We are going to be in 1 John. If the Lord wills and we live, we will visit 1 John several times—not today—but today will be a beginning part with it.
Let us pray together.
Lord, we worship You together. We come and just thank You that we have no need to be distant, no need to be far away, and no need to just learn about You; but we can fellowship with You right now, be near to You, worship You, and, in all closeness, abide in You, and You abide in us.
Lord, we just commit this time to You and trust that Your words would be the words of life to us, that in our own hearts we can commune with You in fellowship with You. In Jesus’ name, amen.
I would like to read the first four verses from 1 John. These will be the main verses we look at today as a foundation to the whole letter of 1 John.
That which was from the beginning,
that which we have heard,
that which we have seen with our eyes,
that which we contemplated,
and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life—
and the life has been manifested,
and we have seen, and bear witness, and report to you the eternal life,
which was with the Father, and has been manifested to us—
that which we have seen and heard we report to you,
that you also may have fellowship with us;
and our fellowship is indeed with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.
And these things we write to you, that your joy may be full.—1 John 1:1-4
And then one more verse is in 1 John 5:13.
These things have I written to you, that you may know that you have eternal life, who believe on the name of the Son of God.
—1 John 5:13
When I shared with Catherine that I was going to be looking into 1 John, it was similar to when I shared with her that I was going to talk about Melchizedek. She just frowned and thought, “What are you going to say?” Because I have talked about 1 John so much in the past, in little parts here and there, in different places.
It includes my favorite gospel-witnessing verses, and I have been helped so much through this book. Since I have been a Christian, the first book I tried to study was 1 John, and I gave up—I think I gave up four times studying 1 John. I moved on to more interesting, studious books like Hebrews or Romans, or things that I could piece together in a clearer way.
But I have always come back to 1 John because I get spiritually helped from it. I have not always understood much, so I just pay attention to what I do understand. But as I have read it through the years as a Christian, maybe this has been the most helpful book to me personally. So it is a real joy just to be looking at it again.
I have been studying it, purposing to finish a study with it—although we never actually finish anything with the Word of God.
Something that eventually, through hearing from others and finding it in the Word of God, I discovered helped me to read the whole book without being bothered. If you read 1 John, there should be at least four places where you get stuck and say, “That does not make sense,” or, “This does not agree with the rest of the Word of God.”
It has a few of those types of verses where you read them and they sit oddly with you at first. You keep reading because the whole book really is the Word of God, and you can tell. But when you read those verses, you think, “I do not quite get this.”
Things like, “Whoever is begotten of God does not sin.” You get stuck and wonder, “Am I begotten of God? But have I sinned?”
With our mindsets, at least in this country often, and with the way that we do our schooling, many of us think more logically. We think in Apostle Paul’s style. We think one plus one is two. We think of truth in terms of doctrine: How can I make sense of this? How can I understand all the parts so that it is balanced?
But in the Word of God, it does not always balance itself out unless you put it all together. On purpose, the Holy Spirit will draw us so far to a point that we can almost spiritually feel the truth in it, but our minds take a little time to catch up.
There are explanations, and it does make sense. But especially with this book, if you approach it simply trying to get a teaching out of it, you will miss the teaching out of it.
For example, even with that verse, if we are looking literally at the fact of being born again, it is incorrect. But if you are looking at the experience of abiding in your born-againness—if you are currently fellowshipping in the life that you have been birthed with—you realize that you do not sin when you are living by the eternal life within.
The real key that unlocks it is to know what it is about, and it is truly about fellowship. It is for Christians.
Although I use 1 John 1:9 probably more than any other verse to help people come to Christ, and although the principle is true for unbelievers in many of these things, and you can share the good news in every chapter, it is all written for believers.
So with every verse, you do not need to ask, “Is he talking about unbelievers or believers?” It is all for believers, and it is all a type of fellowship.
Just what we read, you can pick out the words in those first four verses. He is saying, “I want to report this to you so we can have fellowship. My fellowship is with the Father and with His Son.” Right from the beginning, the word fellowship is not used a whole lot—it is really in chapter 1—but the feeling of fellowship and the experience of fellowship is the whole book.
This book is all fellowship. If we catch that, then we can experience these things: this sharing of something that we all are involved in. We are in a fellowship. We are sharing something together, and he is writing this to share something with us.
I read 1 John 5:13. Last week I was sharing on assurance of eternal life, or blessed assurance, a little bit beyond assurance of salvation. But this verse helped me to realize that I am definitely saved. I know that I have eternal life.
I bring these things up to say that my personal experience has been so rich with this book. This last verse that we read says, “These things write we to you, that your joy may be full.” Some translations say, “My joy may be full,” or however it works out.
