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[0:00] This evening to 1st John chapter 5. Tonight we're going to look at verses 1 to 5. 1st John chapter 5 and the first five verses.

[0:11] Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God. And everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him.

[0:22] And verse 5, who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. Now you recall that various times and especially the beginning of our studies of 1st John.

[0:36] We noted the structure of 1st John that it comprises by and large three tests or three assessments. To do with what we believe and how we behave and how we are in relation to God's commandments and to each other.

[0:52] In other words, the three assessments are doctrinal and ethical and social. We can categorize them that way. They correspond to faith and to obedience and to love.

[1:04] And all of the three are found in these verses 1 to 5 of this chapter. John is bringing what he has said earlier to a conclusion and doing so.

[1:16] He summarizes here before he rounds off in the rest of the chapter his concerns and the teaching that he has against the false teachers who are threatening and assaulting the church of his time.

[1:29] And as you find here, verse 15 begins and ends with belief. In other words, the doctrinal assessment or test whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.

[1:41] And he finishes, whoever, who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. So there's belief, there's faith there in terms of Jesus being the Christ and of Jesus being the Son of God.

[1:55] And in between that, he has the other two elements, the other two assessments of the doctrinal, of the ethical and the social because he talks there about obedience, the commandments of God, obeying the commandments, but also the love of God in terms of loving the commandments and loving also those who have been born of God like ourselves.

[2:23] So there's a wonderful complexity and inter-arrangement of these great terms of truth. It's very much a unity as far as John is concerned.

[2:35] These strands are so closely bound together that if you pull one, then you see the others moving as well. Just like three important threads that have been woven closely together, you can't pull one out without disturbing the others or impacting upon the others so that you find here's the faith and the obedience and the love that's mentioned.

[2:58] As you deal with one, you're carrying the others with you. You're actually conscious that the others have a very close relationship with the one that you're dealing with. And there's that wonderful unity.

[3:10] And that really tells us something about John's method, about John's purpose in writing this epistle to those that were being harassed at the time by false teaching. And that is this, that these three form a very important unity.

[3:25] They form a unity of teaching, a unity of truth, along with many other things in the Bible. But in themselves, they are such a unity that tells you John hasn't chosen these three elements at random.

[3:39] He hasn't chosen these just haphazardly and without specific purpose and careful deliberation. When he talks about the doctrinal and the ethical and the social, when he talks about the corresponding faith and obedience and love that corresponds to those, that's a very deliberate arrangement on his part.

[3:58] It's something that he is himself, under the Spirit of God, being led to set before those people that he's writing to. So that you cannot really separate off those threads one from the other.

[4:10] They belong together. That's his choice. And that reminds us that all truth, actually, at the end of the day, is a unity. Whatever great doctrines, whatever great passages in the Bible deal with obedience, or deal with love, or deal with the things that we have to believe, they exist together.

[4:31] You have a Bible that's a unity. You have a word from God, in which you find all the different words or books, or themes that you find throughout the Bible. But ultimately, it is a unity.

[4:44] It's something that belongs, as God has given it, belongs together. And you keep it together. And that's why we counter the views that you find so much in the world, that certain aspects of the Bible are no longer relevant, that you can see them as out of date, that you can see them belonging to a previous age, and the kind of ridiculous things that some people say.

[5:07] If Paul was actually living today, he wouldn't have written as he did. He wouldn't have written in the terms in which he did. Or even if Jesus had lived today, some people will say to you, then he wouldn't have actually put things in the terms in which he put them.

[5:21] This is the truth. It's the word of God. It is exactly as God intended it to be, and it's that for every single generation of human life.

[5:33] But the two dominant themes in these verses, while it has these three elements that we've mentioned, and that we in line with the structure of the epistle, the two dominant themes are the themes of new birth, and also of victory over the world.

[5:53] You can see that these two are especially mentioned in relation to the others, and you could say the other themes are arranged really under these two main things. Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of Him.

