1John2:24-27 gives us a guide as to whether or not our trusting Jesus as Lord & Savior is taking root in our lives or not-> “As for you, see that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you. If it does, you also will remain in the Son and in the Father.And this is what he promised us-eternal life.I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray.As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about all things and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit-just as it has taught you, remain in him.”When a person sincerely turns their life over to trusting Jesus Christ,HE anoints that person with His Holy Spirit coming to that person to be a Helper;Teacher;Confidante;Counselor;Guide;Encourager, of ALL THINGS HOLY & RIGHTEOUS! Just like it is said that there are no atheists in fox holes, there are likely times in everyone’s life that they cry out to God in one way or another for HIS Help, and to make a deal with God that if HE does something that addresses our situation, that we will change our life and trust Him! These verses in 1John are talking to us about these times that we cry out to God for His Help, encouraging us to make certain that this TRUST in The Lord “remains in you”. This “remains in you” is our hearts allowing God’s Gifts of Mercy&Grace through Christ to take root in our heart/mind/life by nurturing the efforts of Jesus to Help us;Teach us;Counsel us;Guide us,& Encourage us to ALL THINGS HOLY & RIGHTEOUS for our BEST! The challenge/problem is that there are “those who are trying to lead us astray”! Satan and his minions have so infected the world with all things UNholy & UNrighteous by tainting what God Perfectly Created with sin, which is the core of all “diseases” that lead to eternal death. Sin is also what the world uses to lead us astray/away from the cure for sin that only Jesus can provide. For those that do allow trusting Jesus take root in our lives/remain in us, we will remain in the Son and in the Father...and have even eternal life! The telltale of whether or not “what we have heard from the beginning” about God’s Awesome Love is taking root in our life; if indeed what God has given us through His Word & The Life;Death;Resurrection;Ascension of Christ is taking root in our lives and changing how we think&live; If we are sincere when we cry out to Jesus to come into our lives and take root in our lives, then His Helping;Teaching;Confiding;Counseling;Guiding;Encouraging; and HIS Saving of our lives will change our lives as HE REMAINS IN us, and as HIS Cure for sin gets rid of sin in our lives as we go about living and seeking&following His Word&Spirit, and “what we have heard from the beginning is remaining in us every day. Dear Lord Jesus, I pray for you to help me allow You to be at the forefront of all aspects of my life today, so I can recognize sin as it makes every effort in my life to lead me astray, and may I have Your Courage to remain in You through this day…, and into all my tomorrows!

1John2:9-17 are addressing those who make the claim of accepting The Gospel of Jesus Christ as their only source of Eternal Security!

(I copied this “definition” of The Gospel from gotquestions.org ,”The gospel of Jesus Christ is the good news that God provided the way for mankind to be freed from the penalty of sin (John 14:6; Romans 6:23). Everyone dies physically, but those who believe in Jesus Christ are promised a physical resurrection unto eternal life (John 11:23–26). Those who reject Christ will not only die physically but will undergo a “second death,” which the Bible describes as an eternal lake of fire (Revelation 20:13–14). Jesus is the only One in whom salvation can be found (Acts 4:12).)The verses in 1John2:9-17 describe what a life that has sincerely turned to a new life into The Light of The Gospel will look like.God gives us these verses so we can do at least 2 things.One is for us to have the help of HIS Word in identifying those who are sincere in their “life-trust” in The Gospel of Jesus Christ and those who more than likely are not.The other purpose is for those who are sincere in their Faith in The Gospel of Jesus Christ to have The Guiding Light of God’s Word to keep us from veering away from the new life that Jesus Christ gives us through His Gospel.In verses 15-17 of this section,God gives us the simple guide for those living in His Light,and not the darkness of the world- “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.For everything in the world-the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life-comes not from the Father but from the world.The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.”.When John talks about “the world”,he isn't referring to the physical sphere we call Earth. Rather, it's a system of thought, motivation and ideas. "Love" should define Christians in their relationship with God and each other. "Lust" characterizes people imbued with the spirit of the world and the demonic forces that shape it.John names three lusts that govern the world.Putting riches before God is the lust of the eyes, which is materialism or coveting. A desire to be famous is the pride of life. The third, lust of the flesh, refers to sinful sensual pleasure. God created sensual pleasure to be enjoyed by a man and a woman within the confines of marriage, but sex outside marriage is driven by lust, not love.Boil down is that our lives are defined by what&/or who we love,that is why this section of Scripture starts out with “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.”The WHO and WHAT we love are the ultimate determining factors of whether or not we have sincerely taken the gifts of The Gospel of Christ as our own or not.This doesn’t mean that we all have an overnight night&day transformation when we decide to Trust Christ! It does mean that our lives will bare witness to THE LIGHT of The Gospel of Jesus Christ becoming an ever increasing guiding LIGHT for our lives as we dedicate our lives to the pilgrimage of being one that lives in The Light of The Gospel of Jesus Christ.Dear Lord,not only does my life not always indicate my living in Your Light,but my motivations and thoughts fail miserably much of the time.I praise You for Your patience & persistence & perseverance with me...and I pray for Your Spirit to help me have more life&motive&thought steps today that are in Your Light!

