An old proverb goes: “God defend me from my friends; from my enemies I can defend myself.” Julius Caesar’s dying words, at least in Shakespeare’s play, were “et tu Brute?” Brutus was one of the senators who stabbed him to death, in an attempt to overthrow him. Politicians are well aware of attacks from their opposition, but the ones that cause the most harm are sometimes from within their ranks. Similarly, in 1 John 4:1-6 the Apostle John tells us to beware of those who appear to be from within the Church, but who are really opposed to the truth of Christ. He also tells us how to spot the difference. While Christians are well aware of opponents, such as those who attempt to marginalise Christianity from public life in the West, or the new atheism that has arisen recently, we are often much less on our guard against those from within who are opposed to the gospel of Jesus Christ. There are various individuals, or loosely connected groups of individuals, who have a problem with one aspect of Christianity or another. Secondary matters should not divide us, but when primary matters are opposed, we have to react. For example, when the cross of Calvary is not about resolving our sin problem before God, but is just an extravagant example of God’s love for us. John tells us to be careful what we believe – not to be gullible and accept everything without testing it according to the test of those who are eye witnesses of Jesus and his glory. He shows that false teachers leave and return to their natural home, the world, because they never belonged to the Church anyway. People listen either to the Word or the World. We must believe and uphold the gospel of Jesus Christ, as the test of orthodoxy. And he encourages believers to depend on the Holy Spirit within them to guide them into truth, because he is greater than the spirit of untruth in the world. The Bible needs to be the truth we stand on, and not public opinion or new teachings that are not in line with God’s Word. This is more of a live issue for some than others, such as the debates with the Anglican Church worldwide as to whether their leadership is standing squarely on the Bible as it’s source of authority, or not. John wants God’s children to have joy and assurance in their salvation. His guidance to be careful about what we listen to can prevent us letting opponents from within the broad category of ‘Christianity’ do damage to the cause of Christ, and hurt God’s children.

In the BBC’s ‘The Apprentice’ programme, one team wins if they make more profit than the other team. The worst performing team member from the losing team is then fired. In business, people are often valued by how much money they make, or how much they contribute towards a company’s profit. But is money a good way to value or rate the stature of people? If not, what should we look for instead? Are career success, influence, wealth, etc. the right criteria? What about ethical issues? In Christian circles, we can often be tempted to value or gauge people according to how effective they are at communicating their faith, how much theology they know, how big or wealthy their church is, how influential or successful they or their ministry appear to be, and so on. But are we simply adopting worldly standards or ways of thinking instead of having our minds informed by God’s Word, the Bible? What should a Christian look like? The Apostle Paul tells us what Christians ought to look like. He describes the results of the Holy Spirit working in the lives of those who trust in the Lord Jesus: “But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!” (Galatians 5:22–23, NLT) These verses are quite well known. But what is not so well known is that they are the contrast to what worldliness looks like. Paul is here contrasting the character that the Holy Spirit produces in a believer with a list of some of the sins that characterise the opposite extreme of unbelievers. The Holy Spirit is essential It is not possible to have the ‘fruit of the Spirit’, or the results of the work of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life, unless the Holy Spirit is at work in their heart. We cannot have fruit of the Spirit without the life of the Spirit. Jesus said that humanity gives birth to human nature, but the Holy Spirit gives birth to godly spiritual nature (John 3:6 NLT). We all inherit fallen or sinful human nature. But if we want to have godly nature, which is far superior to our best efforts at being godly, then we need the Holy Spirit in our lives, in our hearts, changing us on the inside first. The result is holiness and salvation Paul’s primary concern throughout the letter to the Galatians is that they had been trying to be right with God, and to deserve eternal life, through worldly methods (the ‘flesh’ instead of the ‘Spirit’). Paul concludes that worldliness results in judgment and condemnation, but those who display the fruit of the Spirit are not under God’s judgment (law) (Galatians 5:21, 23). this reflects what Jesus said, that those who have trusted in him have passed from death to life, and will not be condemned (John 5:24). Encourage the fruit of the Spirit The fruit of the Spirit is not many fruits, but one fruit with many flavours. We ought to encourage each other to be more godly, to show the character of the Spirit in our lives. We ought to try to ripen the fruit, although we know that it will not be perfect until we go to be with the Lord. When Paul wants to evaluate whether a person is a Christian or not, he looks at their character or the fruit of the Spirit, not their ministry or the gifts of the Spirit. He certainly does not rate them according to worldly standards. Jesus summarises it well: “Yes, just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions.” (Matthew 7:20, NLT) How to receive the Holy Spirit However, Paul is not saying that the fruit of the Spirit is the means towards being right with God. The fruit of the Spirit is a result of being right with God, not a means towards it. Good actions are not the way of salvation, but those that are the fruit of the Spirit are an indication that a person has already been made right with God. The way to be made right with God is through believing in Jesus, and his atoning sacrifice on the cross, for our sins (John 3:16). And the Spirit is received at the same time, by faith in Jesus (Galatians 3:2). To have the fruit of the Spirit, we must have the Spirit. And to have the Spirit, we must have faith in the Lord Jesus.