[6:11] So there's the theme of the new birth, the spiritual birth through which we come into the possession of such things as this faith and this love.

[6:21] And then there's secondly this victory. He mentions this three times, this overcoming the world, this victory over the world. Whoever has been born of God overcomes the world, this is the victory that has overcome the world.

[6:34] Who is he that overcomes the world? So obviously John saw that this matter of overcoming the world was hugely important and significant, and so he gives it emphasis in these verses as well.

[6:45] These are our two main headings tonight, the new birth and victory over the world. So let's look at these in turn, and how they relate to the other elements in the passage. Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.

[7:03] That's very interesting because it takes us back to something before the believing. Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.

[7:15] You can see from that that being born of God precedes faith. The new birth is that from which faith emanates.

[7:26] Faith is not the product of our own minds. The faith that the Bible speaks about, our trusting in Christ, our believing the Word of God itself, and our coming especially to trust in Christ, to believe in Christ, to rest upon Christ, which really is the central part of faith, that's not something we've come to decide for ourselves.

[7:46] That's not something that has been invented by human beings. It's not something that you can come to just by your own efforts or be educated into it. Something that comes as a product of new birth.

[8:02] Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God. The believing has come from the being born.

[8:13] And so the new birth, the very thing that Jesus mentioned to Nicodemus in John chapter 3, you can see that except a person be born again, or born from above, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

[8:26] He cannot see the kingdom of God. Born of water and of the Spirit. Some of that's mentioned later in the chapter, but what he mentions there is referring to this new birth, to this spiritual change that God effects, a new creation.

[8:42] Something, as we'll see, that involves an inward change that then shows itself outwardly. That's why this inward change, this new creation, this new birth, this power of God changing us from within in the very depths of our souls, that's where faith comes from.

[9:00] That's what produces the faith that locks us on to Christ. You see, that's why it's so critically important that we don't dismiss the new birth as something old-fashioned.

[9:13] That we really get to grips with the theology of the Bible in such things as the new birth. Because they're so vital for us to understand. And to know, even if we can't understand everything about them, we can understand in principle that without new birth, we're dead in trespasses and sins.

[9:29] And we don't have the faith that unites us to Christ. So it's prior to believing. But what is it that we believe? Well, you find that in the first verse here, but also in verse 5, it has to do with Jesus.

[9:43] Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ. And then he says in verse 5, whoever believes, the one who overcomes, is the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.

[9:55] In other words, it has to do with what you believe. It has to do with something that actually lies at the very heart of the Gospel, the person of Jesus Christ.

[10:06] How often we come to emphasize this because that's what the Bible itself emphasizes. Who is this person? Who is this Christ? Who is this Jesus? What does it mean that he is the Son of God and that he is the Christ?

[10:21] That's what we believe, the content of faith, more so than the believing itself. Sometimes we focus so much on the believing, don't we? We try and focus on our act of believing or our ongoing believing.

[10:35] And that's important in itself. But really what John is concerned for more so than that is what our believing rests upon, the person of Jesus. Before you get to grips with what faith is, you really have to get to grips with who Jesus is.

[10:51] And through being born again, we come to see Christ in a particular way. We come to acknowledge him, to confess him, to believe in him, to be convinced that he is, in fact, the Christ, the promised Messiah, the promised Savior.

[11:09] That's why he's putting it here, the anointed one of God. Because you see, John was facing this false teaching as you face in the world today as well, as Christians, and these people he was writing to were facing the kind of idea, the kind of philosophy, if you like, because it really came from a Greek background, philosophy background, where it said that Christ, this person, Jesus, who was a real person, a real human being, but he had been somebody just chosen by God and specially endowed.

[11:42] Or the different versions of that, that the Christ was really that emanation from God that rested upon this person, Jesus, this human being, but he was not God.