When we talk about these things, there is a fullness of joy going on. Even as I was walking up here, it kept coming back to me: my joy is so full. If I can share just a little bit of what the Lord has been showing, I feel like we will have joy together.
My joy is not really full unless I can share with someone and they get joy also. Then there is a fullness of joy bouncing back and forth. There is fullness of joy with the Lord, but it almost feels incomplete when we do not get to fellowship together.
So if we can go through this together with the thought of experiencing eternal life, with the thought of sharing life together and fellowshipping, I think we will be very blessed. I think our joy will really be full.
With the theme being fellowship, I want to look into the verse that says, “That you may have fellowship,” and, “Our fellowship is with the Father and the Son.”
Here you can see a few layers of fellowship. You see fellowship with the Father and the Son. In this whole realm of fellowship, the Father and the Son began fellowship before the beginning—before things began.
The Father and the Son have always had eternal fellowship. The life of God is an eternal life that has always existed. This fellowship between the Father and the Son has been for eternity, and this is the type of fellowship that we are stepping into.
John says, “Our fellowship.” This is the Apostle John and the others who began with him. Their fellowship is with the Father and the Son. The Apostle John stepped into the very fellowship of the Father and the Son. It became his fellowship—what he began to experience and share.
Then he writes this so that we also may have fellowship. You see a progress: the fellowship between the Father and the Son was shared with those who knew Christ physically on earth and were brought into fellowship. Then they report it to us, and we are brought into this fellowship.
In 1 Corinthians 1, we are told that we have been called into the fellowship of God’s Son. This is the fellowship all of us have been called into: the fellowship between the Father and the Son, the fellowship of the Lord Jesus.
In 1 John 1:6, he says that if we say we have fellowship with Him but walk in darkness, we are lying. But this is a true phrase: we have fellowship with God. Our fellowship with God is the fellowship that God has in the Godhead between the Father and the Son.
Acts 2:42 speaks of “the fellowship of the apostles.” Some have made something odd out of this, but there is nothing odd about it. It is simply their fellowship. It is the same fellowship that we are brought into.
It is not a unique thing only among the Twelve or the expanded group of apostles. It is the same fellowship that John reports to us and that we join into. Otherwise, it cannot be shared. If it is shared and we receive it, it is fellowship by definition. We share it in common.
The fellowship of the apostles, in which the whole early church participated, was the same fellowship for all of them. What fellowship was that? It was the fellowship that all of us have been called into: the fellowship of the Son of God, the fellowship between the Father and the Son.
In 1 John 1:7, it says that if we walk in the light as He is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another.
That is similar to where John says, “I want to report these things to you so that you can have fellowship and our joy can be full together.” If we are walking in the light together, we are receiving from each other. We have fellowship with one another.
Then the blood of God’s Son, Jesus Christ, cleanses us from every sin. These are layers of fellowship. We are sharing this all together, and it goes beyond time, all the way into the Godhead of the Father and the Son.
It is something way beyond us. It is not stuck in our personalities, our history, or our failures. We are not sharing in common our victories over sin; we are sharing in common this eternal life that is victorious over sin.
Everything that our fellowship hinges upon is beyond us. It is something untouchable, but we touch it. As we experience it and join in with this fellowship, we find ourselves in a largeness beyond our small lives.
We find ourselves meeting believers with whom we do not have much in common, and suddenly we have everything that matters in common because we have fellowship—the fellowship of eternal life.
You meet a Christian and begin to hear how they met Christ. You are walking in the light, and they are walking in the light. The next thing you know, you are in joy as you talk to each other.
You meet someone very different from you. You may even disagree on some understandings in the Bible. But as you find out how each of you has been born again, as you find out how that believer—even a difficult believer—has been saved, you have a little joy because you have just touched fellowship.
When you struggle with someone and cannot walk along together because you disagree on every point, you can pause everything and step back and say, “Tell me how you met Christ.” You hear their story of how they know the Lord Jesus, and you share how you know the Lord Jesus.
The next thing you know, with the person who seemed impossible, you have joy together. Your joy is full because you have touched into the eternal fellowship that you share in common. It is our basis for everything.
When you cannot agree on something, backtrack and go right to where you discovered Christ. Then we can build from there.
This fellowship is really where it all begins, and it is where we all exist in our church experience. Sometimes we replace the word assembly or church with the action word fellowship, because it is when the church is churching that it is fellowship.
The church is called out from the world and gathered together. But when they are gathered together, what they are doing is sharing Christ together. Then they are fellowshipping. That is what we are doing as the church. This is our fellowship.
In 1 John, the theme really is fellowship, but the whole basis of fellowship is the thing in common that we all share: eternal life.