Yesterday evening I was listening to the inspiring finale of the ‘Les Misérables’ musical with someone, and I was struck by the lyrics before the final anthem “Do you hear the people sing” sung by Jean Valjean, Fantine and Eponine: Take my hand, and lead me to salvation. Take my love, for love is everlasting. And remember, the truth that once was spoken: To love another person is to see the face of God… The last line above could be understood to be an allusion to the Bible verse: “No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us.” (1 John 4:12, NLT). The Apostle John teaches that if godly love is seen in the lives of Christ’s followers, then even though people cannot see God directly, they can see him indirectly when his children show his likeness by loving others. This was also the passage which we looked at on Sunday morning. In 1 John 4:7-21, John wants to reassure believers (those who have trusted in Jesus by faith for salvation) that they know God. One of the results of trusting Jesus is that believers will live godly lives. If the fruit of the Spirit can be seen, if the maturing or end result of the work of God is evident in their lives, then the believer can be sure that they are truly God’s children. In other words, if they are a chip off the old block, or ‘like father, like son (or daughter),’ they can be assured of being a child of God. John’s argument features some of the most lovely, most awesome, statements in the whole Bible, such as: “God is love.” (1 John 4:8, NLT) “This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.” (1 John 4:10, NLT) Yet, despite being such profound truths, these are only supportive statements in his argument to reassure believers of their standing with God. It is a bit like going out for a meal, but instead of going to a local restaurant, going to one via the scenic route of the north Antrim coast on a bright summer’s afternoon. We can get captivated by the scenery and forget where we are being taken. So too in 1 John 4:7-21, John takes us on a captivating path through some of the most inspiring verses of his letter, if not the whole Bible. Focusing back on John’s argument, rather than his inspiring supporting points, he wants believers to understand that they need not fear the judgment day, because of the evidence that is already there in their favour. When they stand before God, and are judged according to works, only those who have been already justified by faith will have the evidence of righteousness, the good works that will distinguish them from those who are unrighteous. If they show godly love that is similar to the self-sacrificial love of God that sent Jesus to die for sinners (and not worldly love that comes from essentially self-centred or impure motives, no matter how charitable it may be; Romans 3:9-20), then such love in action is proof that they are already right with God. Such love in action is not the way to get right with God, but it is the proof that they are already right with him, and do not need to fear on the judgment day. But in order to distinguish between worldly love and godly love, John illustrates his point with showing what godly love is like. He wants to show the difference between worldly love that is focused on benefitting us, our family, our community, our favourite sports club, our favourite charities, that inflates our pride, etc, in fact anything that is us-centred, with love that is other-centred, love that is focused on benefitting others, such as our those who we do not naturally want to love. Love that is from God loves enemies, is self-sacrificial, and can be ultimately seen in practice where God loved the world by Jesus’ suffering and dying on the cross for our good, for our salvation. This kind of love is what John wants his readers to look for as evidence of God at work in their lives. John concludes by saying that when believers love like this, it is not in order to get right with God, but it is because they are already right with him: “We love each other because he loved us first.” (1 John 4:19, NLT) That is why it is so important that the believers love one another and others with the kind of love that comes from God. Lack of godly love in a person’s life indicates that a person has not believed in Jesus for salvation, and they cannot truly call themselves a child of God (1 John 4:20). But, anyone who shows godly love can be assured that they are a child of God (1 John 5:13).

