From Haters to Lovers (1 John 3:11-24)

“If I were sitting on the end of the pier on a summer day enjoying the sunshine and the air, and someone came along and jumped into the water and got drowned ‘to prove his love for me’,I should find it quite unintelligible. I might be much in need of love, but an act in no rational relation to any of my necessities could not prove it. But if I had fallen over the pier and were drowning, and someone sprang into the water, and at the cost of making my peril, or what but for him would be my fate, his own, save me from death, then I should say, ‘Greater love hath no man than this.’ I should say it intelligibly, because there would be an intelligent relation between the sacrifice which love made and the necessity from which it redeemed.”

— James Dennon, The Death of Christ

Living Out our Union (1 John 3:1-10)

“Commandments are the railroad tracks on which the life empowered by the love of God poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit runs. Love empowers the engine; law guides the direction. They are mutually interdependent. The notion that love can operate apart from the law is a figment of the imagination. It is not only bad theology; it is poor psychology. It has to borrow from law to give eyes to love.”

— Sinclair Ferguson, The Whole Christ

Seeing Christ through the Tension (1 John 2:28-3:10)

“True, [God’s] love for me is not based on my qualification or my preparation but it is misleading to say that God accepts us the way we are. Rather he accepts us despite the way we are. He receives us only in Christ and for Christ’s sake. Nor does he mean to leave us the way he found us, but to transform us into the likeness of his son. Without that transformation and new conformity of life we do not have any evidence that we were ever his in the first place.”

— Sinclair Ferguson, The Whole Christ