Seeking to make the Lord God Jesus Christ visible in our midst… "Where two or three are gathered together in My name there am I in the midst of them." (Matt. 18:20)
The Gospel of John (Page 4)
To love the Lord is to be in the effort to live from our understanding of the Word for the Lord is the Word, and when we live from the Word, then we love the Lord, and it is in living from the Word that we learn how we are to love each other. These loves are from heaven, for anything of spiritual substance produced in us by means of the Word must be heavenly, and if heavenly then it must contain the Lord because the Lord Himself makes heaven, heaven.
When John says he is not the light we are being taught that the literal sense or the historical context in which the Word is clothed doesn’t constitute the divine truth, which is the true light. But the relationship the historical garments represented by John, and of which the literal sense Word is made up is absolutely essential if we are to come to believe in the Lord.
It’s not a question of morality but of spirituality. Morality focuses on external behaviour; genuine spirituality focuses on the inner motivations and thoughts that underlie the behaviour. So a person may live an external life that is morally perfect, be an upright citizen of their community and never put a foot wrong, but spiritually they may still be missing the mark. They miss the mark when they give no thought to the motives from which their behaviour flows.
The condition of our mind prior to our regeneration in regard to spiritual things is nothing but gross darkness; we actually have no capacity of ourselves to grasp anything pertaining to spiritual realities. Any genuine comprehension we have of such things is from the Lord alone or from the truths of the Word which is really the Lord with us. We should never be tempted to attribute our understanding of spiritual things to our own intellectual ability, all power in this regard is from the Lord, who gives us the ability to reason about truths but more importantly grants us the ability to love them by responding to the challenges they make on our life in freedom.
To understand the message of John’s gospel we need to have a clear understanding of the teaching set forth here in its opening verses. These opening few verses of John set the framework and reference point for understanding everything else in the gospel, and so what we take from here will have a direct bearing on how we perceive the things that are to come.
…the Word is Divine revelation that unveils the operation of the Lord as Divine Love and Wisdom within the human mind. John’s gospel is well suited to this as its style lends itself to taking our thought beyond the historical framework of the gospel story, to draw us beyond the letter to an understanding of the living, dynamic, operation of the Word as the divine power that recreates our life into the image and form of heaven.