[11:58] It wasn't a matter of God coming into this world and taking human nature to himself. These were just a couple of issues that belonged to the kind of world, the world that John was facing in the false teaching of his day, but they're not old.

[12:14] They're still there. These heresies are still in the world and still in the church. In a wider sense. And so he's dealing with the identity of Jesus, that he is indeed the Christ, that he is indeed the Son of God.

[12:31] What does that tell you? It tells you when you read about Jesus that you have to maintain the truth of his deity and of his humanness at the same time.

[12:45] The Jesus that's described in the Gospels is God. He's God come into the world by taking a human nature to himself and making that human nature his own.

[12:57] The Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, completely and fully divine and completely and fully human. We can't get our head around all that's involved in that, of course.

[13:12] But we need to really believe and in a certain measure understand the fact of it, the truth of it, the importance of it. Who is Jesus?

[13:23] Who is he today? Who was he then? The same as he had always been, the Son of God, but he took human nature to himself and became one of us with a true body, with a reasonable soul.

[13:39] That's to say a rational soul, the same kind of soul as you and I have, with mind, with conscience, with understanding, with will, with affections, with emotions.

[13:50] It's all there. He's fully human, perfectly so. And that's who he is. Whoever believes, everyone who believes, that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.

[14:04] Who is it that overcomes the world? It's the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. So there's the question, doesn't it come again, as it comes again to myself and to yourselves, who do I believe Jesus to be?

[14:21] Who is Jesus in my life? Who is Jesus in my lifestyle? Who is Jesus in my prospects? Who is Jesus in terms of my understanding and relationship to him tonight?

[14:36] Is he for me and for you, both God and human? Is he this person that's described by John? Or do we think he's just something less than that?

[14:48] This is the full Christ, the complete Christ, and there's no other Savior. There are no other varieties of Savior. There are many ideas in the minds of human beings as to what salvation consists of and who it comes by.

[15:03] But this is God's, God's truth about it. Jesus as the Son of God and as the Christ. Well, then he moves on to speak of love.

[15:15] Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God. As we said, that lies behind of the believing. But now he comes to say everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him.

[15:29] What is he saying by this? Well, he's saying something against the false teachers again who would say it doesn't really matter what you believe. It doesn't really matter what you behave. It's as long as you fit in with a certain type of philosophy then everything is alright.

[15:43] as long as you're sincere about that. And you'll find that presently the same for ourselves, don't you? People will say it's all about love. It really doesn't matter what you believe as long as you love one another, as long as you're sincere in loving one another and practically loving one another.

[16:00] It really doesn't matter ultimately what you believe. Well, John is discounting that. Of course it matters what you believe and what you make of Jesus, what you make of God. And yet, being a Christian is far more than what I believe.

[16:14] I can't say that tonight I'm a Christian because I believe these things about Jesus to be true and it doesn't really matter how I relate to other people, how I treat them, whether I love others or not, whether I'm, as we saw this morning from Ecclesiastes, whether I'm the kind of person that just isolates myself off or wants to live in my own wee world.

[16:34] That's not a Christian. Because here is John saying, it's not just what you believe, it's how you behave, it's how you actually come to show that you've been born again by loving whoever has been born of the Father.

[16:48] Everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of Him. In other words, it's family love, isn't it? He's saying this is really ultimately what we are as Christians.

[16:59] We have the one Father, we have God. And it's logical that we love our Father. Just as you find, although sadly there's breakdown in relationships and human life, when you look at it, ideally, those who've had a father, who have a father, love that father, and mother as well.

[17:20] That's their parents. And that translates into the ultimate in terms of God. Whoever has been born of God doesn't just love the Father, he loves the rest of the family, she loves the rest of the family.

[17:32] We've seen that all the way through this letter of John that we know, in fact, we've passed from death to life because we love the brethren, we love the other children of God.

[17:44] We really have to seriously examine ourselves if that's not the case, if we're not concerned to love the children of God. Because that's what he's saying. Whoever loves the Father loves whoever has been born of Him.

