Radio Repeaters

1 John 5:14-15

          Radio Repeaters are devices that receive a radio signal that is weak and then amplify it and send it out again. Sometimes they transmit on the same frequency that they received. Sometimes they send it out on a different frequency. The content of the signal doesn’t change. What they received they send out. Repeaters extend the range of the original signal. As an example, most police and fire services use repeaters to be able to communicate across their large geographic area.

          Effective prayer is very much like a repeater system. We get so close to the LORD, listening to His every desire, and then we transmit that desire back to Him in prayer. We end up praying His will in a situation. And He knows what is best for us. He has our greatest good on His mind. So when we pray according to His will, the best outcome is guaranteed. He always wants us to join Him in what He is doing. He wants us to join His bandwagon.

          This is the confidence we have. Our prayers can be answered when we pray what He wants us to pray. But one of our biggest struggles connected to prayer is our own selfishness and shortsightedness. We want what we want and we want it now. There is so often little actual flexibility in our prayers. We so often don’t bother listening, tuning in to His frequency, before we pray. We just let it rip.

          John tells us we can have confidence when we pray. We can know we have eternal life and we can know that our prayers will be answered. Pray His will! Take time to get in His presence, silent enough to hear His heartbeat, then pray what He tells you to pray. But we don’t like having to slow down and listen. We must still our trembling heart. We must fight our urge to rush in and ask. We have to submit our will to His will. We must surrender.

          Some have taken these verses and transformed God into a winning slot machine or internet marketplace. In goes the prayer and out comes the answer. They string together verses to suit their fleshly desires and then claim that their fleshly desire is God’s will. And since it is God’s will, at least in their warped mind, they twist God’s arm until they get their answer. Some TV preachers are famous for this kind of manipulation. They get the money rolling in from viewers, buy the corporate jet and MacMansion, and then they say, “See, it works.” God didn’t answer their prayer. Guilt inducement and manipulation did.

          One of my professors in college years ago said something that has stuck with me. He said that if the Gospel being preached didn’t work among the poorest people in the world, then there was something wrong with the Gospel being preached. If the prosperity teaching wouldn’t work in the slums of Calcutta, it wasn’t true.

          God does not run a Ponzi scheme, taking wealth from one per and passing it on to another using manipulation. He is not behind those preachers and their teaching. Their judgment is waiting for them. They have stored up wrath for the day of judgment.

Clarity

1 John 5:6

          Not everything is life is of equal clarity. There are things that seem fuzzy, unclear in the moment. If everything was equally clear, we would have all purchased Microsoft stock when it was only a few dollars a share. We operate in a world with so much information and yet so little information that we actually need right now to make decision. We are always operating on less than 100% information.

          We read emails and texts and have to guess about the meaning. And then we get upset when someone misunderstands what we wrote! The passing of information is an imperfect art. And even when we do it perfectly, the other person might be missing key information to the full context and back story so that they understand exactly what we were trying to convey. Their mood in the moment, their reaction to unseen factors can shift how they hear our perfectly clear communication. Or like I did just yesterday, send the message to the wrong person!

          Even some parts of Scripture are not a clear to us today as they might have been to the first recipients. Some of the cultural and religious context of that day has been lost. All the personal conversations are gone. There is no email archive or voice recording vault with those for easy access. We can’t even get emails of current history to help fill in the blanks. Hard drives get removed and destroyed. Servers get wiped of evidence. Multiple email addresses go largely unnoticed. But I digress.

          Even today we don’t have access to complete communication. So as we look back at some parts of Scripture and have questions, it should be expected. So much of Scripture is pretty clear in meaning. We might kick against the Truth being presented, dismissing it because of some preconceived idea about our own superior grasp of the universe, but what the text says is crystal clear.

          But there are times when the fog of time seems to take over. I think our text for today is just such a passage. I have looked and read people’s interpretation of what this text says for the last three decades. I am no surer of exactly what is meant now than when I started. I still sit in the fog. And when I read some who write with such absolute certainty of the meaning, I have to restrain myself. The fog must be thicker where they are than from my vantage point.

          Water and blood are both symbols of something important. Water could be physical birth. Blood could be sacrificial death. I’m not sure. I don’t think they are connected to baptism, but I could be wrong. I do know that John must have known that his readers would have gotten exactly what he meant when they first read these words. They would have understood the testimony John was talking about that put Jesus at the center of authentic Christianity.

          John tells us that these two, the water and the blood, are joined by the Spirit in bringing the Truth he has brought and they have believed to light. This is in contrast to what the false teachers were teaching. Something about the water and the blood, what it meant and they understood at that time, was missing from what the false teachers were teaching. And this missing element was essential to being a Jesus-follower.

          I think a possible meaning of the water is Jesus physical birth. He was fully human, something some of the early false understandings of Jesus taught. They said Jesus’ life was not really human life, but some illusion of reality. So for John to tell us that Jesus came by water, had a real physical birth, a real mother, a real passage through a birth canal engulfed in amniotic fluid, would be a reinforcement of and validation of the reality of Jesus’ humanity.

          For me the blood and its meaning in this verse is even foggier than the water. The blood could be blood during physical birth. It could be connected to His physical blood connecting Him to humanity. It might be His physical blood that was actually shed for our sins. It could be the meaning of the blood spilled, the sacrificial nature of His life and death on our behalf. I am just not sure.

          I know that the water, the blood and the Spirit all tell us something about the fact that Jesus is essential to salvation. Without Jesus, fully man, fully God, we don’t have salvation. Our sins are not forgiven. We are still stuck in our sin and sin’s consequences. We haven’t passed from death to life. We are still in life.

          I wish the breeze would blow and clear everything up. One day He will! When our faith becomes sight, everything that can be clear will be clear. We won’t understand everything: only God can do that. But everything that we need to understand will be understood with absolute clarity.