How to Grow in Faith
1 John 2:12-17
Here John addresses those he calls children, fathers, and young men. John has a bit of a poet in him and so we see this most likely as a non-literal way to reflect the ages, stages and phases we go through as we grow in faith and in our knowledge of the LORD.
As you look over your shoulder at your own journey of faith, do you remember that initial thrill of being a new convert? The eagerness and hunger you had for the LORD and for His Word? Or, perhaps you identify with the ones John calls “fathers.” Have you walked through some struggles and started to see some fruit of the Spirit beginning to emerge in your character? Increasing levels of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Or perhaps you are like those John calls “young men” passionately serving with all your strength and knowledge whenever you are needed?
vv. 15-17 What did John mean by the term “the world” that he uses so often throughout his writings? Perhaps a good summary would be: The way the world thinks and acts apart from God, as if God doesn’t exist or, He just doesn’t matter.
“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.”
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
You and I have been designed and created with eternity in our hearts. God gave us a capacity to live in relationship with Him and as St Augustine once said, “our hearts will always be restless until we find our rest in Him.”
“The love of God and the love of the world, are two affections, not merely in a state of rivalship, but in a state of enmity⏤and that so irreconcilable, that they cannot dwell together in the same bosom.”
Thomas Chalmers, 1780-1847
“I am not what I ought to be. I am not what I want to be. I am not what I hope to be. But still, I am not what I used to be. And by the grace of God, I am what I am.”
John Newton, 1725-1807