What we have that we are sharing is from eternity. It is life that we share in common, and it is called life eternal, or eternal life, in the Scriptures.
I want to backtrack into this book of 1 John and say some things about it that I think will help us learn about eternal life, or bring us into this whole realm of fellowship.
It is called 1 John because we think John wrote it, and with good reason. There are many nerdy things to talk about when you study a book, but I pulled these out of my nerdy notes because I think they help us discover eternal life and provide a foundation for meditating through this whole book.
John the Apostle is the one we assume wrote this book. Actually, we really believe he wrote this book. There is no direct statement saying, “This is John the Apostle.”
Paul often starts his letters with his name: “Paul, the apostle.” But this letter begins with the ground moving: “That which was from the beginning.” You find yourself in a zoom-out of all eternity and all time. You do not start with, “Hello, this is John the Apostle.”
So we look at external evidence—evidence outside the book—and internal evidence, clues inside the letter that might tell us who wrote it.
There are two believers called disciples of John—Polycarp and Papias. They were disciples of Christ, but they spent time with John the Apostle. In their writings, they mention this letter, quote a little from it, and use many of the same phrases. When they speak about it, they say that it is from John the Apostle.
That is pretty trustworthy. The men who spent time with John said it was from John the Apostle. The next layer did not know John, but they knew people who knew John. We are playing telephone, but the people who heard it first said it was from John the Apostle. They probably knew.
Another thing is that it has John’s style. We are reading the Gospel according to John in our Friday-night times, and when you read it beside 1 John, you find many parallel phrases and similar words.
For example, 1 John 1:4 says, “These things we write to you that your joy may be full.” In John 15:11, Jesus says:
I have spoken these things to you, that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.
—John 15:11
And in John 16:24, He says that your joy may be full. You do not have this phrase in many other places. Verse by verse, through 1 John, you can pair passages with the Gospel of John. Some are very exact, almost like someone copied the other person. It makes you realize that it is the same author.
Not only that, but John uses a certain type of language—words like love, life, and light. Everybody uses those words, but John is big on them. Even the way he speaks about the world and the antichrist is distinctively Johannine.
This book is often used in biblical Greek classes because it is short and one of the easiest letters to translate. The vocabulary is small, although it is one of the deepest books. Its vocabulary is also similar to the Gospel of John. With this shared vocabulary and style, we can make a very good educated guess that the same person wrote both.
I do not need to argue with you all. I could just say John wrote this, and you would say, “Oh, okay, good.” I bring it up because I think it is wonderful. Comparing the two books does not merely prove who wrote them; it unlocks the letter and the Gospel of John.
The Gospel of John and 1 John have different purposes for being written, but they are right beside each other and parallel one another.
The purpose of the Gospel of John is that people would believe and receive eternal life.
But these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in His name.
—John 20:31
John tells us the purpose of his Gospel. All the signs, miracles, and stories of Jesus were specifically selected so that we would believe on the Lord. When we believe, we receive eternal life.
In a similar way, John tells the purpose for 1 John in 1 John 5:13. Notice how similar they are. In John 20, he says, “These are written,” and in 1 John he says, “These things have I written to you.”
But instead of saying that you may believe and receive eternal life, he says that you would know that you already have eternal life—you who have believed.
One book brings us into eternal life. In the letter, we have already believed on the Lord Jesus, received eternal life, and now, as believers entering into this fellowship, we need to discover that we actually have eternal life.
Not merely as a historical event, but every layer of fellowship is a new discovery. Every depth into which we go is a deeper discovery of the eternal life within us.
We have believed. We actually have eternal life. This is the revelation. We can read the Gospel of John as believers and discover more and more about eternal life, but when you read it as a whole, it is especially useful for leading people to believe and receive eternal life. First John is especially useful for discovering that you actually have eternal life.
This differs from when I first read that verse, or when it was first pointed out to me, and the Lord met me and showed me that I have eternal life. I could know that I was saved, that I was not going to lose my salvation, and my whole life gained a foundation.
I began to walk as a joyful believer again, saying, “I know that I am saved, and I know Whom I have believed in. I know He is going to keep me all the way to the end because He has given me eternal life, and I can actually know this.” That was a joyful experience to enter into.
But to this day, as we are fellowshipping, we discover that we have eternal life—not merely as a past threshold of assurance-of-salvation experience. This discovery is different. It has to do with today and this moment.
When you sit back for a minute and realize, “I have eternal life,” it is a current, life-changing experience.
I know from years ago that I have had eternal life ever since I was born again. It is something I received. But that knowledge is different from the personal knowledge right now that eternal life is abiding inside of me.
The personal knowledge right now that I have eternal life is life-changing in my actions, in everything that I do.
