Overwhelmed or Overcoming?

Introduction: One can only imagine how overwhelmed the apostles of our Lord must have felt from time to time. Men who had been called from the simplicity of fishing nets and a tax table and other ordinary trades to be preachers and teachers of the faith who would turn the world upside down. Positively overwhelmed by the miracles the Lord had done right before their eyes. Overwhelmed by his resurrection and ascension. Overwhelmed by the miracles he continued to perform—often through them—after his ascension.

And they weren’t only overwhelmed by the positive events—the up times—they experienced as the disciples of our Lord. They were surely overwhelmed by what they perceived as the down times as well: the time when they were at sea in the storm, convinced the boat was going to capsize and sink; the time when they heard the cadence of the soldier’s feet approaching the garden; the time in the courtyard when Peter denied Christ, not once, but three times; the trial and judgment and horrible crucifixion of their Lord and the following week of hiding in the upper room, overwhelmed by fear; and, of course, Judas, overwhelmed by his sin and guilt.

As one who knew what it was to be overwhelmed by such things, the apostle John in today’s Epistle Reading writes to his “little children” at Ephesus and to the other congregations with which he had an apostolic affinity. He writes them so that they and we would not be overwhelmed by the world. Rather, he wants us to trust that

The Love of Christ, Who Is the Object of Our Faith,

Overcomes All That Would Overwhelm Us in This World.

Be not overwhelmed by the world.

Be not overwhelmed by false claims regarding Jesus Christ, made by the defector Cerinthus:

Who taught that the man Jesus was not born of the Virgin Mary, but was the natural-born son of Mary and Joseph.

Who taught that the man Jesus and the Christ had to be distinguished from one another since the Christ only descended upon Jesus at his Baptism and then left him at his crucifixion.

Who taught that Jesus was buried and will only be raised with the rest of mankind when Christ comes again at the end of time to initiate a one-thousand-year kingdom on earth.

Of whom Polycarp, a disciple of John, recalled a time when the apostle fled an Ephesian bathhouse when he learned that Cerinthus was there as well, shouting: “Let us flee, lest the building fall down; for Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is inside!”

Be not overwhelmed by those of our day who, like Cerinthus, have been conquered by the world, partly or entirely renouncing the historic Christian faith:

Denying the virgin birth, as did famous Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong (Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus, [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992], 3).

Denying God became man and insisting, as did Princeton-educated theologian Bart Ehrman, that church councils made Jesus into God.

Denying that Jesus rose from the dead, as has another modern scholar, Gerd Luedemann, who also denies the virgin birth of Jesus.

Denying that Jesus was and is God enfleshed, as do Jehovah’s Witnesses, teaching that he is but the incarnation of the created archangel Michael.

Putting “new faces” on the same heresies which once attempted to overwhelm the Christians in Ephesus addressed by St. John. Men and women conquered by the world.

Be not overwhelmed by the “burdens” borne by confessors of the faith as we live out our confession in a hostile world—burdens such as:

Our sin of having ever entertained these aberrations of the faith.

Our sin of complacency, which refuses to counter misrepresentations of the faith.

Our sin of compromise, which weakens our confession of the faith.

Our sin of being silenced by the fear of conflict with—or rejection by—those to whom the love of truth would have us confess the faith.

Be not overwhelmed by the world...

Rather, be overcomers of the world.

Overcome through our Spirit-borne faith in Jesus as the Christ and our love of him and his people.

The overcoming believer is “born of God” and loves the Son even as he loves the Father (v 1).

The overcoming believer who is “born of God” and loves the one “born of him” (namely, Jesus) also loves the “children of God” (brothers and sisters in Christ)(v 2).

Overcome as we love and live out the commands of God in our lives with one another.

These instructions are not “burdensome” (v 3), for they don’t justify us in God’s eyes. Jesus did:

By his perfect keeping of the Law on our behalf (Rom 8:1–2);

By his sacrifice on the cross for our sins of doubt and complacency and compromise and silence regarding our confession of him.

This faith in Jesus as the Law-keeping, sin-bearing Redeemer of the world is the “victory that has overcome the world” (vv 4–5). The world:

Which, Luther says, is “the devil, the flesh, and everything that is evil” (AE 30:313).

Which was made by Christ but would “not know him” (Jn 1:10).

That God so loved that “he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16).

That is “passing away along with its desires” while the one who “does the will of God abides forever” (1 Jn 2:17).

Be overcomers by the Spirit, the water, and the blood.

This overcoming faith has as its only object Jesus the Christ, who secured that victory for us by “the Spirit and the water and the blood” (vv 6–8).

The Holy Spirit unites us by faith to Jesus when we are baptized into his blood-shedding death and blood-renewed resurrection.

The life-giving Holy Spirit, by the life-cleansing water of Baptism, connects us to the life-redeem­ing blood of Jesus, who has overcome the kosmos (“world” or “universe”).

Jesus is God enfleshed coming to us yet today in his body and blood here in the Sacrament of the Altar, as he nourishes his Bride, the Church, and all her children that they may overcome the world.

Chrysostom: “Beloved, do not pass over this mystery without thought; it has yet another hidden meaning, which I will explain to you. I said that water and blood symbolized baptism and the holy eucharist. From these two sacraments the Church is born: from baptism, ‘the cleansing water that gives rebirth and renewal through the Holy Spirit’, and from the holy eucharist. Since the symbols of baptism and the eucharist flowed from his side, it was from his side that Christ fashioned the Church, as he had fashioned Eve from the side of Adam. . . . As God then took a rib from Adam’s side to fashion a woman, so Christ has given us blood and water from his side to fashion the Church” (St. John Chrysostom, The Catecheses [Catechesis 3:13–19; Sources chrétiennes 50:174–77].

So it is that in Christ we ultimately have overcome everything in the world that—if we were without him—would overwhelm us.

Victory in Christ—that’s the theme by which St. John lived and with which St. John died!

Christ breathed that divine theme into the Rev­el­ation to John, his last testimony to the churches John so loved, as seven times he speaks of what awaits all who, in Christ, overcome the world:

Rev 2:7 (NKJV): “To him who overcomes I will give to eat from the tree of life.”

Rev 2:11: “He who overcomes shall not be hurt by the second death.”

Rev 2:17: “To him who overcomes I will give . . . a new name.”

Rev 2:26: “And he who overcomes . . . I will give power over the nations.”

Rev 3:5: “He who overcomes shall be clothed in white garments, and I will not blot out his name from the Book of Life; but I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels.”

Rev 3:12: “He who overcomes, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God.”

Rev 3:21: “To him who overcomes I will grant to sit with me on my throne, as I also overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne.”

Conclusion: We are not overwhelmed by the world—or by whatever may happen to us in it—because we are, as St. John says, those who, in Jesus Christ, are overcoming the world.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.