This Is Not the Life; the Eternal One Is

"This Is Not the Life; the Eternal One Is" – 1 John 5:11-12 We have always lived anxious about this life. You get up thinking about the day, you make plans, and the next day the plans fall to the floor; then trouble comes and you do not know whether you did wrong, whether it was the devil, or whether it is the will of God. Such is the reality of life: it comes, it acts, and then it goes. But there is something we must see: this is not the life. We live here in order to reach eternity, and the danger is that we wound ourselves over what is passing and lose what is eternal. The true life, the one that never ends, is the one we have secured in Christ.

I. The reality of this passing life.

A. The care of the day rules us.

1. You get up thinking about what you did not do yesterday and what you must do today; the care of the day raises you.

2. Good news brings you gladness, but something happens and the hope is taken from you afterward.

3. You think you have conquered one thing and suddenly you must begin again.

4. At four in the morning what troubles you wakes you, and what makes you desperate torments you.

5. In this life we are tried, and the day declares to us blessings or sorrows; sowing and reaping is law.

B. We ourselves crush life.

1. If the trouble stands before you, you grow weary, you grow sad, you tell no one, and you are capable of shutting yourself in.

2. Sometimes we stop at what is in front of us, and that is trouble upon trouble.

3. If you wrap your life in your trouble, you will grow bitter and disagreeable; and it is very easy to grow disagreeable.

4. If you are disagreeable you will hear nothing: everything said to you rings off and does not enter.

5. We have a thousand reasons, but those thousand reasons will not let you grow in what you love.

C. We strive here for what the eternal life is.

1. What is so in this life today is not so tomorrow; the eternal will always be the same.

2. However long your life may be, you are here on earth for the life of eternity.

3. Believers have eternity; we are eternal, because there is a heaven and there is a hell.

4. The life we live here is passing, full of limitations, of sorrows and of momentary joys.

5. This is the common and ordinary life; the danger is how we wound ourselves and lose eternity.

6. Here we are only passing through: the earth is a few steps, and our true citizenship is in heaven.

D. When Jesus comes, life truly changes.

1. The first favour He does us is to wash us with His blood and transform our heart.

2. The greatest thing that comes after the blood of Christ is the Holy Spirit, who directs us and makes us know the holy will of the Father.

3. The one who has contact with God is the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Godhead.

4. That is why I work for that house I have up there, doing the will of God and pleasing the Father.

II. I am the resurrection, and the life… believest thou this? (John 11:25-26).

A. Jesus does not only give life: He is the life.

1. He said to Martha: I am the life, I am the bread of life.

2. Standing before Lazarus was the giver of life, the Messiah Himself.

B. The challenge Jesus gave Martha is the challenge to us.

1. Believest thou this? That challenge was for Martha and it is for us this day.

2. Martha says to Him: if thou hadst been here, this would not have happened. That is a complaint, made bold by her closeness to the Master.

3. And who makes a complaint to God? She is making one, and with much vexation.

4. Jesus lived on earth with a clock marking His days, His moments and His seconds: He knew when He had to arrive and at what hour He would raise him.

5. He is God; He knows everything.

C. How many things does Jesus ask us the same about?

1. We live tangled because we live this life: you weep, your nerves fail, you take a pill for anxiety, you do not know what tomorrow will bring.

2. Tomorrow comes with its own care.

3. Our life is not this, to be troubled, anguished and losing sleep.

4. Faith is the key that opens the hope of the resurrection.

III. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life (1 John 5:11-12).

A. Eternal life is a gift of God.

1. John said it in one of his epistles, not in the Gospel: he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.

2. We were born, we died, we were buried, and that was all.

3. We are soul, body and spirit: the spirit is what joins the Holy Spirit and makes us spiritual persons.

4. The soul is what makes us vulnerable; that is why it is said: my soul, wait thou upon Jehovah.

5. The soul stirs you, unsettles you and lifts you; today it is glad, tomorrow sad, the next day worse, because it holds every feeling.

6. The more you develop your spiritual life, the more you will understand the voice of God.

B. Eternal life is not earned: it is received, and it is centred in Christ.

1. You serve Christ, you are converted, His blood cleanses you, and there is the covenant with the Holy Spirit.

2. The moment the blood of Christ comes, the Holy Spirit sees that the blood is there; it cannot be measured in minutes, for the Godhead knows no time.

3. If you fall back into sin, the Holy Spirit departs; that is why the church and the preaching are always open, so that we may repent.