[17:59] And there's such a close relationship here of these themes, as you say, that he goes on to say, by this, we know that we love the children of God when we love God.

[18:10] And then he adds, and obey His commandments. You see, the wonderful, close relationship. He's not prepared to say, we know that we love the children of God when we love God.

[18:22] That's true, but it's only part of the truth. He then brings in this other theme of obedience, of our relationship to the commandments of God, when we love God and obey His commandments.

[18:35] He doesn't want us to think that it's all right just to love God and to love God's children, but not really to make too much about obedience or our relationship to the law of God or the requirements of God.

[18:49] It all comes together and it all fits together. It all has to be kept together in order to be the kind of Christian people together that we have to be. So what is he saying? Well, he says, and obey His commandments for this is the love of God that we keep His commandments.

[19:07] Isn't that a remarkable statement? It's so closely bound together that he can now say here in verse 3, this is the love of God that we keep His commandments.

[19:19] He's not just saying this is obedience on the one side and this is love on the other side. He's saying they're so close together that you can actually combine them to the extent that when you say here is love, you're also saying here is obedience.

[19:32] And when you're saying here is obedience, you're also saying here is love. You see what I said at the beginning? When you tug one thread, you tug the others. They touch upon the others. You can't leave the others out. And that reminds us of something about love itself.

[19:47] Something we need to apply to the thinking of our day and to what's thrown at us time and time again by those who live their lives in a contrary fashion to the gospel. And it's this, that love is not an emotion, although it contains emotional elements.

[20:07] Of course, you can't have love without to some degree having emotion or emotion stirred and moved. Everyone who loves knows that that's the truth. But love is essentially not an emotion.

[20:20] It is a moral power. It's a moral force. Because when I love somebody, I'm obliged to actually treat that person in a certain way.

[20:33] There's a power in that love. There's a requirement in that love that I actually deal with that person in a way that is proper and fitting and righteous and holy.

[20:44] I remember when Jesus was challenged and this really shows us the relation, the close relation between the obedience and the love, between the commandment and love, where he says, you remember, it's known as the incident of the Good Samaritan.

[21:03] But what's interesting is the way it began. In Luke chapter 10 verse 25, behold, a lawyer stood up and put him to the test.

[21:14] Now, of course, a lawyer wasn't just someone skilled in law, as you would say today. A lawyer there was somebody skilled in the more doctrinal matters of the Old Testament and was a teacher of others to that effect as well.

[21:28] Behold, a lawyer stood up and put him to the test saying, Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? You already think that he's missed the door, hasn't he? He's gone past the door to eternal life because he's thinking of doing something in order to inherit or earn eternal life.

[21:45] Let's leave that aside because Jesus answered him, What is written in the law? How do you read it? And he answered, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.

[22:00] And Jesus said to him, You have answered correctly. Do this and live. And then he says, and willing to justify himself, the man said to Jesus, And who is my neighbor?

[22:14] Of course, Jesus, in the well-known passage on the Good Samaritan, you'll need to go through it, you're very familiar with it, but he turns the thing on its head, doesn't he? He turns the question of the man on its head.

[22:25] He had asked him, Who is my neighbor? But Jesus turns it round to show the important thing is, Not who is my neighbor, but who must I be a neighbor to? Who must I be neighborly to?

[22:38] It's not just, Who is my neighbor, but who must I love? And that's really what he says. Who, he says, Do you think now proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?

[22:52] And he said, The one who showed him mercy. And Jesus said, You go and do likewise. What's he saying? If I love the law of God, and if I love the Lord, and if I love the Lord's people, then my life is going to be one of practical mercy, and practical obedience, and practical obedience to the commandments of God.

[23:12] I can't say tonight, I love the Lord, and dismiss the commandments, as if obedience to the Lord's commandments was no longer relevant. I know that I don't keep the law of God, or can I keep the law of God in order to earn his approval?

