has been described as being more like a spiral  or a circle than a linear line of thinking.

 

The letter was written by John, the beloved disciple, to the people he has pastored in and around Ephesus, a great ancient Mediterranean sea port in what is now Turkey. It was written sometime in the second half of the first century, about 40 years after Jesus. If you have read the gospel of John the language in the letters he writes is familiar. He uses a similar vocabulary and pursues similar themes. Here is a man whose life was turned upside down and rescued by his encounter with Jesus by the shores of Lake Galilee a generation earlier. He had been one of Jesus’ best friends (cf 1 John 1:1-7) and had gone on to become one of the towering figures of the early church.

 

 

 

John calls us to believe the truth about Jesus. He does so because some people would have us believe lies.

Every now and again there is a film or a book which tries to make out that Jesus was something other than what the bible says. New “gospels” appear which tell a different story from the gospels in the bible – for example the Dan Brown novels.

 

Some people hold Jesus up as a good man who told great stories and whom we should try and copy. But instead of believing in him we are tempted to try and be like him instead. This is the basis of many religious belief – the Moslems would say Jesus was a great prophet worthy of honour, but not God.

 

Some might say that he was an ordinary person who became inspired by God in a special way for the 3 years of his ministry – and we should seek to be inspired in the same way.

 

Some say that he wasn’t man at all but a god-like figure. A special one who discovered his inner light and nurtured it to take him to a place of high spirituality. New Age literature loves to run with this speculation (Paul Coelho) – finding the god within you.

 

For many his name is no more than an expletive.

 

So, to over-simplify, you end up believing either that our humanity doesn’t matter – you just have to nurture your inner spirituality, and you can do what you like with your body you can behave as you will.  Or that there is no way of gaining acceptance by God except by working really hard at obeying all the rules.

 

The truth is that we are sinners and separated from God but that he loves us and has done an amazing thing to bring us back to himself through the reality of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God.

 

Chapter 4 Verse 10
Chapter 4 Verse 14
Chapter 4 Verse 15
Chapter 5 Verse 1
Chapter 5 Verse 5
Chapter 5 Verse 6
Chapter 5 Verse 10
Chapter 5 Verse 11

 

John wants us to hold to the truth revealed in Jesus and settled in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, the understanding we have of the truth revealed to us by God. As we read through these passages some things become very clear:

 

Jesus Christ is God’s son, sent as a man to express God’s huge love for his creation. We can see in Jesus the life, the light and the love of God. The core of our belief is that we are saved by believing in Jesus’s sacrificial death for us.

 

There is nothing we can do to get right with God - because it has already been done.

 

An event in history invites us to believe in Jesus. And when we believe our whole life is transformed, our past is forgiven, our present is empowered and our future is assured. There is a revolution in our relationships and behaviour - two other themes in John's letter.

 

A choice to believe in Jesus opens up a whole new way of living. Whilst in the close struggle of day to day life with its pains and frustrations we become aware of this huge cosmic event in our past which unlocks the future. We now live with an awareness of the presence of God in our lives, the expectation of a new creation and an eternal perspective.

 

May you seek and find the truth of Jesus, the Son of God yet fully man.
The One who displays God’s love and who opens the way back to God for you.
May you throw yourself on his saving grace.
May you find forgiveness for the past, power for the present and hope for your future.