A mentor of mine always used to say, "You can't argue with a man's testimony." The idea was this: you can try to convince someone about something, arguing intellectually, but a testimony moves outside of intellectual argument and says, "This happened to me. I give evidence of it!" This is why we all love it when testimonies are shared at church. Testimonies move us beyond the theoretical to the experiential. These testimonies are "eyewitness" accounts. Is it surprising to hear that God has a testimony?
This week, we will be studying 1 John 5:1-12. John starts out by telling us about the family life. He tells us how the life of the child of God is wrapped up in believing that Jesus is the Christ. When we believe that Jesus is the Christ (the anointed leader who comes to bring freedom from sin and peace with God) we become born of God. And when we are born of God, there is only one possible outcome of that birth: we love God and we love God's children. We love God by keeping His commandments. We love God by loving each other. We can't help but love God's family. And since we're in God's family, it's God's family that overcomes the world, because God has overcome the world.
Just in case there's any confusion or doubt about who Jesus is John then moves on to give us proof that Jesus is the Christ.
God has a testimony. It is "He gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son." (verse 11) We believe a lot of things when much less authoritative people give testimony to what they have figured out or experienced. We trust our lives to engineers, scientists, and the like. John says, "If God has a testimony, we should believe it." (verse 9) God is the eyewitness. Actually, He's more than the eyewitness to this testimony. He gave of Himself, by dying, so that we could have Life. John says that the proof of God's testimony is the incarnate son of God, who is proved authentic by the water, the blood, and the Holy Spirit. God has testified. Do you believe it?
If you believe it, the invitation then is to place all your eggs in that basket.