People ask,”how do you know if you are a Christian,or not?”1John2:3-6 gives an answer-“We know we have come to know him(Jesus Christ) if we obey his commands.The man who says,”I know him”,but does not do as he commands is a liar,& the truth is not in him.But if anyone obeys his Word,God’s love is truly made him complete in him.This is how we know we are in him(Jesus Christ);Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.”This doesn’t mean that only if we never sin,& always do according to God’s instructions can we be certain that we are Christians.Yes,it does mean that our hearts desire will be to know and follow The Father’s Will as Jesus did(Matthew6:38,Jesus said-“For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.”)!When we ask Jesus into our lives to be our Lord & Savior,He gives us His Spirit to be our Helper,and much of the HELP His Spirit gives us is a Right Conscience that enables us to know deep down what is Right & Wrong.Romans 7:15-23 talks about this when it says”I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work:.......For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.”When we are yet sinners,we will not have the intense internal conflict that Romans talks about.Sure,we may have an intuitive sense of something that is really bad,but not to the extreme these verses in Romans describe.But once we turn to Christ and His Mercy&Grace to save us from our sin,we will have His Spirit living inside us that our old sin nature will wage a war against.And our day to day battles with our old sin nature as we face temptations and all sorts of character/heart situations,decisions,&responses as we walk step by step through every day we live is what we will sense in out hearts&souls.This is why The Holy Spirit inside us will create in us a hunger to know God’s Heart about “life stuff”...to know what God has given us to learn about HIS HEART in His Word.We see that even Jesus got up early to pray and be with His Father (Mark1:35,”Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.”),& David talks about his heartfelt hunger/desire to first seek the Lord in the mornings(Psalm5:3”My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O Lord; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look to YOU...”;Psalm63:1,”O God, You are my God; early will I seek You; my soul thirsts for You,  my flesh faints for You...”).This is what goes on in our souls& our hearts when our Trust in Jesus alone for our salvation has opened the door of our hearts to His Holy Spirit...we have the Holy Spirit lovingly drawing us to know God’s Awesome Expressions of Love and His Great personal concern for our daily lives....we have a hunger to know more and more about HIM and HIS Love Letter to us...so we have a tug on our hearts to read His Word and to talk with Him about what His Spirit will reveal to us in His Word,& talk with HIM about how His Word causes us to think about our step by step walking throughout every day we live...& how we confront the battles lying in wait for us every day.Some battles we will win,& some we will lose...this is the “waging war” that Romans talks about.There will be the skirmishes&battles that Romans talks about in all of our days,and as we successfully confront more and more of these with God’s Word and His Spirit’s help...we take more and more ground away from the sin nature and open more and more ground up in our lives for Christ and His victories in our life making the love of God more complete in us(1John2:5”But if anyone obeys His Word,God’s Love is made complete in him.”).The hunger in our souls&hearts&lives to seek God in the mornings is a pretty good sign of The Holy Spirit presence in our lives.The proof of the pudding is who wins in our souls&hearts&lives in the skirmishes with sin we face every day...,because God Always Wins!Sure,we will have the struggles that Romans talks about...but The Holy Spirit’s perseverance in the lives of those that sincerely Trust in Christ will have more and more victories in these skirmishes as they walk every day as Jesus walked.And this is some of the “how we know”!Dear Lord...I pray for Your Spirit’s presence in my life to be the first voice I seek in the mornings,beckoning for me to spend time in The Lap of my Father in Heaven...and for Your help in kneading Your Love Letter so thoroughly into my heart&soul&life that the responses I have to the skirmishes I have with sin today are driven back and away from the ground in my life they previously claimed.I know sin will not give up,but I pray as Your Love is made complete in me...that the ground I give You to take is never taken again by the sin that previously laid claim to those areas of my life.