“The Pursuit of Happyness” is closely based on a true story about a man named Christopher Gardner. He invests heavily in a business selling medical machines, but it doesn’t go that well. As he struggles to sell them, his wife leaves him, he loses his house, his bank account, and credit cards. He is forced to live out in the streets with his son. He is now desperate to find a steady job. This film resonates with many people’s hearts, not just because they can sympathise with Christopher Gardner, but because they can easily envisage themselves in his circumstances. Many people are one or two months income away from not being able to pay their bills. Some are already in the situation where they have lost a house, had their marriage break up, or lost their job. The pursuit of happiness is universal. We all want to be happy. But what makes Christianity different from other approaches, religions or philosophies, is that we can have more than just happiness, we can have joy. Happiness is a temporary feeling. It doesn’t last. Retail therapy makes us happy, but the effect soon wears off (sometimes before we get home from shopping!). Eating our favourite food can make us happy for a while, e.g. chocolate, sweets, cream buns, etc. But the happiness doesn’t last long, so we eat more and more to try to keep up the happiness… Some people want money to be rich, in the hope that that will make them happy – sometimes the promise of riches, or the things that riches can buy, can make people happy. But money doesn’t satisfy – When John D. Rockefeller was asked how much money was enough, he replied: “A little bit more.” He said “It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.” Happiness is a temporary feeling. It doesn’t last. C.S. Lewis found that happiness or pleasure was different from joy In his autobiographical search for joy in his book “Surprised by Joy”, C.S. Lewis noted “I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.” He searched for joy, and in the end was surprised with what he found. In his search for joy, he came to faith in Christ instead. As writer David M. Howard, Jr. commented on Lewis’ search for joy: [Lewis] had been focusing on a feeling, an experience, a process that had no Object. What he had been focusing on was “not the wave but the wave’s imprint on the sand.” He realized that he had made “Joy” itself into an idol. He‘d known that “Joy” was a desire, but he’d never realized that “a desire is turned not to itself but to its object.” Lewis discovered that his quest for “Joy”—and even his fleeting experiences of it over the years—was not, in the end, what he was really after. Lewis concludes on the last page of his book; “But what, in conclusion, of Joy? for that, after all, is what the story has mainly been about. To tell you the truth, the subject has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian.” C.S. Lewis was surprised by joy, that he did not find joy when he sought it, but he did find joy when he sought God instead. Joy is a fruit of the Spirit In the Bible, lasting and deep joy is one of the blessings of trusting in Jesus and having the Holy Spirit come into our lives and change us. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy… (Galatians 5:22). It is the result of knowing God personally, and living closely to him, in obedience and faith. Joy is never as free and complete as when we are expressing it. Rejoicing is the expression of joy. Praise is an essential part of Christian worship, as it allows us to express our joy to God. Singing God’s praises is a blessed experience, and we not only send our praises to God, but we experience the fullness of joy as we do so. Yet, we can turn singing into an idol, seeking the fulfilment of joy that we get though praising God, instead of focusing on God himself. We can do that through many other things too, focusing on the gift rather than the giver. But praise God that he alone gives us lasting joy, as we look forward to the fulfilment of salvation in eternity with him. We can therefore have joy despite our circumstances. we can by joyful even when we are sad. Joy is therefore much better than happiness. It is no wonder that the old summary of the main purpose in life is “to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”

It was great to have Barry Rogers from Derry Donegal Christian Fellowship preach God’s Word to us yesterday (19 February 2012). Barry’s message was about Elijah on Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18. The situation there was where people were wavering between two opinions, not whole-heartedly for the Lord God. Also, Elijah was an ordinary person who could do great things through a great God. But being used by God like that involves learning to trust God and be faithful in small things first. If we want to see people turn to Jesus, we need to be faithful to God, and faithful in small things, and trust that God can bring many people to him.

Good parenting is not that common In an article on parenting recently by the Christian Institute, parents were said to sometimes be reluctant to discipline their children, not because it wasn’t in their best interests, but because they were more concerned about how they as parents would be viewed. They were more concerned with self-image than good parenting. Call in supernanny Today, lack of biblical parenting, or good parenting in general, has led to many parents not really knowing the basics of how to love and bring up their children properly. They don’t know the basics of discipline and care that are love in practice. So much so, that supernanny is called in to some homes to try to re-establish some sort of order amid chaos. The programme is not popular because there are a few isolated cases of poor parenting, but because these situations strike a chord in so many homes. Her solutions are therefore practical to many viewers. Have a look at this short summary of one family to see how quickly some proper loving discipline is effective and makes home life so much better and enjoyable. Let’s make supernanny redundant In this week’s Bible passage, Paul briefly reminds both children and parents (fathers, mainly) how they ought to relate to each other. “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother”—which is the first commandment with a promise—“so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.” Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” (Ephesians 6:1–4, NIV) When parents put into practice the basics of ‘loving’ discipline, not just discipline, or worst of all harsh, unloving discipline, children generally respond well quite quickly. Sometimes it takes longer. Discipline can take many different forms, and doesn’t need to be smacking, although with younger toddlers it is sometimes the only thing that will protect them from danger (e.g. from putting their hand onto dangerous objects such as a heater or fire because they don’t respond to ‘reason’ like older children or adults) or make them learn quickly (removal of privileges later on doesn’t always have the desired effect on younger children). Children ought to obey their parents (in the Lord = when being told to do what is right), and parents, especially fathers, ought to love their children and not be harsh on them. There is much more to parenting than that, but Paul reminds both of their mutual responsibilities in some key areas. These are in the context of submitting to each other that he introduced in Ephesians 5:21. If Christian parents put this into practice, there would be no need to call in supernanny!

