When I came to prepare this lesson, I labeled my notes 1 John 5:6-12. That seemed like a good bunch of verses for a Sunday school lesson. Then it dwindled into verses 6-9; Have you seen the title of this entry? Part 2? On verse 6 alone? Well, I ended up writing nearly a whole lesson on the first half of this verse. Even so, we cannot overlook its second half, the one that concentrates upon the Spirit of God. Here are both halves of that verse again:
6 This is he who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ; not by the water only but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. (1 John 5:6–ESV)
The Spirit, that is the Holy Spirit, John says is the one who testifies. When John says that he and his fellows testify about Jesus that makes a lot of sense to me. He is a person like me recounting events he saw and experienced. But the Holy Spirit? How in the world does he testify? Is there a DirectTV subscription to that? Or a “Godflix”? What kind of antenna is needed to catch that signal? Or once caught make sense of it.
There is an antenna of sorts, and maybe you could say modem, in each of us. It is called our spirit, that part of us that is ours alone, experienced individually. It is not body or blood. It is not even molecular, but somehow functions independently of anything science has yet been able to concoct. Maybe we could call it supramolecular?
No matter what we call it we all use it, live in it, experience life through it. Inside that part of us, we have a sense of things. We all have a variety of thoughts about the way things are. That is our God-given makeup, but we must not equate the term God-given to God-agreeing. Often the human spirit is far from God with thoughts both wrong and right existing inside an often contradictory, mental jumble.
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