WEDNESDAY March 8th
1 John 3:11–15
‘For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous. Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you. We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.’
Within these few verses is the sentence I will concentrate on, ‘Because his deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous’. John is re-echoing his common theme springing from the new commandment that we should love one another, and he draws from the example of Cain and Abel, saying that we should not be like Cain who was of the evil one. The opposite to this would be that we should be like Abel. Abel was the righteous one.
Bringing this example up to date, John says that we should not be surprised that the world hates us, because being the children of God, we are righteous. We are different because of the outworking of the grace in our lives.
Today we see perhaps more than ever the hatred of the world toward the children of God, almost daily we see how righteousness and Biblical morality is coming under attack and the more we want to stand up for that which is right the more the world will turn up its hatred towards us. But we must be strong, I wrote something down in my diary a few weeks ago, which fits in with this devotion today, ‘we need to TURN UP our devotion toward the things of God, his word, fellowship and prayer so that we will be ready when the world TURNS UP its hatred toward us.
In many countries that hatred is such that we have our brothers and sisters in Christ being thrown into prisons, even tortured and threatened with death if they refuse to retract their faith in Christ. We do not suffer in the same way in this country, but our faith is being attacked perhaps like it never has been before, we need to stand firm, we need the help of the Holy Spirit, we need to stand having put on the full armour of God, we cannot afford to compromise in any way whatsoever, we MUST turn up our devotion for the things of God.