It is like 1 Corinthians, where Paul is talking to them about their sins, their bodies, sexual sins, and other things. How is he going to help them? He brings them back to this point: “Do you not know that you have the Holy Spirit inside of you?”
Instead of merely saying, “Do not do these things; that is wrong,” he brings them to a discovery. When you realize that you have the Holy Spirit within you, these things fall down and stop. Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.
We are focusing on eternal life, which is brought to us and experienced by the Holy Spirit. It is also similar to Romans 6, where Paul mentions baptism as a way of dealing with the desire to keep sinning.
“Shall we go on sinning so grace may abound?” He does not simply say, “No, of course not. That is evil and sinful, and it hurts the Lord’s heart.” Instead, he says, “Do you not know? You have been identified with Christ. You have newness of life.”
It is a discovery, and it changes everything. To know that I have eternal life is a life-changing thing for a Christian right now. This is what happens when we fellowship.
All the things written in this letter are to bring out that eternal life. As John speaks about walking in the light, practicing righteousness, abiding in love, and loving one another, if we truly step into the experience of them, we discover eternal life.
Otherwise, if we try them without that, it is not fellowship, and we do not actually do them. But when we walk this way, we discover eternal life, and it is our only way.
That discovery unlocks many difficult verses. We find, “Oh, this has to do with eternal life. This has to do with me in Christ and Christ in me. In that moment, this is true.” Many of these verses are not true of the rest of my moments.
For example, he says:
He that saith, I know Him, and keepeth not His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.
—1 John 2:4
All of us who are saved know the Lord. Have we broken commandments and failed to keep His commandments? Are we all liars, with no truth in us? Obviously, that is not right.
But if you know Him right now, and you are in eternal life right now, abiding in it and enjoying that fellowship, and a command comes to you, you go forward with it. You step into it.
Otherwise, you reject the truth, turn away, walk in darkness, and stop fellowshipping. All of this is true in fellowship, but it is difficult to understand outside of fellowship.
Back to eternal life: our very foundation is eternal life. There is a phrase in 1 John, “the eternal life,” and I want to bring it up to show us what eternal life actually is.
In 1 John 1:2, John says:
And the life has been manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and report to you the eternal life, which was with the Father, and has been manifested to us.
—1 John 1:2
This is the eternal life he is talking about, manifested to us. Obviously, from reading the whole passage, we know this is speaking about the Lord Jesus.
It sounds very similar to John 1:14, where he says that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Then there is this parenthesis of excitement:
And we beheld His glory, glory as of an only begotten with a Father, full of grace and truth.
—John 1:14
He has been manifested. The Word became flesh. He showed up, and we have seen Him. But here He is called “the eternal life.”
When we see eternal life, we realize that eternal life within us has to do with a Person. We do not need to separate our experience and say, “Over here is the bubble of the Holy Spirit, over here is eternal life, and maybe over there is the life of Christ because Christ is in me.”
Actually, put it all together and realize: I have eternal life, a piece of the life from eternity. All my experience of eternal life touches the eternal life, who is Christ.
That is why eternal life never sins. Eternal life always keeps the commandments. When I realize that eternal life is Christ Himself, who has been manifested, and I have joined this fellowship and received eternal life, I know that Christ is in me.
As I live by the new life I have received, I know that it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. That is the whole experience of the Christian, and it is the joyful experience.
In 1 John 5:11, it says:
God has given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.
—1 John 5:11
Whatever our experience of eternal life is, it is packaged in Christ. You are never going wrong by looking only at Christ. Even if you do not use the term eternal life, if you are discovering Christ, you are discovering eternal life.
The fellowship that we experience in Christ is eternal life. This eternal life is found only in God’s Son.
In 1 John 5:20, speaking of His Son Jesus Christ, John says:
He is the true God, and eternal life.
—1 John 5:20
Eternal life is God’s Son. Eternal life is in God’s Son.
When we try to separate eternal life from Christ and think, “I have been given the package of eternal life; now I can live in a good way,” the next thing we know, we find it missing.
But if you know, “I have the eternal life, Christ; Christ is with me; Christ is living in me,” and all your attention is on Christ, then as you step forward to live by that life, you find that Christ is with you.
All our beholding is on Christ. All our viewpoint is on Christ. All our focus is there—not that the Lord zapped me with eternal life and now I am a strong Christian who can do these things.
Instead, I find all my overcoming equipment in Christ. All my manifestations of eternal life—obeying the truth, doing anything—is found wrapped up in Christ.
Someone recently used 1 John to argue with me that there are no such things as overcomers, because in 1 John 4 he mentions that Christ is the overcomer. He was using that to look at other verses and say, “He is the overcomer, so we cannot be overcomers.”
But as we talked, this brother discovered that this is how we are overcomers. What are we talking about? Christ is the overcomer.
