1 John 5:6-12 The Possession of Life

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d. iv. 1-v. 12. The Sources of Sonship: Possession of the Spirit as shown by Confession of the Incarnation.

•     The Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Error (iv. 1-6)
•     Love is the Mark of the Children of Him who is Love (iv. 7-21).
•     Faith Is the Source of Love, the Victory over the World, and the Possession of Life (v. 1-12) 

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6 This is he that came by water and blood, [even] Jesus Christ; not with the water only, but with the water and with the blood

6. "This is he that came." The identity of the man of Nazareth with the eternal Son of God is again emphasized as the central truth of Christian theology, the reception of which is necessary to the attainment of victory over the world and of translation out of darkness into the marvelous light of His kingdom. Then follow the witnesses to this truth which are "the water and the blood." Many are the explanations of these words. The ritualists understand them to signify the sacraments of baptism and of the Lord's Supper. Others see only symbols of purification and redemption. But it seems to the writer that John uses these words as a summary of Christ's earthly life and mission, baptism in the water of Jordan and His sacrificial death by the shedding of His blood for the redemption of the world. The cardinal truths of His gospel are here briefly stated; for at His baptism with water was His baptism with the Holy Spirit attended by the Divine announcement of His Sonship to God in words implying that He is the Son in a sense unique and peculiar. This was a sufficient opening and explanation of the whole of His ministry. His public and tragic death is at once the close and the explanation of His life of self-sacrifice. "The Gnostic teachers, against whom the apostle is writing, admitted that the Christ came 'through' and 'in' water; it was precisely at the baptism, they said, that the Divine Word united Himself with the man Jesus. But they denied that the Divine Person had any share in what was effected 'through' and 'in' blood; for, according to them, the Word departed from Jesus at Gethsemane. John emphatically assures us that there was no such separation. It was the Son of God who was baptized; it was the Son of God who was crucified; and it is faith in this vital truth that produces brotherly love, that overcomes the world, and is eternal life." (The Cambridge Bible for Colleges.)

Living Witnesses

In every generation there are needed living witnesses to corroborate the resurrection of Christ. For these on the witness stand of every age He has made provision in the gift of the Holy Ghost. "Believers started to live when He did, and their resurrection is a triumphant proof of His resurrection." On the day of Pentecost the astonished Jews saw a hundred and twenty duplicates of the resurrection of Jesus. A feeble, almost pulseless life they had before, but now they have a stalwart and abundant life. Every Christian who has had a personal Pentecost is a new attestation of the basal proof of Christianity, the resurrection of its Author. Every believer, if he lives at the summit of his privilege, is to an unbelieving world a risen Christ. O Spirit divine, multiply on the earth the number of such facsimiles of the resurrection of the God-Man as shall overwhelm the skepticism of the world and bring hosts of unbelievers to crown Jesus Lord of all!

As George Bowen wrote:

It is the vocation of every believer, in every generation, to afford in his own person the evidence that Christ has risen. Art thou a Christian? Then art thou one whom Christ has chosen to convey to men the proof that He is risen. This is thy vocation. Wilt thou roll back the stone upon the sepulchre and make the world believe that Christ is still there? This thou art actually doing if thou walk not in the Spirit.

— The Gospel of the Comforter, Chapter 9.

Knowing the Holy Spirit

In what sense may believers know the Comforter? Jesus, who sends Him, assured His disciples that they should know Him because of His intimate relation to them, dwelling with them and ultimately being in them. The indwelling would be true after His future coming. If we fulfill the condition, which is love to Christ certified by obedience, we shall receive the Comforter and shall know Him. Of course we shall know when we receive so important a person. It will be a crisis marking a new era in our lives. It is evident that this is not inferential knowledge, though this is important as a confirmation. It comes from noting the fruits of the Spirit described in the Bible and comparing them with the Christian graces observed in ourselves, love, joy, peace, etc. Knowledge of God in the scriptural sense is assimilative. No man can truthfully say that he knows the Comforter when these fruits of the Spirit are absent. But knowledge of a person includes more than an acquaintance with his works. I had known the military career of Gen. Grant, and had read his brief dispatches after his battles, but I had no personal acquaintance with that great soldier till one day in June, 1856, he permitted me to be presented to him and to shake hands with him on the veranda of a Saratoga hotel. I then for the first time knew Ulysses S. Grant.

