1 John 5:1-5; The Passion History – Part 5: Calvary
In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
On the occasion of this fifth and final midweek Lenten mediation let us recap our theme: God is love. God has loved you in giving His Son over to death on the cross. For you to love God is to keep His commandments. The fulfillment of all the commandments is to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself.
If you think God’s commandments to be burdensome, then you must first examine your love for God. For those who love God, His commandments are not burdensome, for He has forgiven your disobedience and failure to keep them. No longer do God’s commandments threaten you with punishment, for God has poured out the punishment you deserved for your failure to keep them upon His Son Jesus who willingly suffered and died in your place.
Jesus’ self-sacrificial death upon the cross was the greatest possible act of love: Greater love has no man this – greater love is not possible than this – that a man should lay down his life for his friends, not to mention his enemies. God is love, and this is how He has loved you. His love is outside of you and yet it washes over you and through you. His love is outside of you just as Golgotha was a hill outside the walls of Jerusalem. His love comes from outside of you and from above you. You can gaze upon it as an object and be assured that it is real, that it really happened, and it really still matters. You don’t have to look within the morass of your conflicted feelings, your frazzled thoughts, your selfishly motivated words and deeds. To do so is to succumb to the world, your flesh, and your sinful desires. To do so leads either to despair or to delusional self-righteousness, both of which leave you dead in your sins. Instead, look outside of you to God’s love crucified, high on a hill for all to see. It is finished. There is no more. You are forgiven. You are free.
God is love. God has loved you in giving His Son over to death on the cross. You receive the benefit of God’s love in Jesus by being born of God: “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of Him.” To be born of God is to be baptized and to believe that Jesus is the Son of God in the flesh. Baptism and faith also come from outside of you. They are the free gift of God’s grace by the Holy Spirit because God loves you. God came to you who could not, who would not, come to Him. He came in love to forgive you, to die for you, and to raise you to new life in Him. To receive this, to believe this, is to be born of God.
Your new life as a child of God is different. It feels different, it looks different, and it behaves differently. You can see it, and others can see it too, just as you can see your salvation standing on hill outside of you high and lifted up. “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey His commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments.” To love God is to obey His commandments. “And His commandments are not burdensome,” for your new man born in baptism is a child of God, and the child of God knows his Father’s commandments, loves his Father’s commandments, wants to keep his Father’s commandments, and is able to keep his Father’s commandments, not out of fear of punishment, coercion, or compulsion, but out of love for God and for the children of God, just like God’s Son Jesus.
“For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world-- our faith.” How do you overcome the world? You have to be born. Now, think about that for a moment. Being born isn’t something that you do, or that you choose to do; being born is something that happens to you. You are completely passive in being born. The Scriptures, and Jesus Himself specifically, use natural birth as an analogy for faith Believing in God, believing in Jesus, is not a decision that you make or a choice of any kind, but it is something that comes from outside of you and the work of the Holy Spirit. That is why you can trust in it that it is true, and you can be confident of your justification, because you had nothing to do with it. You are a child of God just as surely as you are a child of your biological mother and father. Your sonship with the Father is the cause of your faith and is the cause of your victory over the world. The world is all the things that war against you to tempt you to sin: Your flesh and desires, pleasures, comforts, lusts, wealth, possessions, power, and more. Through Holy Spirit created and given faith in Christ Jesus the victory over all these is already yours. “Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”
And, just as you did not choose to be born, neither have you chosen your father or mother, nor your brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Truly, you were born into a family and a community wholly apart from your choosing. Each member of your heavenly Father’s family is a son or daughter just like you, born again of water and the Spirit, born of God. Your brothers and sisters in Christ are a gift to you for you to love as God has loved you – selflessly and sacrificially. By loving them you show that you love God: “Whoever does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.” This is the love Jesus showed for you in His passion, crucifixion, and death: “Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” This is the love of God in Jesus that makes us His children, that makes us His family.
Almighty God, graciously behold this Your family for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed and delivered into the hands of sinful men to suffer death upon the cross; through the same Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
In the + Name of Jesus. Amen.
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