Any overcoming that we have is by the eternal life within us. It is all by the life of Christ.
When you have a small experience today—you want to yell at someone because they did you wrong, but instead you turn to the Lord, grace takes over, you speak kindness, and you have love for them—you look back and say, “Christ is the overcomer.”
We can always look back and say, “That was Christ in me. That was His life. It was the newness of life.” There is no boasting in ourselves. There is no separation of a new package of something aside from Christ.
Eternal life is the eternal life. We are not talking about something besides Christ. It is found in Christ. He is called the eternal life, and He shares His life with us.
Another thing with eternal life is that we actually have eternal life. I have already mentioned this, but I want to make it a major point, because this is our discovery: we have eternal life.
First John 5:13 says that we have eternal life, meaning right this moment. Everyone in this room who is born again, who has received forgiveness of sins, has eternal life inside of them.
However you feel today, however many sins you have done, the sins need to come into the light and be washed clean by the blood. Underneath all that dirt, as it is wiped away, you find a clean eternal life.
The whole slate is clean, and you find inside of you eternal life. Even if you feel down, inside of you is the joy of eternal life. We actually have eternal life.
It is not, “I will have eternal life.” It is true that if you have eternal life, you will live forever and eventually be in the age of eternity. All those things are true. But what these phrases really mean is that we have it right now. It is a new life, and it is something real.
It is not merely that after I am saved, I am going to go to eternity—though that is true. What we are talking about is, “I have a piece of eternity inside of me.” That is what it means that we have eternal life.
In John 6:47, Jesus says:
Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me hath eternal life.
—John 6:47
It is true that you are going to live forever, but here it specifically means that after believing on the Lord, you receive eternal life: the new life within us.
Sometimes you just sit back and think and realize: you almost want to sit differently. You want to talk differently. You realize that you have a different life inside of you.
You act differently. Some songs you cannot sing anymore because you have a different life inside of you. Some things you cannot do anymore because you have eternal life.
What happens to us is that we get disconnected. Then we do not realize that we have eternal life. All of this fellowship is about reconnecting us with Christ, bringing us back into that, and allowing that life to expand and become our life—so that our life is really His life, as we live by it more and more.
One more phrase is from 1 John 3:15:
No murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.
—1 John 3:15
I bring this out because it is for believers. If you are a murderer as a believer, this passage is speaking about hatred of brothers, not merely physically killing people.
No murderer has eternal life abiding in him. I bring it up because of that phrase, abiding in him. If you hate people right now, you are a murderer as far as inward sin is concerned. You hate your brother or sister.
You technically have eternal life inside of you if you are born again, but eternal life is not abiding in you. That is the difference.
When you are murdering others with your heart, your unforgiveness, your bitterness, and your thoughts toward them, you find yourself disconnected from eternal life. The life is there, but it is not abiding in you.
You are not dwelling in it. It is not dwelling in you. You find that you are able to live by your own life. You may still be a pretty good person. You may still look like a Christian and do many Christian things, but it is not the same joy because you are disconnected from eternal life.
This shows how real it is that life is within us. The life within us can be shoved to the side, or it can really live within us.
As He is living within us, the home of eternal life is really our hearts. The home is there, and He is able to make Himself at home and decorate as He wants.
But if you shove Him aside, walking in sin, disobeying, walking in darkness, and hiding from the Lord, though you are born again, your born-againness is not your experience. You are not living in the good of it. Eternal life is not abiding in you.
Finally, let us get back to our actual verses. These first four verses are the basis of fellowship. They show the Apostle John’s basis of fellowship, and he shares it with us.
He is going to write all these experiences of fellowship, but they are all based on this foundation. They all have this ground of fellowship, which is eternal life.
In these verses, we can see the Apostle John’s ground of fellowship—what he stands on. If we can see it, we can find our ground of fellowship.
His ground is different from ours in one sense: he physically met Jesus. Yet we will find that our story is very similar, and in one sense, according to what Jesus said, even better.
John was an eyewitness. He testified of what he had seen and heard. He had personal experience on multiple levels.
When they saw Jesus raised from the dead, they believed and received eternal life. Thomas doubted. He said he needed to touch Him—not simply see a ghost, but touch Him and know that He was physical and real.
Jesus made that happen. He showed up for Thomas and let him touch Him and handle Him. But He said that those who believe without seeing are more blessed.
Because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
—John 20:29
Our blessing of faith is more blessed. We all want to have been those men and see Him perform miracles. But by God’s arrangement, we are in a more blessed experience.
Peter says, “Whom having not seen, ye love.” You can almost hear an envy in his tone: how wonderful that someone loves the Lord without having seen Him physically.
