TEXT: 1 John 3
The Bible Knowledge Commentary continues, “The writer had declared that a confident and effective prayer life is founded on obedience to God’s “commands”. Now those commands are summed up in a single command consisting of faith and love. The phrase believe in the name of His Son contains the epistle’s first direct reference to faith. The Greek here contains no word for “in” so the expression could be rendered “believe the name of His Son.” In this context it certainly includes the faith in Christ’s name which true Christian prayer involves. First John 3:23 furnishes a kind of climax to the paragraph. As a Christian actively engages in deeds of love and as he achieves boldness before God in prayer, he is doing what God commands: living a life of confidence in the name of Christ which is undergirded by love. Since faith and love, thus conceived, go together, this kind of life is seen as obedience to a single “command.” Two new themes appear in verse 24. The first theme is the epistle’s first reference to God, or Christ, abiding in each obedient believer. Those who obey His commands live or abide in Him, and He in them. That the abiding life involves this mutuality is made plain in the Parable of the Vine and the Branches. The second new idea is the epistle’s first of six explicit references to the Holy Spirit. The way a believer can verify that God lives in him is by the operation of God’s Spirit in his life.”