The Little Letters - Day 5

1 John 2:1  My dear children, I am writing this to you so that you will not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate who pleads our case before the Father. He is Jesus Christ, the one who is truly righteous. 2 He himself is the sacrifice that atones for our sins—and not only our sins but the sins of all the world.
3 And we can be sure that we know him if we obey his commandments. 4 If someone claims, “I know God,” but doesn’t obey God’s commandments, that person is a liar and is not living in the truth. 5 But those who obey God’s word truly show how completely they love him. That is how we know we are living in him. 6 Those who say they live in God should live their lives as Jesus did.

The break in the text is probably a little incongruous with the thoughts that the author has been presenting. The first and second verses of Chapter 2 seem as if they should really be included in Chapter 1. So when the author is calling his congregation “my dear children,” it is at the conclusion of a reprimand. However, you can see clearly that the object of this lesson is not the behavior of the children, it is the person of Jesus Christ himself.
 
When  my wife’s father would discipline his children, he would pray with them before he spanked them. Admittedly, this did not happen often, but it made my wife afraid of “amens” in certain situations. The author is capping the end of his reprimand with a bit of hope, which is actually beautiful. He reminds them that it is Jesus who is truly righteous and atones for our sins.
But then it is as if he almost thinks better of it, and decides that just our sins are not enough to encapture the sacrifice and power that was the death and resurrection of Jesus. So he includes that the sacrifice that atones (present tense) for all of our sins is actually the same sacrifice that atones for the sins of the entire world.
Let us think about that for a moment. Eight billion people all sinning all over the world. But that number does not include those who have gone before us and will come after us. The number is staggering. Some estimates put it at 117 billion people over the earth’s history! That is an unreal number! But the truth is that it is an estimate, as we can never really know how many people lived at any given time over the whole history of the world.
But when you think about the fact that the sacrifice of Jesus covers all that sin, we begin to realize that it is not something that we have ever seen before. The magnitude of that sacrifice can only be reasonable if it is God who made that sacrifice.
Verse 3 moves us into what we can call the true second chapter of the book of James. And this is about doing what we say we believe. Let me make the jump for you. If we say we believe in Jesus, but then we don’t do those things that Jesus says we ought to do, are we really showing love to the one who saved us.

It is not about behavior  but about relationships and responses to that love. The quality of our love for him tends to be lived out in our love for others.

1. How do you show love to the ones you love?
2. Do you think there should be relationships that show that you love Jesus? What would that be? 
3. How can you show God how much you affirm his love in your life?