[23:26] That's not possible, nor is it necessary. Jesus has done that for me. But I don't just put the law aside as if it didn't matter anymore. It's a guide to my morality.

[23:38] It's a guide to my standard of life and behavior. And that's why it's so close, the relationship between obedience and love. And the mantra that's so often thrown out today is totally meaningless, especially in the light of this teaching.

[23:55] love is love. What does that mean? It means nothing at all, really. It really means love is what I make it. Love is what I consider it to be. Whatever my behavior is, I choose to live this way.

[24:08] These people say, I choose to live this kind of lifestyle. And for me, that's exactly how it should be. And you don't have the right to tell me that I should live any other way, and especially not that some other command or other is appropriate to my life.

[24:23] Well, here is Jesus saying, you can't have love without obedience. You can't have love without commands. Will there be a structure to your life that answers to the requirements of God?

[24:39] This is the sum of the commandments, isn't it? What is the sum of the commandments? How do you summarize them all? Well, as Jesus said, or as that man rightly said to Jesus, you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself.

[24:58] And that's why the thinking of today, as it was in John's day, is so out of sync with what God actually himself commends in his word.

[25:09] That's why it's so important to get the Bible back into society, to get the Bible into public life, to get the teachings of God's word contrary to what people will say, back into people's mindsets, in their thinking, in their conclusions, in their deliberations, personally and publicly.

[25:28] This Bible fits the need of human beings, this word of God, this law, this gospel. Only then will we come to see the relation here between love and obedience.

[25:43] And of course, he now says, and his commandments are not burdensome, for everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. So the whole thing is just moving on, all these wonderfully tied up and connected themes, but this is what he's saying, his commands are not burdensome.

[26:01] Now, some people will say, his commands are not burdensome. Look at the Ten Commandments, surely they're burdensome. Look at the Seven on the Mount, surely that's burdensome. Surely that's something that really imposes huge challenges upon people's lives.

[26:15] and the world will tell you, well, that's not right, that's not fitting in today's age. Surely there's freedom of choice and freedom of language and freedom of behavior and all these other freedoms.

[26:26] Yes, they're there, they're bought at great cost. We have to maintain them, even if some of them are deeply abused. However, what he's saying is, his commandments are not burdensome.

[26:39] Of course, they're burdensome until you come to know Christ. I didn't think the commandments of God were anything other than burdensome as I lived a life of following sin because every time I was conscious of the Lord's law saying one thing and my own behavior doing something else, that was a great weight on my conscience.

[27:03] Of course, it's burdensome to that extent that you know that it criticizes and it condemns when you live a life that's not in accordance with God's will. That's not what he's saying.

[27:16] His commandments are not burdensome in the sense that whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God. In other words, the rebirth that God brings about gives you a totally new understanding and application even of the laws of God.

[27:35] As a Christian tonight, you're thankful that there's such a thing as God's standard expressed through his law as well as through his gospel. You're thankful that these exist to be a guide and a pattern for your life.

[27:49] You're thankful that God's own will has come to be seen, if you like, in the pattern of the Ten Commandments, the moral law, that that code is there for our life to be lived accordingly through Jesus Christ, through faith in him.

[28:06] They're not burdensome. They are, in fact, when you understand through faith in Christ that he has fulfilled his law.

[28:20] They're not burdensome. They are actually very much the other way. It's a liberating thing to know that you don't have to keep the law yourself, but you don't put the law aside then and say it's of no use anymore.

[28:40] That liberating thing that the new birth is brings to you an appreciation of God's law, an appreciation of God's will expressed through the law that takes you out of the burden of trying to please him by your own efforts.

[28:58] And you're thankful that he's given you the structure of his law to be a guide and pardon for life, even if your fulfillment of the law is through Jesus himself.

