JOY of Living

1 John

1 Kings -

11 lessons followed by Highlights of OT Wisdom & Prophecy 15 lessons

  Daniel -

7 lessons and 9 lessons = 16 weeks I will need to find 10 more something

  Revelation -

24 lessons

JOY 2016

Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is

still in the darkness.1 John 2:9

 

Memory Verse

Here’s how we can be sure that we know God in the right way: Keep his commandments. If someone claims, "I know him well!" but doesn’t keep his commandments, he’s obviously a liar. His life doesn’t match his words. But the one who keeps God’s word is the person in whom we see God’s mature love. This is the only way to be sure we’re in God. Anyone who claims to be intimate with God ought to live the same kind of life Jesus lived.

1 John 2:3-6The Message

Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining.

1 John 2:7-8

1. The moral test – Obedience

2. The relational test – Love for others

3. The doctrinal test – Jesus is the Christ, Son of God, one being with the

Father.

3 Tests for Teachers & Us

Don’t love the world’s ways. Don’t love the world’s goods. Love of the world squeezes out love for the Father. Practically everything that goes on in the world-wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to appear important-has nothing to do with the Father. It just isolates you from him. The world and all its wanting, wanting, wanting is on the way out-but whoever does what God wants is set for eternity.

1 John 2:15-18The Message

Whatever commands our time, energy, and resources commands us. And if we are honest, we will admit that our lives really aren’t that different from those of our secular counterparts. I suspect that one of the reasons we are so ineffective in evangelism is that we are so much like the people around us that we have very little to which we can call them.

We hang around church buildings a little more. We abstain from a few things. But we simply aren’t that different. We don’t even do hedonism as well as the folks around us … but we keep on trying. As a result of this unfortunate accommodation, Christianity is reduced to little more than a spiritual crutch to help us through the minefields of the upwardly mobile life.

God is there to help us get our promotions, our house in the suburbs, and our bills paid. Somehow God has become a co-conspirator in our agendas instead of our becoming a co-conspirator in His. Something is seriously amiss.

Tom Sine, Christianity Today 1989Christian author, Mustard Seed Associates