Are all religions the same? The Dalai Lama often refers to the ‘oneness’ of all religions, the idea that all religions preach the same message of love, tolerance and compassion. But are all religions essentially the same? They certainly have a common moral standard, more or less, that we ought to live by. But they differ in how to resolve our failure to live up to this standard. According to author Stephen Prothero, to claim that all religions are the same is to misunderstand that each attempts to solve a different human problem. In his book God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World-and Why Their Differences Matter he shows that religions vary significantly, because they see humanity’s plight as different problems, with different solutions: Confucianism: the problem is chaos / the solution is social order Hinduism: the problem is reincarnation / the solution is spiritual liberation Buddhism: the problem is suffering / the solution is awakening Islam: the problem is pride / the solution is submission to Allah Judaism: the problem is exile / the solution is to return to God Christianity: the problem is sin / the solution is salvation by faith How can we know which one is right? They can’t all be right, because they’re not all addressing the same root problem. Despite some aspects of truth being found in many religions, which one addresses the core issue of mankind’s problem? Is faith always the way of salvation? Christianity says that the problem is rooted in sin, and that salvation is through faith alone. But then, others say that faith is believing the unbelievable! Isn’t faith a leap that is disconnected from reality? Isn’t faith believing without evidence, as some atheists would say? On the contrary, faith is believing the evidence. Faith that is not based in reality is faith in faith, not faith in truth. Faith in faith was very popular after World War II. Mark Pinsky comments in an interview on his book The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust that: Will Herberg’s book Protestant, Catholic, Jew, … was written in 1955. His thesis was that America’s civic religion was faith in faith—that is to say, faith in a nonspecific, non-sectarian faith. Or, as Eisenhower put it, “I don’t care what you believe in as long as you believe in something.” When people say; “Just believe” or “Have faith,” we can’t just believe that faith itself is the solution. It is who or what we are believing in that matters. The faith that produces results But how can we know what to believe in? And how can we know that it is the right belief? This is the question that the Apostle John answers in 1 John 5:1-12. Following on from his teaching in the previous chapter that the evidence of godliness in the lives of believers shows that they are God’s children (see last week’s podcast), John takes a different tack, based on the same evidence. In 1 John 5:1-12, he not only tells us that we ought to accept the testimony of God above that of what people say is true, by pointing to the dual witnesses of Jesus’ baptism and his death to disprove a heresy that was present in his day. He goes further and shows that the faith that overcomes worldliness, the faith that produces evidence of changed lives, the faith that has life from God, is the faith that works in reality. He shows that Jesus is the one we should believe in if we want to see evidence of faith that works, religion that changes lives towards godliness. While John’s argument in 1 John 4:7-21 is that the evidence proves that a believer is a child of God, in 1 John 5:1-12 his argument is that the same evidence validates the message that Jesus Christ is the one we should have faith in. The work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of God’s children is a third testimony to the truth of the gospel. The real and tangible evidence of lives where the life from God can be seen in practice not only validates that believers in Christ are God’s children, but that belief in Christ is what results in life from God: And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. (1 John 5:11–12, NIV84)

What is the cement that holds the Church together? According to Paul, it isn’t just a common belief or salvation – while we have these in common, they are not enough on their own to make God’s people grow into a beautiful Church. Focusing for a while not on our common salvation, Paul focuses on what ought to bind together God’s people – love. Continuing his imagery of the people of God as a temple, Paul considers how wide and long, deep and high the construction is (also alluding to the limitless bounds of God’s love too). While he has discussed suffering in the cause of the gospel in the previous verses, in Ephesians 3:14-21 he considers the people of God as a growing building. Each believer is a stone in the building. The cement between believers ought to be love. Paul prays that the believers will know how glorious the Church is, the temple of God’s Spirit, the body of Christ. In case we might be tempted to think that the Church is incapable of being anything significant, let alone glorious, Paul assures the believers that God can do far more in them that they can imagine or pray about. And he does all this to his own glory – glory in Christ Jesus, and glory in the Church. We might not be much in and of ourselves, but with God doing far more in us that we can conceive of, we can look forward to seeing his masterpiece completed on the grand opening day when all of God’s children will be with him for eternity (Rev. 21:2-4).