[29:11] You see what he's saying? His word, his commandments, they're not burdensome. You know, you can say a lot about a person and you can say a lot about yourself and a lot about myself tonight just by asking this question and seeking to answer this question.

[29:28] What do I make of? What is my opinion of? What do I think of the law of God? What do I make of the law of God? Do I love the law of God?

[29:40] Do I despise the law of God? Would I rather life without the law of God? Would I rather that God's law was taken out of things altogether and no longer relevant to my life? Well, as a Christian you say, of course not.

[29:53] That's why all the way through the Psalms and Psalm 119 especially is the great Psalm that deals with the word of God and different words that use the new precepts, law, commandments, word, testimonies, all these words describe the word of God.

[30:12] But the law is part of that. And he says, oh how I love your law. It is my study all the day.

[30:23] And if you love the law of God, a change has taken place in your life. Nobody here loves the law of God if they're not born again.

[30:36] They might appreciate it, they might value it as part of the Bible, but for me deep down in my heart to be able to say tonight, Lord I do love your law.

[30:48] That's an indication that I've been born again. I've been given an appreciation for something that I don't love naturally. That I don't love as a fallen sinner.

[30:58] That I don't love in my enmity against God. I need that removed. I need that dealt with. And when that is dealt with, I come to love the law of God because it shows me where I go wrong.

[31:13] And it keeps me right. And helps me to understand the will of God for me. So he's saying here, this is in fact not burdensome. And he goes on, for everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world.

[31:27] The time is largely gone. We expanded on that a bit more than I intended, but that's God's dealings, not mine, that's God's doing. We're in the hands of God as we preach and as we listen.

[31:39] And as his truth is unfolded, here is how it is. Well, the new birth, but also victory over the world. Now three times he mentions this, overcoming the world. And one of these times, the second reference there, in verses 4 and 5, is actually in the kind of tense in Greek that shows you it's something that's complete, it's something that's definite.

[32:01] And the others are ongoing tenses. In other words, there's the two sides to overcoming the world. You have overcome the world, or you overcame the world. He's saying to these Christians, but at the same time he's saying, you're going on overcoming the world.

[32:15] What is the world? What is the world? First of all, let's deal with that. Well, the world, as we saw from chapter 2, verses 15 to 17, do not love the world or the things in the world.

[32:30] For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, the pride in possessions, or the lust of possessions, is not from the Father, but is from the world.

[32:42] And the world is passing away. In other words, for John, the world means not something physical, it's something moral, something spiritual. The world means the whole sum of all the forces, of all the influences, of all the behaviors that are ranged against God.

[33:01] The things that you face as a Christian come from the world, the pressures of the world, the immorality of the world, the thinking of the world, the way in which the world opposes you, all the so-called values that you find in human life, arranged against God, order against God, that's the world.

[33:20] That's why it's so right, historically, as a church, as a people, we're used to this description, the world in describing what we've left behind, the values of which we've left behind when we're born again.

[33:34] You are not, says Jesus to the disciples in these wonderful chapters in John in the upper room, you are not of the world. If you were of the world, the world would love its own, but you are not of the world.

[33:49] I have taken you out of the world. I have redeemed you from the world and its values. Everything that the world is in its organized opposition to God, he's saying here, you have overcome that, and you keep on overcoming that through your rebirth, through this great achievement of God that's left your life so changed.

[34:16] Of course, the world, as you very well know, exerts pressure and influence, and the world is very adept at gaining political support. I'm not talking here about political parties, I'm talking about government support, and in our own nation, in Scotland, as well as in Westminster, we're not in any way unfamiliar with that, that certain styles of life, certain ways of looking at how human behavior should be arranged, they have a great deal of support in the world, and they have such a support that even such things as are abhorrent to Christians are recommended, even such behavior as you would never imagine to have been brought into the curriculum of education in schools, they're there already, and that world continues to exert its influence, and all the perversions and the immorality, not just sexually, but in every other way that's possible for the world to be the world, it's there, you're facing it daily, it's challenging you daily, it's challenging your children daily, it's challenging your grandchildren daily, it's challenging your marriages daily, it's challenging your relationship to each other daily, it's challenging what we are as a congregation together daily, the world's influence is never far away from you, it's always just beside you, it's always against you, well he's saying, here's something really to appreciate and to encourage, as Jesus himself said again in