When we are in the kind of fellowship with God the Father that 1John1:1-4 describes, then 1John1:5&7 says that our lives will be “walking in the LIGHT, as HE is in the LIGHT”. In other words, if we are to have a living relationship with God the Father then our lives will display evidences of that relationship as we live our days making the decisions that determine how we live, what we say, the ways that our character is shaped, and how we form and value the other relationships in our life ->”This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.” Sandwiched between these two verses in verse 6 the Bible says that if we claim to be Christians and yet we are not walking in the Light but walking in the darkness(not seeking&following God’s Light),that we are liars and do not truly live by The Truth/God’s Word. We can check all the boxes of attending Church, Sunday School & Bible Study Groups..., support and/or participate in missions..., tithe, participate in Church leadership, teach Sunday School and/or preach...,etc., yet if the way we live-talk-breathe-think & the ways invest our lives does not line up with what The Bible teaches...then we are liars/phonies...we think that we are something that we are not, which is the basis of ARROGANCE! God addresses this HIMSELF in Isaiah 66:2b when HE says,”This is the one I esteem:he who is humble & contrite in spirit,& trembles at MY Word.” The humility and contrition that God talks about is when we realize that nothing we DO makes us worthy of any favor nor specialness of any kind in God’s Family of believers/followers. The trembling at HIS Word is when the prime motivation in our life is to know and follow the heart of our Father in Heaven as HE expresses HIS Heart to us through HIS Word and by HIS Spirit. That is why the Holy Spirit inside the lives of true believers leads us to a hunger that is only genuinely satisfied when we sincerely seek God’s Heart in the Scriptures so our lives can honor Our Father in Heaven’s Awesome Love for us! Dear Lord...I confess that I am a “box checker” most of the time...forgive me...but I pray for You to let me NOT stop at being forgiven this morning...may Your Spirit living inside me give me whatever I need so that my heart is changed by what I learn about Your Heart...and that my thoughts, my words, and my steps the steps that I have and take today are in lockstep with Your Heart...so that with YOUR HELP I may walk in YOUR LIGHT…and not the darkness of the world….

The Apostle John wrote 1John around 50-55 years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ!Right after Christ’s Ascension the devil got busy leading people away from the TRUTHS of Christ by spreading UNtruths about Christ,specifically denying HIS Absolute Deity that John talks about in John1:1-14”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.....The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth”.Because of the efforts of the devil leading people away from Christ and toward Gnosticism having such an impact on the “religious”,John was compelled to point everyone back to God’s Word through Moses and the prophets found in what we have in the Old Testament.Just as triangulation is the needed information making it possible for our current GPS technology to give us pinpoint revelation of our geographic position,we need the Old Testament to give us all the information necessary to give us pinpoint revelation of ALL the TRUTHS about Christ and His Gospel.If we don’t have this “spiritual triangulation”,we will be susceptible to MISinformation guiding us to all things other than the TRUE Gospel of Christ,& Absolute AWE of God.So 1John begins with verses 1-4 putting an immovable stake in the ground about the Deity of Christ,& that HE is the fulfillment of everything that has been said and prophesied about the coming Messiah since the beginning of time (“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched-this we proclaim concerning the Word of life(God’s Word made flesh-Christ).The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.We write this to make our joy complete..”).John is yearning for everyone to have the fellowship that he has found with The Father in Heaven through Christ...only Christ!The Gnostics around John we’re not having a problem with believing Christ rose from the dead,nor that He was “a divine being”.In fact the Gnostics made it part of their false gospels.But they allowed themselves to be MISled into all sorts of dark spiritual areas because of not leaning into “the Word of life”/God’s Word for the spiritual guidance/information that would’ve given them the “triangulation” that would have led them to an AWESOME REVERENCE for GOD & WHO CHRIST IS, and ALL CHRIST has done for our salvation from sin, and ETERNAL GIFTS!The Gnostics of John’s time based their spirituality on Christ being a divine being that raised from the dead...,and NOT The Word Made Flesh/God Made Flesh...living/teaching/suffering/dying/resurrecting,& ascending to Heaven to show us God’s Only Way to have Eternal Salvation.This was because of their lack of awesome appreciation for the Word of life God had given them from Genesis to the book of Malachi!For us,without Genesis to Malachi in our lives,we will have less than the true AWE of The Word made flesh/Jesus Christ that is revealed to us in the books of Matthew to Revelation.This is the same AWE that brought Moses prostrate...turned Esther’s heart to God’s purpose for her life....gave Joshua perseverance&courage...humbled David so he could chase after GOD’s own Heart...made Josiah tear his robe & change a nation for God...led Shadrach,Meshach,&Abednego faithfully into a fiery furnace to walk with The Lord...led Daniel into a lions den & be saved...led the Prophets to boldly live for God & declare HIS Word in TRUTH...led the Apostles and the early Disciples to live,suffer,&even die in such a way that the first century Roman Empire was turned upside down for The Gospel of Christ.This is the same AWE of God that Christ came for us to have...so our life and the lives around us will have the same Eternal Impact that these men and women had.For they are “the great cloud of witnesses” that Hebrews 11 draws us to look to for inspiration/encouragement/discernment/perspective/perseverance...& the TRUE HOPE found ONLY in Christ.Dear Lord,I pray for Your help in having my mind&heart drawn to Your Word of life in IT’s entirety...& for Your Spirit to help me understand Your TRUTHS in such ways that I am AWED by You in the same ways that “the great cloud of witnesses” were...so my heart/mind/life would be changed as theirs were….and live with the passion for and commitment to YOUR LOVE that they did…