In this message from Cornerstone Fountain Valley, Pastor unpacks 1 John 5:6-12 by tracing the historical conflict between early Christian faith and Gnostic philosophy, which taught that Jesus became God only at his baptism. Drawing on John's unique role as Jesus's cousin, inner-circle disciple, and caretaker of Mary, the sermon argues that Jesus was fully God from the beginning, not a human who attained divinity. The passage's testimony of spirit, water, and blood is shown to be John's direct rebuttal of pagan ideas that still surface today in new language, making the question of Christ's identity as urgent now as it was in the first century.
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“God made us in his image. We broke our relationship with God through sin. And the penalty for that sin is death. We could not be made right with God on our own efforts. So God himself did what we could not do.”
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Unlock with your sermon →“Understanding the Truth Have you ever heard someone say they admire Jesus, his wisdom, his kindness, his example, but stop short of believing he's actually God?”
Read all 5 days of the devotional →“Whoever believes in the Son of God accepts this testimony. Whoever does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because they have not believed the testimony God has given about his Son.”
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Unlock with your sermon →“According to the Gnostic argument that John was refuting, when did Jesus supposedly become divine?”
Take the sermon quiz →“Share with your group in your own words: The New Testament was written over roughly 50 years, from about AD 50 to AD 100. The earliest letters, books like Galatians and 1 Thessalonians,”
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Unlock with your sermon →“First John is technically a letter, though it lacks the standard epistolary greeting of most New Testament letters. Many scholars classify it as a theological tract or homily, a circular document sent to a”
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Unlock with your sermon →“There's a question that sounds polite and open-minded on the surface, but it actually contains a hidden problem: "Can't Jesus just be a great moral teacher without being God?”
Read the pastor's blog post →“Some Sunday mornings you walk away with a gentle encouragement. And then there are Sundays like this one, where you walk away with your understanding of Jesus permanently sharpened.”
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Unlock with your sermon →“The Bible is not a book. The Bible is a library of books. And that library has two major sections. The Old Wing and the New Wing.”
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Unlock with your sermon →According to this sermon, Jesus was fully God from the very beginning, not a human who became divine at baptism. John, as Jesus' firsthand cousin and closest disciple, insists Jesus always was God. As John's Gospel states, 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God,' before creation itself.
The sermon argues this is the most essential Christian belief, not a side issue. If Jesus was merely a good person who became divine, salvation changes entirely. As C.S. Lewis put it, Jesus was either Lord, a lunatic, or a liar. There is no middle ground of 'great moral teacher.'
Both were written by John, Jesus' first cousin and one of his inner three disciples. He played with Jesus as a child, witnessed the crucifixion, cared for Mary afterward, and was the last living disciple. His testimony about Jesus being eternally God carries unmatched personal authority and firsthand knowledge.
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