C. There is no life outside the Son of God.

1. You do and undo, you shout, you stamp, you grow angry, you grow content; such are mortals.

2. The life we receive through the Son is absolute and exclusive: He is the only one, and He permits no other option.

3. No one may opine on how Christ ought to have been, why He died, whether He truly went to the cross; all raise arguments, but He is the only one.

4. Your spiritual life did not begin the other day: it began the day Christ came and washed you with His blood.

5. You are costly, because He bore upon His body all your curse.

6. To know to do good and not do it is sin; the struggle on earth is to keep pleasing God, so as not to lose so great a salvation.

IV. He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me… is passed from death unto life (John 5:24).

A. He that heareth my word.

1. Faith begins by hearing and receiving the word of Christ.

2. If I do not read it, it is as though I had forgotten it all; the Bible is living word, and every time you read it, it produces faith in you.

B. And believeth on him that sent me.

1. Salvation rests on believing in the Father and in the mission of Jesus.

2. Jesus comes to earth because the Father sends Him: humanity must be saved.

3. With the sacrifice of animals it did not work; He sends His Son, and so it does.

C. Hath everlasting life.

1. With the death of Christ eternal life came to us.

2. You do not have it by qualities nor by sacrifice: Jesus came, gave His life and paid for it.

3. It is not only future: it is a present secured to the believer.

D. And shall not come into condemnation.

1. That is a promise of security: in Christ we are not condemned.

2. The good thing is to rise in peace; whatever the anguish may be, one is at peace, because we strive for the eternal.

3. What is not settled today is settled tomorrow; and if it will never be settled, I will not live troubled over it.

4. I cannot bleed out my life over what is not mine to do.

E. But is passed from death unto life.

1. The day we were converted we were full of sin, of trespass and of disorder.

2. Jesus gave His body, His blood cleanses us, and the Holy Spirit comes to take up residence in us.

3. He makes a wholly radical change, and it has already happened: from death unto life.

4. When Jesus came, every one of us was dead. I learned to love in the death of Christ.

V. And I give unto them eternal life… neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand (John 10:28).

A. He paid for our eternal life.

1. It is not by works; works do not save us.

2. He is absolute in the payment of our deliverance, and no one else can make it.

3. Eternal life is a gift directly from Jesus; that is why loving Him is a great thing.

B. Eternal life is neither earned nor paid for: it is received.

1. The only payment was the death of Jesus on the cross.

2. Every one of us has had to answer a call to repentance on some day of our life; on that day one accepts and receives it.

3. It is not earned by good works, nor by praying more, nor by fasting more.

4. That is why at the call it is asked: do you want to receive Jesus?

C. They shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.

1. Those who will perish are those who have no eternal life, because they have not been willing to come to Jesus.

2. We have divine protection, not man's; I have been chased on the road and threatened with a weapon, and the Lord kept me.

3. Jesus guarantees that nothing and no one can separate His sheep from Him.

4. What God has given you of life and has placed in your hands, no one can harm.

VI. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God (John 17:3).

A. Eternal life is a relationship, not merely a duration.

1. It is not only endless duration: it is a relationship with God, a friendship, a lifelong companionship.

2. To know God is not to know about Him, but to have intimate, personal communion with Him.

3. Only through Jesus Christ is that knowledge and that eternal life reached.

B. Here Jesus Himself defines what eternal life is.

1. To know God and Christ: it is the Godhead, it is the Trinity.

2. We must know God the Father, who is upon His throne, and Christ at His right hand.

3. Prayer is to the Father, but it reaches the Father through Christ, because the one who died on the cross was Christ.

4. Every prayer must end in the name of Jesus; it is obligatory. This is doctrine.

5. There are sects that say it is only Christ, or only God; they are not separated.

C. A present reality, not only a future.

1. It is to walk in relationship with the Father and with the Son.

2. That communion is the essence of the true life.

VII. For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life (Romans 6:23).

A. The wages of sin is death.

1. Sin always brings consequences, always brings a result.

2. That is why one is troubled, why one is anguished, why so many things are not understood.

3. One is ashamed, one is filled with anguish, one despairs. In life what is done is paid for.

B. But the gift of God is eternal life.

1. Unlike wages, the gift of God is not earned: it is received by grace.

2. So we must thank God every day for His mercy: thank you for forgiving me, thank you for lifting me up again.

3. It is an unmerited gift that comes only from His great love.

C. It is not found in religions, nor in works, nor in merits.

1. The human being loves to manufacture works and is fascinated by merits and ministries, and from that comes pride.

2. Jesus lived in action: what He touched was healed, the blind He healed, the dead He raised.

3. He is the bridge between our condemnation and our salvation; whoever wants to be saved has Jesus as the bridge, for He is the one who brings us to the Father.

