The Lord is awe-inspiring, fascinating, intriguing, majestic, and full of splendor: breathtaking! Here is what I saw of him in 1 John 2:17,
“The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.”
This comment from John follows his observation that if we love the world we cannot have the love of the Father. These two are mutually exclusive in our lives. He doesn’t say that we can live forever if we do the will of God; he says those who do the will of God live forever. This is an important distinction. If we could earn eternal life by doing the will of God there would be no need to appeal to the cross of Jesus Christ. But as Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:8-9, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.”
We are hopelessly incapable of doing that which is God’s desire for us without him stepping into our lives. He steps in when we invite him in. As John says in John 1:12, “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” He then enables us to live lives that are pleasing to him. As John says in 1 John 3:9, “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God's seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God.” My point here is that we cannot do something to become what we are not when doing that something comes from being what we are not.
The exciting point to all of this for me is that when we come to embrace Jesus Christ in faith he changes us from within! As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17, we are now a “new creation”. Having embraced Jesus Christ in faith we are given the Holy Spirit who enables us to change from within to live lives that are pleasing to God. So much so that this becomes an indication of whether we have eternal life or not as John points to in our theme of worship today.
Astonishing and overwhelming as I think of it this morning.
Anything of the Lord capture your heart from Scripture today? Share your theme of worship with us from your Bible reading today. We’d love to hear from you!
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