You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.
1 John 4:4 (NIV)
The One Who Is In You
She gets the messages on Sunday nights, usually long. Her friend left in the spring and has read a great deal since, and puts things in an order she can’t get out of. Links at the bottom. She has never once been able to answer one of them.
She goes on Thursdays. She said to the group, once, that she can’t argue with any of it and that she isn’t leaving, and then somebody put the kettle on and that was the end of it. The messages keep coming. She reads all of them.
John was writing to a church that had people walking out of it and telling everyone that Jesus hadn’t come in the flesh. He tells the ones who stayed to test what they’re hearing. Then: You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.
Them is those teachers. The overcoming John names is over people with an argument, and the reason he gives for it is who’s in them. He also says who is on the other side of it, and it isn’t a well-read friend: the one who is in the world. The messages are the near end of something John thinks is much larger than the person sending them.
John doesn’t tell them to be surer. He never says the ones who stayed had the better case, or that they would win the argument if they worked at it. He tells them who is in them and calls that the overcoming, in the past tense, about people who were still being talked at.
How would I know, on an ordinary morning, which of my own certainties came from the one who is in me?
I don’t, and John doesn’t offer a way of checking. What he offers is the size of the one who has come to live there, and he says it was already true of them on the morning they felt least sure of it. They had work to do on the teaching, and they had a fact to stand on while they did it.
Another one came in last night. She’ll read it on the bus, and she’ll be there on Thursday, and she still can’t answer a word of it.
A Prayer to Remember
Thank you for coming to live in people, God. You’re in me this morning, and I’m less sure of what I believe than I was a year ago. You call that overcome already, in the past tense, and I’d have called it losing. Let me go today on your word about it and not on how sure I can get myself to feel.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
