Book of Common Prayer

Faith wins the victory

5 Everyone who believes that the Messiah is Jesus has been fathered by God. Everyone who loves the parent loves the child as well. ² That is how we know that we love the children of God, because we love God and do what he commands. ³ This is what loving God means: it means keeping his commandments. His commandments, what’s more, are no trouble, ⁴ because everything that is fathered by God conquers the world. This is the victory that conquers the world: our faith.

⁵ Who is the one who conquers the world? Surely the one who believes that Jesus is God’s son! ⁶ It was he who came by means of water and blood, Jesus the Messiah, not by water only but by the water and the blood. The spirit is the one who bears witness, because the spirit is the truth. ⁷ There are three that bear witness, you see, ⁸ the spirit, the water and the blood, and these three agree together. ⁹ If we have received human witness, God’s witness is greater. This is the witness of God, the testimony he has borne to his son. ¹⁰ All those who believe in the son of God have the witness in themselves, but anyone who does not believe God has made a liar of him, because they have not believed in the witness which God bore concerning his son. ¹¹ This is the witness: God has given us the life of the age to come, and this life is in his son. ¹² Anyone who has the son has life. Anyone who does not have the son of God does not have life.

³⁸ He left the synagogue and went into Simon’s house. Simon’s mother-in-law was sick with a high fever, and they asked him about her. ³⁹ He stood in front of her, rebuked the fever, and it left her. And straight away she got up and waited on them.

⁴⁰ When the sun went down, everyone who had sick people—all kinds of sicknesses—brought them to him. He laid his hands on each one in turn, and healed them. ⁴¹ Demons came out of many people, shouting out, “You are the son of God!” He sternly forbade them to speak, because they knew he was the Messiah.

⁴² When day dawned he left the town and went off to a deserted place. The crowds hunted for him, and when they caught up with him they begged him not to leave them.

⁴³ “I must tell the good news of God’s kingdom to the other towns,” he said. “That’s what I was sent for.” ⁴⁴ And he was announcing the message to the synagogues of Judaea.