DEVOTION – DAY 531

1 John 5:4-5 “Overcome The World”

1 John 5:4-5 “For everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.”

To overcome the world means to gain victory over our sinful pattern of life. When we choose to obey God and His Word, we will have victory over sin and death. Obedience to God is possible for believers because they have been born again. The Holy Spirit lives within them and gives them the strength. In these verses, the apostle John tells us that there are two aspects to victory: 1) The initial victory all Christians have at their point of conversion when they turn in faith from the world to God through confession and belief in Jesus as their Lord and Savior, 2) The ongoing daily victory that Christians enjoys when they reject sins in their lives when they walk with Jesus. All this is possible when they believe in Jesus as the Son of God, their Lord and Savior.

Sergei Kourdakov was born in 1951 in the Soviet Union. He became an orphan when he was 5, and was raised in state run orphanages schooled in communism. By the time he was 18, whilst studying in the naval academy at Petropavlovsk, he was recruited as a KGB agent. He was tasked with persecuting Christians. He was involved in multiple raids against Christians meeting illegally in homes, often beating them up, and confiscating their Bibles and materials. In one of his raids, he caught a pretty young woman and he proceeded to beat her before letting her go. He thought the beating would deter her from joining further Christian gatherings. To his surprise, the next day, in another raid in a nearby village, he found the same young woman again attending the illegal meeting. This aroused his curiosity as to what could cause Christians to want to meet despite the high risks and dangers. At the same time, he began to question his own communist ideologies especially when he noticed that his communist superiors were hypocritical about their beliefs and values.

One day, Sergei was tasked to burn some of the confiscated Christian material. Before he burnt them, he thought he would keep aside some material to see for himself why young people would want to place their belief in something that the Soviet state had condemned as dangerous. The material he kept aside happened to be an incomplete copy of the gospel of Luke. To his surprise, the material was not dangerous to the state at all. Instead, it was more about how to be a better person and how one should forgive those who had committed wrong. The words seem to strike at his heart and he could not stop reading the material. He found himself increasingly conflicted as he carried out raids against Christians he no longer felt was a threat to the Soviet state. He eventually defected to Canada by jumping off his merchant ship when it was close to the Canadian shore. He eventually converted Christianity. He had turned his back on his dark past and chose to put his faith in Jesus as His Lord and Savior.

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, thank you for your mercy, grace and salvation. We pray that many people will one day confess and believe in Jesus as their Lord and Savior. We humbly pray in the powerful name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Questions

1. How has the Lord given you strength to turn from sin and temptations of this world?
2. What are some victories you have experienced over the power of sin in your life because of the Lord’s help?
3. Share how you became a child of God.