John's Letters

John's letters, especially his first letter, contain some very strong and potentially unsettling statements. Some of the things he says are so unsettling that they can leave his readers wondering whether or not they are truly saved, or if their salvation is secure.

These studies endeavour to understand John's letters from the perspective of their original setting, where a certin kind of false teaching, along with its proponents and adherents, had entered the church.

It is important to remember that all that John says has some connection to the presence of this false teaching. His purpose in writing is not to unsettle genuine believers, but rather to encourage them to be persistent in their faith in Jesus Christ and consistent in the way they live their lives. His purpose is to expose false belief and false practice and in doing so confirm right belief and right practice. His purpose is not to make those who believe in Christ afraid they can lose their salvation, but rather to point out that the false teachers and their adherents had never had salvation, because they had never truly believed in the real Jesus Christ who was proclaimed by the apostles.

Where there is difficulty in knowing exactly what John means, or where there is disagreement among Bible teachers about what he means, these studies seek to understand what he wrote by looking at other things that he wrote in his letters or in his gospel, and by looking at the teaching of the New Testament generally.