Of course, Peter loved the fact that he saw Jesus and had that experience, so do not take that wrongly. But in one sense, we envy them and they envy us—how lovely that a person loves the Lord and has not seen Him physically.
Jesus likewise says that the faith of someone who believes without physically seeing and touching Him is more blessed. It is more faith-like than seeing and then believing.
So, as we look at John’s experience, we should not say, “I wish I could have been him.” Rather, let us see it as an example and then see our own experience, which according to the Lord is even better in some ways.
The Apostle John speaks of “that which was from the beginning,” “that which we have seen with our eyes,” and so on. Let us go through this list and see how it played out in his life.
It starts with “that which was from the beginning.” In the Gospel of John, he begins the same way:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.—John 1:1-2
He begins from the beginning beyond the beginning. It is not the same beginning as Genesis 1:1. It is before creation, because the Word was God, was with God, and is God.
Then John 1 goes on to say that everything created was created by the Word of God—specifically the capital-W Word, the Son of God.
Later we know that this Word of God is Jesus from John 1:14, where John says that the Word became flesh and lived among us.
For John the Apostle, Jesus is the Son of God. He has always been. This is John’s testimony. The Word became flesh and lived among us, and John saw Him—the One who created everything, the One who existed before time.
His witness is, “I saw that One.” But he knows that He is from the beginning, from eternity. This is his experience and his foundation.
The eternal life that is his foundation, the eternal life manifested among men and to which he bears witness, has existed from eternity. For him, the foundation of what he witnesses is the Person of the Godhead who has always been.
Then John says, “That which we have heard.” He is speaking about the Scriptures.
In John 5:39, Jesus says:
Ye search the Scriptures, because ye think that in them ye have eternal life; and these are they which bear witness of Me.
—John 5:39
You are looking in the Bible for words of life, but they are speaking about the eternal life, which is Christ.
As you read the Gospels, there are so many Scriptures referred to. This prophecy here, that prophecy there. In Luke 24, the two disciples are on the road to Emmaus after Jesus has died and risen from the dead.
Jesus joins them as they walk. They are dumbfounded and say, “We thought He was the Messiah.” Then He begins with Moses and the prophets and shares all the things concerning Himself.
As He shares with them, the words are like fire inside of them. They have joy as the words come alive and they see Christ, Christ, Christ, all through the Word of God.
This is “that which we have heard.” The apostles often say in their writings, “We did not really know what this was, but later we understood it from the Scriptures.” As they read the Scriptures, they saw, “That is what happened right there.”
John’s relationship with the text of Scripture was connected with eternal life and with Christ Himself. What he saw and heard of Christ was solidly based on the Word of God in the Scriptures.
The Word of God came alive and became this Person. The Word became flesh. Every single thing God had spoken in the Old Testament, everything breathed by God as Scripture, became a person.
Not that He took words and shaped them. This Person, the Word of God, existed before the Scriptures existed. Everything breathed by God is a little flavor of the eternal Word of God who has always been.
The very expression of God has always been. If God is going to express Himself, He does so through His Son. As He expresses Himself in the Scriptures, it is all Christ, and it is all pointing us to Christ.
Hebrews 1 says that in the past God spoke to the fathers through the prophets, but now He has spoken in His Son.
This is the connection between what John saw and heard and his testimony of eternal life. The eternal life abiding in the Apostle John comes alive and is connected with the Word of God.
The two feed on each other. You do not understand the Word of God except when you have eternal life, and the eternal life within is brought larger and larger as the Word of God is revealed to us.
The descriptions of eternal life and the descriptions of Christ come more and more alive. Like those disciples walking on the road, as Jesus unfolded the Scriptures, they saw: He must die for sins. He must rise from the dead. This is Christ.
Everything they saw and heard of Christ was expanded through the Scriptures, through the Word of God. This is their basis of fellowship in eternal life.
Another thing John says is, “That which we have seen with our eyes.” When the Word became flesh, many people saw Him physically. That is why John specifically mentions eyes here.
The phrase seen and heard usually has a larger meaning than merely physical sight and hearing. As the Old Testament says, “Seeing, you do not see; hearing, you do not hear.” There is a spiritual hearing and a spiritual seeing.
But when John says, “seen with our eyes,” he physically saw the Person with his eyes and spent years with Him. Many people saw Him with their eyes.
But John’s experience went beyond physically seeing. “The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us,” but then there is the next phrase: “We contemplated.”
John saw with his eyes, and then, if you remember his experience, he was with John the Baptist. John the Baptist said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”
John saw Him, probably saw Him baptized, just as many others saw Him. But John the Baptist was saying, “Behold. Contemplate. Fix your eyes on Him. Stare at Him for a while.”
