How to Overcome the World

“Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: and every one that loveth Him that begat loveth Him also that is begotten of Him…..Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?”  I John 5:1,5

One cannot truly love God without loving His Son also.  To truly be a believer, one must believe that Jesus is God’s Son.  That entails believing that God sent His Son to earth to teach, preach, and heal, and then to die on the cross, paying the penalty for man’s sins so that man can be reconciled to God.  John wrote that whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed One by God as Prophet, Priest, and King, is born of God.  There are multitudes of people who believe that Jesus existed, and that God sent Him, but they haven’t made Him their King and owned the fact that He died to pay their sins.

John 6:65 tells us that no one can come unto Jesus unless that privilege is given to him or her by God, the Father, thus the ability to believe in Christ is given to the sinner by way of God’s Spirit.  No one can come to God on his or her own.  The gift of faith comes from God through Christ; thus, Christ knows those who belong to Him.  Matthew Henry wrote that “God draws souls by giving them grace and strength, and a heart to come, without which, such is the moral impotency (helplessness to be righteous on one’s own) of man, in his fallen state, that he cannot come”.  Borrowing from an old television commercial, the sinner says, “Help, I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up”, when he or she realizes his or her lost condition.  That confession comes about because the Holy Spirit has touched the heart of the sinner, convicting him or her of sin, and provided them the way to leave their sin behind and receive a new life of righteousness in Christ.

How could someone say they love God yet reject His Son?  Let’s say that a father had a good friend and found out that his friend had been telling other people how much he hated this man’s son.  The so-called friend mocked the man’s son, yet pretended to respect the son because he didn’t want to destroy his friendship with the father of the son.  How do you think the father would react?  Hopefully, he would confront the friend to ascertain the truth, and upon finding out that his friend did criticize, mock, and discredit his son, he would likely break off that friendship.  Even if the friend apologized, and the father forgave him, their friendship would suffer greatly.  To honor God and dishonor His Son by rejecting Him is to dishonor God.  God and Jesus are One (John 10:30), thus it is impossible to truly love one without loving the other.

We show God that we love Him by receiving His Son, loving our brothers and sisters in Christ to which John is herein referring, and obeying His commandments.  If we can’t love our fellow believers, fat chance that we are going to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44).  If we are going to be like Christ, we must love those whom He loves.  I will admit that not everyone is easy to love, but we can let Christ love them through us.  We honor God by keeping His commandments.  God gave us His standards by which we are to conduct our lives, and these standards were set forth for our benefit.  There’s no guilt in doing what’s right.  Following God’s commandments brings peace among others and peace in our own hearts.  When we know God’s word and live by them, we can discern truth from lies.  That gives us a great advantage over the world, even the so-called intellectuals who may have a lot of “book smarts”, but not of the one Book that really counts.

Faith in Christ is the key to overcoming the world.  When He dwells within our hearts, and we dwell within Him, we have all we need to fight Satan and the evil of the world for Jesus does our fighting for us.  He has already defeated Satan.  Even though Satan has power over the majority of the world’s population, he doesn’t have authority over the world.  His power is limited.  Christ stands between us and Satan; Jesus “has our back”.  This world has no control over us because we belong to an invisible world, ruled by the Lord, and it will last for all eternity while the earth, as we know it, is doomed for destruction (and not from climate change) as are all those who have ignored God and rejected Christ.

The world, our secular, ungodly world, is a great hindrance to heaven.  The world teaches that if you are a “good” person, if your good deeds outweigh your bad deeds, then you are a “shoo in” for heaven.  Sadly, multitudes upon multitudes believe this.  However, scripture tells us that our human righteousness is as “filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6), thus no matter how “good” we think we are, we can never measure up to God’s standards on our own.  In Ezekiel 3:20, we find that if a righteous man (remember, Ezekiel lived over 600 years prior to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ) turned to sin, that the righteousness that he had done before, God would not remember when the man stood in the judgment.  Jesus carried that truth even further when He stated that those who come before Him with nothing but their “good” works to justify themselves will find that He never knew them.  They had spent their lives trying to “earn” eternal life and found that it was all for nought.

Since we are unable to be perfect as God requires and cannot overcome the draw of the world and all of its evil on our own, we must have Christ as our Lord and Savior for He has overcome the world (John 16:33), and, in Him, we are also overcomers.