“AND THIS IS his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us” (1 John 3:23). This is very interesting and important, for it seems that God is here pointing us, through the apostle, to two things: that we believe in the name of His Son Jesus Christ, and that we love one another. God is telling us to believe in His Son! In one place Jesus tells us to believe in God: “Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me” (John 14:1). Here God says, “believe in the name of [My] Son Jesus Christ.” The fact is that God could not give a higher commandment than just that. If you believe in the name (character) of Jesus, then everything comes out right concerning God and man and life. If you don’t believe in the name of Jesus, if you take some other key for life, then everything comes out wrong concerning God and man and life. Jesus is God’s self-disclosure—He is the truth about God. Moreover, He lifts up in His own person and teaching the underlying principles of the moral universe. He summed them up in Himself. He is the revelation of Life; live by Him and you live; if you do not, you perish. So literally God could not say anything higher than, “believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ”! Nor can we say anything higher than just that. We call that evangelism. It is just sense—common and uncommon—it is sense.
The second: “love one another.” Those two things—believe and love—put the whole of the Christian faith into simplicity itself. Believe in the kind of God, the kind of Man, the kind of life, you see in Jesus. Love each other the way He loved, and nothing more is required or necessary. This is it! It needs not to be added to or subtracted from.
O Jesus Lord, when our eyes fall on Thee in loving trust and surrender and obedience, then we can say to those eyes: Blessed are our eyes for they see! They see what the ages have longed to see. We see and are satisfied forever. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Believe in Jesus and love people—those two things are the alternate beats of the Christian heart.