VIII. In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began (Titus 1:2).

A. The centre of the Gospel is eternal life.

1. We gather because what we seek is eternal life; that is why God raised up the church.

2. The one who sustains it and keeps it is God.

3. It is not an illusion, but a certainty.

B. God cannot lie.

1. God never says anything in half measures.

2. The security of our salvation rests on His character, not on our effort.

3. What we must know is the character of Christ: what He is, what distinguishes Him, the way He works.

4. Christ is love: He gave His blood for me and for you, and He lives mindful of us even when we feel Him far away.

C. The blood covers us.

1. The devil has no dominion over you; what covers you is the blood.

2. The demons do not come to torment those who lack the blood: they come to torment the chosen of God.

3. When the soul of a believer is to go up, at the moment of death the angels come, they fetch it and they pass through the atmosphere.

4. And afterward the body will rise, at the time when Jesus stands in the clouds.

IX. According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4).

A. Eternal life is no improvised plan.

1. It was the purpose of God from eternity.

2. Before the creation it was already in His heart to redeem us in Christ.

3. How then can I be unfaithful to Him? How can I not work what God placed in my hands to do?

4. Before the creation we were already chosen, rescued, delivered and forgiven.

X. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal (Matthew 25:46).

A. The judgment of the nations.

1. Jesus separates the sheep, who are the righteous, from the goats, who are the unrighteous according to their works, which evidence faith.

2. It is the final judgment, and it is written in the Revelation: the angels will bring the books.

3. According to how they behaved it will be told them whether they are cast into the lake of fire.

4. The saved will be with the Father, the multitude of the saints in their robes.

B. The order of what is coming.

1. First come the thousand years, when Jesus descends after the seven years of the wedding of the Lamb and returns to Jerusalem, to Israel.

2. It says that land will be enlarged, and there we shall all be.

3. After those thousand years comes the great judgment of the nations; it will be a multitude, but that is another dimension we do not grasp at this time.

C. Two final destinies.

1. Those who rejected Christ and did not come in obedience will face eternal separation from God.

2. They had opportunity to enter eternity with God and never did: they denied Him and crucified Him.

3. On that day there will come new heavens and a new earth, because all that is the earth will pass away.

4. Here the reality of hell is affirmed as a final destiny; and the righteous, those who believed in Christ and bore the fruit of love, will enter eternal glory.

XI. Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life (Jude 21).

A. Keep yourselves in the love of God.

1. Never be in strife, never quarrel with anyone, never be angry with anyone.

2. If at times a distance must be kept, keep the distance; but without discord, without quarrels, without hatred, without bitterness.

3. To say that a person does me no good is not hatred: it is knowing that it can no longer be.

4. It is to remain firm in the relationship with God, keeping the faith, because the world will try to rob you of faith and make you disobedient.

5. It is not that one holds on by his own strength, but that we cooperate with the grace of God.

6. God has called us to peace: if you see something drawing you into strife, put in your own part and withdraw; it costs nothing, and so the soul is calmed and the impulses are neutralized.

B. Looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ.

1. Christian hope rests not on our own merits, but on the mercy of God.

2. Every day you see the mercy of God, and on that our whole existence rests: that God would come out on our behalf.

3. Keep me, God, this day; teach me to battle in peace and in mercy.

C. Unto eternal life.

1. That is the final end of perseverance in the love and grace of God.

2. The whole of our warfare is for eternal life.

3. Salvation is a gift, not a reward for works; Ephesians 2:8-9 says so.

D. While this life lasts, care for the body.

1. Take the medicines that are yours to take; do not be capable of ruining your life by failing to obey what is ours to do.

2. It is no humiliation to take pills. I take mine, and I am very responsible with them.

3. Whoever thinks high blood pressure is nothing is mistaken: it is a neglect, and it is a certain death.

4. This is the life, but I have the eternal one; and I strive in this one because in the eternal I want to gain all that belongs to me.

E. Thou hast been faithful over a few things; I will make thee ruler over many things.

1. If Jesus stands in the cloud and calls those who have departed and catches up those who are alive at that time, if it were today, then amen.

2. We shall be given to the Lamb, to the wedding of the Lamb; there we shall have the supper and there we shall have our house.

3. For what you do on earth is little: your eternity is your life.