Growing up strong

For close to sixty years John has been watching the effect of his teaching. He’s watched newly hatched Christians grasp the love of the Father and his Son, enabling them to put their past lives behind them and start afresh, knowing they’re forgiven and forever loved as fully fledged members of God’s family. 

John then watched these same Christians set out on their new lives. John calls them “young men,” but it could be someone of any age who’s well into the next stage of their Christian lives, seeking to live as Jesus lived, 1 John 2:5-6.

They’re growing up well too, because John also writes that they’re growing up “strong,” verse 14, the Greek word meaning “mighty” and “powerful.” They’d entered that stage in a Christian life – pictured in Hebrews 10:32-35 – “when you stood your ground in the face of suffering. Kicked around in public, targets of every kind of abuse – some days it was you, other days your friends. If friends went to prison, you stuck by them. If enemies broke in and seized your goods, you let them go with a smile. Nothing they did bothered you, nothing set you back.”

Just like the apostles who, when flogged in Acts 5:40, “never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ” (42). And when Paul was nearly stoned to death in Lystra in Acts 14:19, a little while later “he got up and went back into the city” (20). These men were unstoppable. There was “nothing in them,” as John phrases it in 1 John 2:10, “that could make them stumble.” 

This was how it was in the early stage of the church, when like typical “young men” they were full of drive and energy. Life was tough at times, and opposition could be severe, but as Paul wrote in Colossians 1:29, “I struggle on with all the energy God gives me, which so powerfully works in me.” Paul had learnt too, that “I can do everything through him who gives me strength,” Philippians 4:13. 

And it was this same strength that John had seen developing in those he’d watched as they too entered this stage of life as a Christian, when life was tough and the world and its influence pressed in on them, but then seeing them come through it in a great show of strength. And it was thrilling to see. But so was the reason for why they had such strength: because “The word of God lives in you”….(next blog)