In like manner we may have such a second-hand knowledge of the Paraclete as we find in the Holy Scriptures and in the testimony of persons filled with the Spirit, while strangers to the personal Holy Spirit. It is one thing to know much about Him; it is quite a different thing to have an intuitive perception of Him, and to feel the thrilling and transforming touch of His hand, and to commune with Him by day and by night more intimately than with any earthly friend. This is the kind of knowledge invoked in the so-called apostolic benediction. We do not understand that in our knowledge of the Holy Spirit we differentiate Him from the Father and the Son, though some eminent Christians testify to an acquaintance with each Person of the adorable Trinity, one in substance, but three in subsistences. If such a knowledge has been given to any believers, it is quite exceptional. It may be universal in the future world; it is certainly very rare in this. In our present state it is enough for us to receive the love of God and the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ commingled in one blissful stream descending through the channel of the Holy Ghost. A distinctive knowledge of each person would tend to divide the divine substance and to lead to tritheism, three Gods.

In the scheme of revelation the Father revealed Himself in His incarnate Son. After His visible form was received by the cloud which hid Him from the eyes of His gazing disciples on the day of His ascension, the Paraclete was sent down to testify of the absent God-Man, to keep Him in the world's thought and to glorify Him who came to glorify the Father. Hence the Paraclete glorifies both the Father and the Son when He glorifies the Son. Hence Paul's prayer for the Ephesian church, "That the Father would give them the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him." This and other texts show that it is not the mission of the Comforter to give prominence to Himself, but to Christ, to whom He bears witness. Thus

"...when a messenger comes to tell a king, when a witness gives a testimony for his friend, neither speaks of himself. And yet, without doing so, both the messenger and the witness, in the very fact of giving their evidence, draw our attention to themselves, and claim our recognition of their presence and trustworthiness. And just so the Holy Spirit, when He testifies of Christ and glorifies Him, must be known and acknowledged in His divine commission and presence." (Andrew Murray.)

It is in this sense that we are to have a knowledge of the Paraclete while He holds up a light for us to see the Father in His adorable Son.

— from The Gospel of the Comforter, Chapter 22.

Soul Winning and the Fullness of the Spirit

The intimate connection between efficiency and success in saving souls and the fulness of the Spirit, may be seen in the study of the lives of those among the laity and the ministry who have instrumentally turned many to righteousness. It is an open secret that their suasive power dated from the hour when their hearts were enlarged by the baptism of the Holy Ghost.

From this experience in the city of New York, in answer to the prayers of a few consecrated women, Dwight L. Moody dates the beginning of his highest efficiency as an evangelist. This made Mrs. Catherine Booth's preaching so pungent in convicting of sin among the middle and upper classes in the West End of London; while by the same mighty power as a conscious experience, her husband, Gen. Booth, was conquering the slums in the East End of that city of nearly five millions of souls. Dr. Finney, after the Spirit anointed him, was like an electric dynamo from which streams of power went forth whenever he stood up to preach, and sometimes from his speechless presence. Benjamin Abbott, converted late in life, so extremely illiterate that he preached on the "oyster man," misreading "austere man," preached in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland under the anointing of the Spirit with so great success that thousands were added to the Lord. A layman by the name of Carpenter was comparatively a cipher in the Presbyterian church until he was filled with the Holy Ghost, when he became, through personal effort, the most successful winner of souls in his generation. He drew men to Christ to the number of several thousands as estimated at his funeral. These are a few instances out of myriads in which the baptism of the Spirit has given all the qualities requisite for moving souls from sin unto Christ, love, self-sacrifice, persistence, fear, fearlessness, tenderness and sympathy.

We should have mentioned joyfulness as an element of great power in drawing sinners to salvation. Joy always attends the of the Holy Spirit. It differs from all other kinds of happiness which arise from a pleasant environment and depend on things external and hence changeable and transient. The joy of the Holy Ghost is internal, abiding and eternal. The joy of men and women pelted with brickbats and rotten eggs, taking joyfully the spoiling of their goods, has a strange power to convince the persecutors of the truth of the gospel, on the principle that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church."

