Study Desk

So if we say that we share in life with God, but we continue living in darkness, we are liars, who don't follow the truth.

But if we confess our sins, God will forgive us. We can trust God to do this. He always does what is right. He will make us clean from all the wrong things we have done.

My dear children, I write this letter to you so that you will not sin. But if anyone sins, we have Jesus Christ to help us. He always did what was right, so he is able to defend us before God the Father.

If we say we know God but do not obey his commands, we are lying. The truth is not in us.

But when we obey God's teaching, his love is truly working in us. This is how we know that we are living in him.

But what I write is also a new command. It is a true one; you can see its truth in Jesus and in yourselves. The darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining.

Someone might say, "I am in the light," but if they hate any of their brothers or sisters in God's family, they are still in the darkness.

But whoever hates their brother or sister is in darkness. They live in darkness. They don't know where they are going, because the darkness has made them blind.

This is all there is in the world: wanting to please our sinful selves, wanting the sinful things we see, and being too proud of what we have. But none of these comes from the Father. They come from the world.

The world is passing away, and all the things that people want in the world are passing away. But whoever does what God wants will live forever.

These enemies were in our group, but they left us. They did not really belong with us. If they were really part of our group, they would have stayed with us. But they left. This shows that none of them really belonged with us.

Whoever does not believe in the Son does not have the Father, but whoever accepts the Son has the Father too.

The Father has loved us so much! This shows how much he loved us: We are called children of God. And we really are his children. But the people in the world don't understand that we are God's children, because they have not known him.

Dear friends, now we are children of God. We have not yet been shown what we will be in the future. But we know that when Christ comes again, we will be like him. We will see him just as he is.

Don't be like Cain. He belonged to the Evil One. Cain killed his brother. But why did he kill him? Because what Cain did was evil, and what his brother did was good.

My dear friends, many false prophets are in the world now. So don't believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see if they are from God.

But we are from God. So the people who know God listen to us. But the people who are not from God don't listen to us. This is how we know the Spirit that is true and the spirit that is false.

No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us. If we love each other, God's love has reached its goal—it is made perfect in us.

If we say we love God but hate any of our brothers or sisters in his family, we are liars. If we don't love someone we have seen, how can we love God? We have never even seen him.

We believe people when they say something is true. But what God says is more important. And this is what God told us: He told us the truth about his own Son.