1 John 2:1 I. Admit the fact that "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself," and then we can at once understand why when His ministry commenced the heavens were opened and the powers of hell disturbed. Admit that, when the Lord Jesus was going about doing good upon earth, the fulness... [ Continue Reading ]
1 John 2:1 Christ our Righteousness. This short, pregnant passage stands in one of the inner sanctuaries of the Bible. This first epistle of St. John is very possibly the latest page of Scripture in date. Assuredly in it the Holy Spirit takes the reader into the last recesses of spiritual life and... [ Continue Reading ]
1 John 2:1 The True Idea of Man. I. St. John had a special reason for using this tender phrase, "my little children," in this place. All sin is connected by the Apostle with the loss of fellowship. A man shuts himself up in himself. He denies that he has anything to do with God; he denies that he h... [ Continue Reading ]
1 John 2:2 I. The Christian world here presents to us opposite extremes of opinion, as well as diversities. If we except, on the one hand, those who put a limitation on the intrinsic value of the Redeemer's sacrifice, who, by a kind of arithmetical process, estimate the worth of atonement by the num... [ Continue Reading ]
1 John 2:3 Saving Knowledge. I. The whole duty and work of a Christian is made up of these two parts: faith and obedience; "looking unto Jesus," the Divine object as well as Author of our faith, and acting according to His will. Not as if a certain frame of mind, certain notions, affections, feelin... [ Continue Reading ]
1 John 2:3 Doing and Knowing. I. St. John assumes that the knowledge of God is as possible, is as real, for human beings as any knowledge they can have of each other. Nay, he goes further than this. There are impediments to our knowledge of each other which he says do not exist with reference to th... [ Continue Reading ]
1 John 2:8 A New Commandment. I. I will try to show you that this commandment is old, and yet new. But we may as well see, first of all, what the commandment is. John does not quite say in the text what it is; but he does tell us elsewhere. He says in another letter, writing to a Christian friend,... [ Continue Reading ]
1 John 2:12 The Children; the Youths; the Old Men. I. "I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for His name's sake. Many interpreters are careful to tell us that the Apostle does not mean actual children, but only children in faith and knowledge, young converts. I do... [ Continue Reading ]
1 John 2:15 The World and the Father. I. While St. John looks encouragingly and hopefully on the young men, while he sees in them the strength of the time that is as well as of the time that is to come, he is also fully alive himself, and he wishes them to be alive, to the danger of their new posit... [ Continue Reading ]
1 John 2:16 I. The world is nature's heaven. It is a carnal copy of a spiritual joy. It is a figment which he who is the prince of it sets up, whereby, indulging our senses, or pleasing our imaginations, or gratifying our vanity, he makes us rest in happiness which imitates heaven, but is not heave... [ Continue Reading ]
1 John 2:17 The Apostle draws a contrast, and bids us choose which of two things we prefer. "The world," he says, "passeth away, and the lust thereof"; at its best it is but for a moment; "but he that doeth the will of God," hard though it may be at the time, "abideth for ever." I. Now the world, s... [ Continue Reading ]
1 John 2:18 The Dispensations. Consider the leading dispensations under which mankind has been placed. I. A single arbitrary restriction, issued merely as a test of obedience, was the first of them. II. The dispensation of experienced punishment on the part of the parent, of ancestral precept on... [ Continue Reading ]
1 John 2:18 The Last Time; the Christ; the Antichrist; the Chrism. I. The Apostles said that a new age was at hand, the universal age, the age of the Son of man, which would be preceded by a great crisis that would shake not earth only, but heaven, not that only which belonged to time and the condi... [ Continue Reading ]
1 John 2:23 The Place of the Doctrine of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit in Christian Ethics. I. St. John is especially occupied throughout his Gospel in setting forth the ground and principle of the obedience of the Son. It is filial obedience. It is the obedience of a Son to a Father, in who... [ Continue Reading ]