Jackie DeShannon sang a lot about love. She made the song, “What the World Needs Now” famous. She was right. The world “needs love, sweet love,” but not just any love. The world needs the love of God.

Your amazing faith is what makes you an amazing person. That’s not a cliché, it’s a fact that is accomplished by the transforming work of God through the in dwelling of His Holy Spirit. That’s where your amazing faith came from in the first place: God. It was His gift to you when you heard the Word and responded in faith to it:

Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ. (Romans 10:17 | NIV84)

And your amazing faith, as amazing as it is, isn’t in itself, it isn’t in your abilities, or your dreams and hopes. Your faith isn’t your church or some talented individual. The object of your faith is God Himself, and His abilities and His Word, as Paul showed us during a raging storm at sea:

So keep up your courage, men, for I have faith in God that it will happen just as he told me. (Acts 27:25 | NIV84)

Not only did Paul discover the object of faith, but he also showed us the secret of faith – or more specifically, Paul showed us the secret to living righteously is in our amazing faith in Jesus Christ:

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20 | NIV84)

You and I work so hard to avoid trials and trouble and if we happen to fall into trouble on account of our faith, those kinds of trials are what God uses to stretch and toughen up our amazing faith:

These have come so that your faith–of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire–may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. (1 Peter 1:7 | NIV84)

Paul found out that living a righteous life was possible by having faith in Jesus Christ and living as He did, and He went on to show us how the Holy Spirit makes that possible:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23a | NIV84)

That’s the power of faith – the fruit of the Spirit. And the prayer of faith is something James taught us about when he talked about praying for a sick person. There is power in prayer just as there is power in faith and the prayer of faith really boils down to exalting the amazing will of God:

And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. (James 5:15 | NIV84)

We come now to the last aspect of your amazing faith, and it’s found in the most pastoral letter in the New Testament:

This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. (1 John 5:4c | NIV84)

John and his letter

In all, John wrote five pieces of literature that have been preserved for us in the New Testament; three letters, a book of prophecy, and one gospel. His first letter is unlike any other New Testament letter. Some scholars refer to it as an essay or a tract, and others refer to it as a sermon. It’s hard to categorize it, but it’s easy to see what John was trying to do. He wrote like a pastor, covering all manner of issues so as to build up and encourage his people in their faith. He writes with care, compassion, and passion.

The thing about John’s letters, and in particular his first one, is that they are chock full of theology. A lot of Christians hate that word almost as much as they hate the word “doctrine,” yet no believer can live without either. The “apostle of love,” as John is often referred to, covers such profound doctrines as sin and salvation, atonement and holy living. But unlike, say Paul in his letter to the Romans, John writes about various doctrines not in an academic, systematic philosophical manner, but he shows how these doctrines form the very foundation of our fellowship with God and how believing the right theology leads to a life of love.

John lived a very long life for a man of his day. He traveled with Jesus and wrote his letter sometime around the end of the first century, around 95 AD.

Faith is the victory

1 John 5:1 says a lot more than appears on the surface:

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. (1 John 5:1 | NIV84)

The word “believes” a Greek verb, pisteuon, and it’s a strong verb. Merely understanding the Gospel and confessing the truth of salvation does not make anybody a partaker of the life of God in Jesus Christ. It’s one thing to outwardly confess faith in Jesus Christ, as John had previously covered back in 4:2, 15. But what is outward must be inward first. Remember what Paul wrote:

For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. (Romans 10:10 | NIV84)

But when you couple the truth of verse 1 with what John says in verse 2, you get the notion that Christianity is absolutely exclusive:

This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. (1 John 5:2 | NIV84)

Only Christians – only those who have experienced a conversion of the heart leading to a confession of the mouth, leading in turn to a wholehearted love and devotion to God and His Word – are children of God. In spite of what you may have heard to the contrary, not everybody is a “child of God.” In John’s Gospel, there is this interesting exchange between Jesus and some Jews.

Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire.” (John 8:42-44a | NIV84)

Wow! That’s Jesus talking, telling unbelievers that God is not their father, the devil is. A statement like that is like a deep line in the sand. If a person wants to be a child of God, then he must sign onto the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Christianity is exclusive to Christians. Being a child of God is exclusive to Christians. And loving the children of God is part of loving God. You can’t claim to love God yet live out of fellowship with the body of Christ. The two go hand-in-hand. That’s why being in church is so important. It’s not that going to church saves you, it’s that being in regular fellowship with the local body of Christ is one way of showing your love and support for the children of God, and God Himself.

But again, actions without an inner commitment constitute nothing.

This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome… (1 John 5:3 | NIV84)

Just to exclaim, “I love God” while you are in church amounts to exactly nothing. Anybody can say anything. John made that pretty clear a chapter back:

If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. (1 John 4:20 | NIV84)

But now he adds the bit about non-negotiable obedience to God’s commands. In John’s thinking, that’s simply doing what God wants you to do; it’s living the way He wants you to. And that’s not hard to do, by the way. The world thinks it is. As far as the world is concerned, only one person a 10,000 is a “Saint.” But in the Kingdom, we all are. And if you forget what those “commands” are, John’s already told us:

And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us. (1 John 3:23-24 | NIV84)

Love was a big deal to John, and it should be to you, too, if you consider yourself a Christian. We should be deliberately looking for ways to encourage fellow believers all the time. A phone call, an email, a text message, or a smile and good word can go so far in making the day a little for another Christian. Too often though, we find it easier to tear down a fellow believer, especially if we don’t like them in the first place. When we gossip or speak about another Christian using derogatory terms, then we aren’t being obedient to God. During the Second World War, there was a saying, “Loose lips sink ships.” Well, in our war against the forces of evil today, “loose lips sink lives” all the time. Your grandmother was right: If you don’t have something good to say about someone, don’t say anything.

And that gets us to the verse that got us into this whole thing:

…for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. (1 John 5:4 | NIV84)

Verse 4 is really just a continuation of verse 3, so let’s ignore the verse break and put the sentence together, the way John intended:

And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world.

God’s commands are not too much for the believer, because the believer has been born of God and he, by virtue of his new birth, overcomes the world. What that means is simple. To John, “the world” is opposed to God and God’s people and that opposition is manifested in the form of disobedience. So when you, as a believer, are tempted to disobey the Word of God and live in a way that shames God and the body of Christ and hurts other believers, you are doing what “the world” wants you to do, not what God wants you to do.

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world–the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does–comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever. (1 John 2:15-17 | NIV84)

The things of the world look so good and promise so much, but according to John, you never have to side with the world over Christ. It is entirely possible to live in constant obedience to the Will and Word of God because you have overcome the world; you are stronger than “the world.” By virtue of your faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, you have already overcome this sinful world in the spiritual sense. In the practical, day-to-day sense, that same faith, which was given to you by God, empowers you to live in such a way as to glorify God and shun the world.

To overcome the world begins with being victorious over all the things in your life that have ever tempted you or will ever tempt you to go back to the ways of the world. Things like your attitude, your dreams, your desires, your ambition, your emotions, and so on. Your amazing faith gives you the strength to overcome those those inborn stumbling blocks so that you are equipped to overcome the world.

Your amazing faith, that incredible, indispensable gift from God, not only saved you and set you free from sin; it not only enables you live like Jesus lived and love like Jesus loved, it gives you what you need to live in complete victory over the evil in this world. It empowers you to live in obedience to God and to love other believers. Your amazing faith is such an integral part of your life, you can’t live without it.