[35:46] John's gospel, these wonderful chapters, in the world you will have tribulation, but take encouragement, I have overcome the world, that's the key to it, I have overcome the world, and when you come through God's grace to be born again and to be united to Jesus and to believe in Jesus, you are then raised to that same platform with him, where you have overcome the world, the world is no longer the standard by which you want to live your life, the world is not that way of life, however much you are aware of it, it's not the kind of thing that you choose to live anymore, you have a hatred of the ways of the world, though not a hatred of people I have to say, let's not mix these up, that's what it says, you have overcome the world, everything that is in the world is inferior to the power of Christ, the power of grace, this is the victory, he says, that has overcome the world, even our faith, and he mentions that specifically, because that's in verse 4, that's what unites us to Jesus, our faith, our adherence to him, our union with him, that we come in this life to know through faith, where we deposit ourselves into his custody, into his keeping, into his safe oversight.

[37:21] And that radical change of life, that's from within, is the key to it all, isn't it? Who is it that overcomes the world, except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

[37:39] You know, when you look out at the problems of our society, and the debauchery of our age, the immorality that's so rampant, and so much commended by governments, so much a force in public life, too.

[37:57] What is the greatest need in this age of ours? It's conversions, isn't it? People to be born again.

[38:10] Education will go so far, but that can be very easily discounted. But when somebody is born again, when that radical change takes place in their very soul, that life is turned around.

[38:25] That life doesn't see God the way they once used to think about God. That life doesn't see God's commands the way they once did. That life doesn't understand love the way it once did.

[38:39] Our biggest need, friends, is this. That people will come to be born again through the Holy Spirit of God, and be turned to the truth of God thereby, and come to love God, and to love all that God loves, and to turn from all that God does not love, to put sin beneath our feet, to realize that our whole well-being is bound up with Christ, with who he is, with what he commands, and commends.

[39:20] Whoever is born of God has overcome and continues to overcome the world. Is that not yourself?

[39:33] And if that's not yourself tonight, is that not your greatest desire? To be born again, to be a changed person, and to know that that is the case. Because that's the person.

[39:46] These are the people. Not perfect, by any means. But they have victory. They are in Christ. They have overcome the world.

[39:59] May God bless this word to us. Let's sing in conclusion then. And this evening we're singing finally in Psalm 112. 112 on page 151.

[40:16] And verses 1 to 8. Praise God, blessed is the man who fears the Lord, and finds delight in following his word.

[40:28] His children will be mighty in the land, his line will know the blessing of God's hand. Psalm 112, and we're singing verses 1 to 8 to God's praise. Praise God, blessed is the man who fears the Lord, and finds delight in following his word.

[40:59] His children will be mighty in the land. His line will know the blessing of God's hand.

[41:17] Riches and wealth within his house are found. His righteousness forever will have found.

[41:33] The blood who stands for mercy, truth and right, will fight the darkness turned to morning light.

[41:51] Good is the man who gives and freely lands. To his affairs with justice he attends.

[42:08] His name is the man who gives and freely lands. Surely a righteous man will come secure. His memory forever will endure.

[42:21] His memory forever will endure. The hope and news comes. The hope and news comes. He will not be afraid.

[42:34] His heart is firm. He trusts the Lord for aid. He will not be afraid. He will not be afraid.

[42:45] He will not be afraid. He will not be afraid. He will not be afraid. His heart holds past. He'll view his toes in triumph at the love.

[43:01] I'll go to the door to my right this evening. Now may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you now and always.

[43:13]  Amen. Amen.