These books are John on fire; he is passionate, strong and very black and white. These short letters will take you to another level in your maturity in Christ, giving us the tests of Christian living and the things we should ‘know’. As you read them, you won’t remain the same. They will challenge you and change you as you sit at the feet of John, one of the key apostles of the faith.
As I mentioned when we studied the book of John together, John is my favourite author of the Bible. I mean, I absolutely love Paul but I resonate with John – he is a logical, analytical super-passionate teacher that is anchored in the Old Testament but with an incredibly creative prophetic edge.
A recurrent, and all to easy, temptation when doing theology is to unhook describing the life from living the life, as though theology were a science. This is one reason I prefer Biblical Theology to Systematic Theology. Biblical Theology tends to take the passages in their immediate context, applying them to the purpose for which and to which/whom they were penned, whereas Systematic Theology attempts to make a coherent system of disparate parts.