Their staring turned into walking. They were staring, and then following Jesus. Jesus turned around, saw those two fellows staring and following Him, and said, “What do you want?” They said, “Where do You live?” He said, “Come, and you will see.”
They kept staring at Him. Miracle after miracle, as they stared, as they saw water turned into wine, the staring became inward contemplation. They began beholding Him.
They saw, “He is not just the man I see with my eyes. He is the Son of God. There is a glory about Him—the glory of an only begotten with His Father.”
They began to confess it. They began to follow Him. They were stuck with Him. They would leave Him at times, but even if they left Him, they were still stuck with Him and would come back to Him.
As they failed, went back to fishing, or completely failed at the cross, they came back because they were stuck with Him. Even when He said difficult words, they had beheld His glory.
When Jesus asked, “Are you also going to leave?” their staring had changed from beholding with the eyes to inward contemplation and knowing that He was the Son of God.
They said:
Thou hast the words of eternal life.
And we have believed and know that Thou art the Holy One of God.—John 6:68-69
This was John’s experience and foundation. “I saw Him with my eyes, but it is different to see Him with the inward eyes of my heart.” They contemplated.
Then John says, “Our hands handled, concerning the Word of life.” Very physically, this same phrase appears in Luke 24 with Thomas.
Thomas had said, “Unless I feel His hands and His side.” Jesus said to Thomas, “Here are My hands. Here is My side. Handle Me.” He used the same phrase. It simply means touch, because Thomas said, “I need to put my finger on it.”
They handled Him. John leaned on His chest. They were with Him. Perhaps they had wrestling matches or whatever they did. They broke bread, passed it on, and shared from the same cup. Physically, they had that.
But because of the progression here, this is probably focused on Thomas’s experience with all of them. All of them had the handling of Christ physically after His resurrection.
They were stuck wondering what to do because He had died. But when He rose from the dead, He showed Himself to them in physical, “handle Me” ways.
He cooked breakfast for them. He broke bread with them. He was in the room with them. Of course, He could disappear and leave the room, which was a little disturbing. But He moved things physically. He was physically able to be touched.
They swam to Him and saw Him. Maybe they hugged Him; I do not know. But they physically touched Him, and Thomas handled Him.
This is John’s testimony of his whole foundation: “I saw His resurrection. I even grabbed a piece of bread He handed me, and we broke it together.” This is handled. This is real resurrection experience.
When John says, “I know Him, and I want to share it with you,” we can see his history. It was literal for him, but it is spiritual for us.
Let us look at the same things with us—our witness of what we have seen and heard. It is not physical for us, of course, but it is even better.
If we are going to have fellowship today and discover eternal life more and more, there is a basis for our fellowship. These things keep us in a living, experiential way in our foundation.
One beginning thing is “that which was from the beginning.” For us, it is the discovery that I have eternal life, and this life has always existed.
Just knowing that, realizing it, discovering it, and letting that eternal life abide in us gives us the very ground to stand on. This is a different life. “That which was from the beginning.”
All my fellowship is based on Christ Himself. Everything that becomes an experience of following the Lord or being faithful to the Lord is from the beginning.
I have a history in my Christian life, but it is wrapped up in the eternal life from the beginning. My history of failure is not wrapped up in that at all.
You see me in my failures—Jeffrey, the carnal man—but Christ is in me also. We find each other having two histories, in a sense. Our history in eternal life is always wrapped up in Christ.
This is your foundation. When you come back with your clean slate and have been washed clean as if you have never sinned, you come back to that which was from the beginning. All things issue out from Him who has always existed. The very life I have is His life.
Then there is “that which we have heard.” If you only sit back and realize that you have eternal life, but throw away the Word of God and its examples because everything must be life in the Spirit and eternal-life experiences, you will find yourself running out of fellowship.
The foundation of our fellowship includes that which we have heard. Eternal life responds with the Scriptures.
If you have no Scriptures going on within, if the word of Christ is not dwelling in us richly, we find ourselves running out of fellowship. We find that joy lacking.
Eternal life wants to expand and be revealed more and more through the Word of God. The two play off each other.
In John 5:24, Jesus says that the one who hears His word and believes Him who sent Him has eternal life. When the words are heard and faith is there, the eternal-life experience is there.
Christ is called the Word of life in these verses. The Scriptures and eternal life are connected. He is the very Word of God.
If you have disconnected yourself from regular reading in the Word of God—this is not merely a plug to read regularly, though I should plug that—it is more an explanation of how that works.
We know we should read regularly, but notice what happens when you do. You read chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, without necessarily receiving some amazing direction to go to a particular verse and say, “Wow, I should marry her.” Those things are dangerous.
