Today’s Daily Light

How To Overcome the World.  

1 John 5:1-5, 19-20 NIV  John wrote to us…

1-5 “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well.  This is how we know that we love the children of God:  by loving God and carrying out his commands.  This is love for God:  to obey his commands.  And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world.  This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith.  Who is it that overcomes the world?  Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.   

19-20 “We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.  We know also that the Son of God has come and has give us understanding, ‘so that’ we may know him who is true.  And we are in him who is true – even in his Son Jesus Christ.  He is the true God and eternal life.’

Just looking out of my window as the sun came up this morning…the birds beginning to come to the feeder…the beauty of trees, of nature…the quiet of my home…the smell of coffee….kind of hard to grasp that the ‘world’ out there is under the control of evil.   But I know it is….just turn on your t.v….read the newspaper…and kaboom…back to reality 101.   We live in a fallen world which is under the control of the dark side.   The total objective of the dark side and its evil leader is to ‘blind’ the world to the reality of the truth of God…of the truth of Jesus the Savior.   The dark sides hates anything related to the truth of God.  It’s sole purpose is to keep the people in the world in blindness and deception and running on the hamster wheels that come in all shapes and sizes that the dark side has in its arsenal…and such hamster wheels are designed per each individual person…simply to create an illusion of forward movement, activity, busy-ness…to keep us doing anything and everything that keeps us from seeing the light of truth which is only found in the Word of God which are his instructions for how we should live…how we should function in this fallen system as children of God who have been called out of this world system and into His eternal kingdom.

I don’t wish to throw out so many big thoughts here this morning…..so let me bare down and focus a bit…..    The only way we can overcome the pull and suck of the power of the dark side and its system (the world)…is to be regenerated and transformed into the image of Christ.   We do that through re-birth ‘in’ Christ…   We put our faith in Jesus as the Savior..and we become born into the family of God.  We then have God’s spirit come to live inside us and it is ‘He’..the Spirit of God, that transforms us and gives us the power to overcome the pull and suck of the world.   Even though we immediately gain eternal life and will ultimately have eternal victory….  we still can get stuck in this quagmire world system…because… when we become a believer in Christ Jesus…the dark side goes to work double time to try to keep us from transforming into the image of our glorious Savior.  But Jesus has already won the battle for us and He promises that if we will obey His commands and abide in Him that we will produce fruit and overcome. ‘

So go…overcome!   Christ the Savior is yours!     Amen