1 John 2:12-17, "Love Wins"

Ten years ago, a book written by Rob Bell entitled “Love Wins” created all kinds of controversy in the evangelical church in America. Bell made the claim that, “At the center of the Christian tradition since the first church has been the insistence that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins.” Bell argued that if God is loving, He would never condemn anyone to hell forever.

Other teachers with some very large churches tell us that the love of God means we will have a comfortable, prosperous life, if we have enough faith and learn to love ourselves.

These are just two examples of a long line of people who believe they have outgrown Christian orthodoxy with some new insight. But their insights are not new, and they ignore our root issue. Our problem is not that we need more time to reform our ways or we need to learn to love ourselves. Our problem is that we need to be remade, and learn to love God and love our neighbor in ways that overcome evil and do God’s will from our hearts. We have disordered loves that lead us into all evil we see around us. It’s coming from within us.

At the center of the Christian tradition since the first church has been the insistence that history is tragic, that everyone sins and commits injustice that demands eternal separation from their Creator. We are all in need of forgiveness and salvation, which God has provided in Jesus Christ. So, repent and believe in the gospel. The gospel is good news, that God is overcoming evil and establishing His rule and reign of justice and righteousness in and through Jesus Christ.

Here is our real hope: the truth is that love does win. Our passage today is good news. You and I can know that our sins are forgiven, we can grow in our knowledge of God through Jesus, and we can overcome evil. When we understand who we truly are as God’s children through faith in Jesus, we will learn the power of an abiding love for God that desires to do His will. To put it more simply, when we know our identity in Christ, we will pursue an abiding love.

John is writing to a community of Jesus followers who have their own deceptive teachers who may be tempting some to walk . He writes so that they will hold onto the hope of Jesus Christ and learn to love in a way that puts things right. They should not run after the trendy teachers that are leading people astray.

Who We Are

John begins our passage in verses 12-14 with a poetic reflection on who we are as God’s children. As believers in Jesus, you have everything you need to know God and overcome evil. You don’t need a new philosophy, however attractive it may be. John is writing to the community of believers who have fellowship with God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ. But they are in various stages of growth in their relationship with Christ. So he calls them “children” in one sense, “fathers” in another sense, and “young men” in a third.

John may be reflecting on his own experience with Jesus. He was the youngest of Jesus’ disciples, and was probably still a child or a teenager when he first started following Jesus. Now, he is writing as an old man, and he reflects on the ways his faith has grown in knowing Jesus, who has not changed at all.

1 John 2:12–13 (ESV)

I am writing to you, little children,

because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake...

I write to you, children,

because you know the Father.

First, in verses 12 and 13, he addresses them as children. As we saw a couple weeks ago, children get dirty. Even as God’s children, we sin and need forgiveness. But as believers in Jesus, we have been forgiven our sins for the sake of Jesus’ name. Jesus receives all the glory in salvation of sinners. He is the one who took the guilt and shame of our sin upon Himself on the cross and put them to death once and for all. As believers in the resurrection of Jesus, we have victory over sin and reconciliation with God the Father. We can truly know God through Jesus Christ. There is no higher knowledge.

The tragedy of the seriousness of human sin is an essential element of the gospel. Understanding that my sin requires forgiveness, and forgiveness only comes through the work of Jesus who saves me from the wrath of God for sin, is necessary if I am to understand the good news. But we grow from here.

1 John 2:14 (ESV)

I write to you, fathers,

because you know him who is from the beginning.

In verses 13 and 14, he addresses these believers as “fathers”. In what sense are these children also “fathers”? “because you know him who is from the beginning.” Their faith in Jesus is fellowship with the Eternal Word of Life that spoke our world into existence in the beginning, and is now speaking salvation and eternal life to us. Jesus is the One who has been active in our world and in human lives from the very beginning. Even the newest believer is growing into spiritual wisdom and maturity through their fellowship with Jesus, the eternal Word of God. They don’t need to run after some new philosophy or teaching. They will only become spiritually mature as they grow to know Jesus who is unchanging.

As we grow in our faith in Jesus, we all start as children who are learning God as Father. Children have lots of energy, they get dirty and need forgiveness, and lack wisdom. Fathers have wisdom but lack energy, and have learned to rest in the unchanging Jesus Christ. On the path to spiritual growth, John also reflects that there is a period of time in which your wisdom and your energy are strongest and God uses us most actively as His partners in overcoming evil and establishing the kingdom of God through the gospel of Jesus. So, John also addresses his readers as “young men”.