It is more like this: you are reading, and you do not realize what is happening. Without even one verse popping out from the page, inside, eternal life is saying, “Yes.” You are refreshed.
You may have a bad day, sit down, and read a few chapters in Leviticus about things you do not know what they are talking about. But as you read, you are washed by the water of the Word, and the life of Christ is renewed within.
The very words of God do not always connect with revelation, and our own thoughts cannot always handle them. But the eternal life within us can handle every verse in the Bible.
Every single verse brings up eternal life. As you read it, it brings out the life of Christ in us.
Then there is hiding the Word in us. Some verses stick with us. We write them down, post them on our fridge or mirrors, and carry them with us. When you are walking or dealing with something, eternal life within brings up Scriptures.
When we are fellowshipping, it is often based on Scripture. Someone else is sharing the Word of God, and suddenly fellowship happens because the Scriptures are truly our foundation in this.
“That which we have seen with our eyes; we have contemplated; and our hands have handled concerning the Word of life”—obviously, this is not us seeing and touching Jesus physically.
John could have stopped at seeing miracles, seeing Christ, and knowing something truly divine was happening. But for him, it moved into staring, beholding, and contemplating.
Then it moved into sticking with Christ long enough that his hands handled Him—that he touched into the resurrection life of Christ.
With us, there is a lot going on in our lives. If we open our eyes, we can see that God is moving. God speaks through others, through the Word, and through circumstances.
If we open our eyes simply to realize that something of God is happening in our lives, and then He points our attention to a miracle, we realize that the miracle is a sign.
In John’s Gospel, a sign points your attention to something. You start to stare at eternal life. As your attention is captured by something happening in your life, you behold. You bring it back and behold Christ. You take these things to the Lord.
After a message, if you ask five people what was shared, there may be five different messages. They may all have the same topic, but something is what each person sees with their own eyes. The Lord is showing each one something.
If you walk away, James says you are like a person looking in a mirror who walks away and forgets what he looks like. In a sense, take the mirror with you. Do not behold yourself, but behold Christ.
You see something He is showing you, and you stare at it. You stick with Him, continue to contemplate, and bring it back to the Lord.
Contemplating means walking. It means saying, “Where do You make Your home, Lord? I want to abide with You in this thing.” It means you are going to obey.
It turns into an experience. It turns into something of Him showing more, but it also turns into, “What are you going to do?”
It is like the Apostle Paul. Others were with him when he was saved. They physically saw and heard something, but Paul responded. He was told of his sins and told what he should do as the next step.
This is what happens to us. We see something in our lives. I would say we should go back and ask: What have you seen with your eyes that you have closed your eyes to?
This has pulled us away from fellowship and off our foundation. Everything the Lord has shown me can feel distant, almost like a person standing separately from me, because I have not beheld it much or allowed it to sink deep.
I have not begun to stick with Christ and step into it. So I find myself out of fellowship and off that ground of eternal life.
But if you ask the Lord, “Show me again what You have shown me. Show me what has gone from my eyes,” He shows you things in your past that He led you in, things you should be doing.
You bring it back. You do not hide anymore. You do not stay away from Him. Even as you say that, though it is difficult, you stare at Him, behold Him, and begin to follow Him.
Not because you are strong enough to do all those things, but because you fix your eyes on Jesus. He leads you, and He completes that faith.
The next thing you know, you look back and say, “My hands have handled the Word of life. I experienced resurrection life inside of me as I stepped my feet forward and followed Him in the fullness of all that He showed me.”
It is like the Apostle Paul, who said, “I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.” He stuck with Christ. He hung on to Him, followed Him, beheld Him, and saw His glory.
He kept staring at Him and came all the way through into resurrection. The next thing you know, in a tangible way, eternal life is flowing through you and your actions, and you are overcoming in fellowship with others.
This is our foundation. This is our basis.
Praise God, we have eternal life. If I could mention just one thing today, it is that we actually have eternal life.
If we look at all of this, our joy will be full. It is really on this discovery that we have eternal life.
Let us pray together.
Lord, we come back to You with this, and we know that unless we behold You, unless we contemplate, our eyes will see and look away right away.
Lord, we want to come back to You, that You would reveal deep within that we have eternal life, that today would be our new knowledge of this newness of life that You have given to us.
Lord, we want to fix our eyes on You and never let go. Lord, we confess that we are stuck with You.
We want to come back to You with all the things that You have shown us, confessing that You have given us eternal life and that You alone have the words of eternal life.
Lord Jesus, thank You for this joy that You have put within us, and for the brothers and sisters in this room with whom we can have fellowship.
May we bring each other back to You constantly and remind each other that we know You, that we are all walking together with You, and that we are all brought into this fellowship together.
In Jesus’ name, amen.