— edited from The Gospel of the Comforter, Chapter 21.

All Christians are Called to Spread the Gospel

There is a sense in which every Christian, whether old or young, male or female, is called to preach the gospel. The first impulse of every regenerated soul is to run and tell the good news to others in the same family or neighborhood, shop or school. Andrew findeth Peter, and Philip, Nathaniel. On such informal but effective preaching, as on the wings of love and gladness, is the gospel of Christ to spread through all the world. Woe to that church which from month to month hears not the voice of the young convert in its assemblies. Its lease of life is short. God has no use for a sterile gospel. All may not be called to expound God's word or to define doctrines; but all are called to preach by example and testimony. Even the mutes are not excluded from this privilege and duty, for they can communicate with the slate and pencil, or with the dumb alphabet, and can all be persuasive by holy living.

The relation of experience is the most convincing preaching. A little girl of eight years came from her chamber to her mother, radiant with joy, and said, "Mother, God has pardoned my sins and given me a new heart; may I run across the street and tell the old cobbler?" "It will do no good, my child, for he is a confirmed and outspoken infidel," said the mother. "But it will do me good to tell him, and it may do him good, too; may I not go?" "Yes, if your heart is so much set on it." She went and told in artless simplicity of her sense of sin and guilt, of her repentant tears and prayers, of her trust in Jesus Christ who died to become her Saviour, of the light and joy which sprang up in her heart, of the feeling of love towards God, and of a voice sounding within saying, "Father, Father;" and whenever she thought of God he seemed no more like a policeman to arrest her, but a person more loving and tender than her mother. Before she finished her account of her joyful conversion her solitary hearer was in tears, which did not cease to flow until they were wiped away by the hand of divine mercy writing forgiveness on his believing heart.

When Paul rose to the summit of his eloquence, whether as a prisoner before Felix or Festus, or addressing the riotous Hebrews in their temple, he presented no elaborate chain of reasoning, but narrated in unadorned style his own experience of the transforming power which arrested him and, when he was obedient to the heavenly vision, made a new man of him when he had still in his pocket a commission to arrest and handcuff and drag to Jerusalem all the Hebrew disciples of Jesus found in Damascus.

Testifying of personal conscious salvation through faith is a kind of effective preaching to which all believers are called.

— edited from Jesus Exultant (1899) Chapter 5.

Confessing Christ

A confessing mouth always attends a believing heart.

"Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul."

This declaration, constantly put forth by living men, is perpetual testimonial to the spiritual medicine advertised in the word of God. A specific held up before the public from year to year, unaccompanied by attested cures, comes to be distrusted and neglected. Hence even the blood of sprinkling, potent to cleanse the heart from all unrighteousness, needs something more than the advertisement of the inspired penman; it needs the joyful voice of the healed leper, crying, "It hath cleansed me!"

The Spirit Can Qualify You to Preach

QUESTION: Being filled with the Spirit and entirely sanctified, though without education, except the ability to read, I feel called to preach. Cannot the Holy Ghost qualify me for this work?

ANSWER: Yes, he can bless your attempts at a thorough mastery of the Word of God and the art of speaking. God sometimes takes "the weak things of the world to confound the mighty," as in the cases of Benjamin Abbott and Bud Robinson, whose experiences you should read. God helps those who help themselves. A knowledge of the Holy Scriptures and a heart experience of  Christ's saving power are two cardinal elements of success. In this age of brain-worship and excessive leaning on education God likes to skip the universities and endow an ungrammatical Moody with the power to reach and save the multitudes. Such an act shows the church that her power lies not in the dead languages but in the living Christ. If the whole world is to be speedily evangelized the whole church must become preachers by precept and example. Our streets are becoming full of people whose only Gospel is the Sunday newspaper. The harvest is truly great and the laborers — wholly consecrated — are few. Hence I feel like encouraging every saved person to consecrate his or her gift of speech to the salvation of all for whom Christ died. Don't wait for a license, but begin now from the tail of a plow or cart and from the side of the washtub or sewing machine. Tell everybody of Christ's great salvation, backing up the message with your own experience. This was the way in which Christianity triumphed over all its persecutors and mounted the throne of the Caesars in 300 years.

— From Steele's Answers pp. 33, 34.