1 John 2:13 (ESV)

I am writing to you, young men,

because you have overcome the evil one.

1 John 2:14 (ESV)

I write to you, young men,

because you are strong,

and the word of God abides in you,

and you have overcome the evil one.

When John mentions the “evil one” in these verses, he is speaking about satan, the one who has been tempting human beings since the beginning to love themselves more than God. Satan is the father of lies, he steals and kills and destroys, and he deceives us into loving the things of this world that give us temporary pleasure in ways that kill our hope for anything better. Sin rules and reigns in our hearts when we listen to the voice of the evil one and love our comfort in this world more than we love eternal life in God.

The gospel is not just tragedy. The gospel is also that God is overcoming evil and establishing His rule and reign in and through the person and work of Jesus Christ. The hope of the gospel is that the rule and reign of God begins in the life of the believer in Jesus, whom God strengthens to participate with Him in His work of overcoming the evil one.

God strengthens His children with His word. As you read, study, meditate on God’s word, and put it into practice, it begins to abide in you. As you obey God’s word instead of listening to the voice of the evil one who deceives, you overcome him. You can live according to your identity: a child who knows the Father through forgiveness in Jesus, spiritually mature as you learn to rest in knowing Jesus, and as a strong young champion, overcoming the forces of spiritual evil in our world with the word of God.

We begin in our own hearts, by reordering our love.

Who We Love

When I am abiding in Christ, and God’s word abides in me, I learn to desire God’s will, seeking justice and righteousness. I need to reorder my heart, my affections. I often love the wrong thing.

John tells us in verse 15 that love for the world crowds out the love of the Father. 1 John 2:15

1 John 2:15 ESV

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

What does John mean by “the world”? Didn’t God so love the world that He gave His only Son that whoever should believe in Him would not perish, but have eternal life? Shouldn’t we love the world too?

We use phrases like “the world” to mean lots of things. We use qualifiers. We have the world of baseball, the world of comic books, the industrialized world, the third world, a world of hurt, etc. If we’re talking about the world of people, then yes, we should love everyone in the way God loves them. So John must be using a qualifier that is different from loving the world of people.

What is John’s qualifier for “the world”? He says in verse 16,

1 John 2:16 ESV

For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world.

John is talking about a world of disordered desires.

Our world seems to be getting darker and as Jesus said, the love of many grows cold. Our problem today is not a lack of love. Our love has lost its power because it is disordered. We love the wrong things, or certain things the wrong way, and we cannot love the right things the right way. If you love the Yankees, for example, it leaves keeps you from loving the Red Sox. Or if we love our physical or socio-economic comfort, we cannot love the glorious, but very messy and inconvenient adventure of following Jesus. Your disordered desire for comfort will keep you from loving Jesus. I’m not making this up. Jesus said it. John is saying it here.

If you love your comfort in this world too much, you will lose everything when this world of disordered desires passes away and the new world begins.

1 John 2:17 ESV

And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

In the new world, you will need new desires.

The evil in our world, the injustice and hate and fear, all come from disordered desires for comfort. The systems of our world are feeding those desires. If we are to ever overcome this evil, it will not happen by wishing away the real injustices with some alternative teaching that may sound nice but only feeds our comfort even more.

Overcoming evil and preparing to abide in eternal life will start in the hearts of people that are united to Jesus Christ through faith, who learn to know the Father and be strengthened in His word. When we know who we are as God’s children through fellowship with Jesus His Son, we will learn what love really looks like. The love John is talking about, the love of the Father, is a love for doing God’s will. We truly desire justice and righteousness more than we desire our comfort.

People who have learned to rest in their identity in Christ and loved like God by doing God’s will in the face of evil: John, Peter, Paul, Christians who took plague victims into their homes to care for them, Corey ten Boom, Elizabeth Elliot, and Mary Johnson, who realized that her identity as a Christian meant she had to choose to love, and eventually forgive the man who killed her son. Not comfortable, but “whoever does the will of God abides forever.”

Questions for Discussion

Is there anything you learned from applying last week’s passage, 1 John 2:3-11?

What do we learn about our identity in Christ from our passage today?

What do we learn about Jesus from this passage, and how does it give us confidence in our faith?

How does John help us understand how to overcome the evil one?

How does knowing the Father and knowing Jesus, who is from the beginning, lead us into the right kind of love?