“O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.”
—George Matheson, O Love that Will Not Let Me Go
Beloved, Empowered Children (1 John 4:1-6)
“God’s purpose was not only to secure our sonship by His Son, but to assure us of it by His Spirit. He sent His Son that we might have the status of sonship, and He sent His Spirit that we might have the experience of it.“
—John Stott, The Message of Galatians
Guarded by the Promise (1 John 5:13-21)
“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou doest overthrow
Die not, poor Death, no yet canst thou kill me…
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.“
—John Donne, Holy Sonnets
Test and Discern (1 John 5:1-12)
Bending towards God (Psalm 115)
“There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.“
—David Foster Wallace
Identity in Adoption (Galatians 4:1-7)
“If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity,, find out how much they make of being God’s child and having God as father.”
—J.I. Packer, Knowing God
From Haters to Lovers (1 John 3:11-24)
“If I were sitting on the end of the pier on a summer day enjoying the sunshine and the air, and someone came along and jumped into the water and got drowned ‘to prove his love for me’,I should find it quite unintelligible. I might be much in need of love, but an act in no rational relation to any of my necessities could not prove it. But if I had fallen over the pier and were drowning, and someone sprang into the water, and at the cost of making my peril, or what but for him would be my fate, his own, save me from death, then I should say, ‘Greater love hath no man than this.’ I should say it intelligibly, because there would be an intelligent relation between the sacrifice which love made and the necessity from which it redeemed.”
— James Dennon, The Death of Christ
Living Out our Union (1 John 3:1-10)
“Commandments are the railroad tracks on which the life empowered by the love of God poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit runs. Love empowers the engine; law guides the direction. They are mutually interdependent. The notion that love can operate apart from the law is a figment of the imagination. It is not only bad theology; it is poor psychology. It has to borrow from law to give eyes to love.”
— Sinclair Ferguson, The Whole Christ
Seeing Christ through the Tension (1 John 2:28-3:10)
“True, [God’s] love for me is not based on my qualification or my preparation but it is misleading to say that God accepts us the way we are. Rather he accepts us despite the way we are. He receives us only in Christ and for Christ’s sake. Nor does he mean to leave us the way he found us, but to transform us into the likeness of his son. Without that transformation and new conformity of life we do not have any evidence that we were ever his in the first place.”
— Sinclair Ferguson, The Whole Christ