How to Conquer the World

To conquer the world in Christ doesn’t mean we get everything we desire. It does mean the world has no power to master us in the daily struggles and persistent challenges we face.

“Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”
—1 John 5:5

“He came from nothing. He conquered everything.” That’s the tagline for Ridley Scott’s film, Napoleon, released in the fall of 2023. Movie reviewers have remarked on Joaquin Phoenix’s understated performance of the French general who terrorized Europe in the early part of the 19th century, after literally crowning himself emperor of the French.

Napoleon really did come from nothing, or close to it. Born on the remote Mediterranean island of Corsica, he faced discrimination as a young army officer. He had an Italian name: Buonaparte (he later changed it to the French-sounding Bonaparte). Because he’d spent the early part of his career on the fringes of respectability, he found himself one of the few military officers still standing after the carnage of the French Revolution.

Napoleon never saw a power vacuum he didn’t want to fill. And there was a whopper of a power vacuum in France after so many leaders had gone to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. When the few remaining royalists seized the moment to push back against the Revolution and restore themselves to power, Napoleon ordered his men to load their cannons with grapeshot and turn them on the mob of aristocrats. The cobblestones of Paris literally ran red with blood. After the smoke cleared, this fierce Corsican military officer was the most powerful man in France.

Napoleon seized the moment. In the coming years, his army would overrun nearly all of continental Europe. By 1812, his empire stretched from Spain on the west to Poland and Austria on the east.

But the juggernaut of conquest, once set in motion, is hard to stop. Rather than quitting while he was ahead, Napoleon boldly sent his army into Russia in late summer, looking for a swift victory. Who could defeat him, the great Napoleon?

The Russians like to say it was General Winter who defeated him. His overconfident soldiers outran their supply lines. Many of them, still wearing their summer uniforms, starved to death in the snowbanks. The elusive Russian soldiers, bundled in heavy fur coats, came out of their hiding places and made short work of the rest. After a brief return to power and his legendary defeat at Waterloo by British General Wellington, Napoleon lived out his days on a remote and rocky island in the South Atlantic, the world’s most notorious prisoner.

In Napoleon’s heyday, it looked to the people of Europe like he was a man who could conquer the world.

But he couldn’t do it. No one, thank the Lord, ever has.

 

Just One Word

The writer of the first letter of John begs to differ. “Who is it that conquers the world,” he declares, “but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”

This is the season of college graduations, when celebrities address crowds of eager capped-and-gowned graduates, seated row upon row. Their message often boils down to, “If you just believe in yourself, you, too, can conquer the world.” But — apart from a few Christian colleges — commencement speeches rarely have anything to do with believing in Jesus.

They’re more likely to have something to do with financial success. Remember the 1967 classic movie, The Graduate? In a famous scene, title character Ben Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman) is taken aside by an older man at a party.

The businessman, Mr. McGuire, whispers to the promising young college graduate, “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.”
“Yes, sir,” says Ben, dutifully.
“Are you listening?” asks McGuire.
“Yes, I am.”
“Plastics.”
“Exactly how do you mean?”
“There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?”

Plastics manufacturing looked like a pretty good field in 1967. They were making all sorts of things out of plastic — and hardly anybody had ever heard the word “recycling”! Graduate from a top school, get your foot in the door of the infant plastics industry, and who knows how fast and how high you could climb? Why, you might even conquer the world!

Speaking of conquering the world, in the same year that Ben Braddock was hearing the whispered mantra, “plastics,” a young teenager named Bill was learning how to play tic-tac-toe on a school computer. Back then, a game of computer tic-tac-toe — that would take 10 seconds with a pad and pencil — demanded all of a school lunch period to come clattering out of a dot-matrix printer. (They didn’t have monitors back then, let alone smartphones.) It hardly made sense to play that way, but Bill wasn’t giving up his lunch periods because he was a tic-tac-toe fanatic. He was enough of a visionary, even at that tender age, to realize computers wouldn’t be that slow forever.

When Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard eight years later and joined his friend Paul Allen in starting a little company called Microsoft, no one ever dreamed he’d become the next Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller — but that’s exactly what happened. If anyone can be said to have conquered the world in our day, it would be Bill Gates, multi-billionaire.

But that’s not the sort of conquest the author of 1 John has in mind. “Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes Jesus is the Son of God?” That statement’s not about accumulating vast wealth, nor wielding enormous power. The author of this letter knew perfectly well there was only one person in his day who could fit that description: the emperor of Rome. It was the sort of role Napoleon wished for himself, but he couldn’t make it stick.

No, the sort of world conquest this ancient disciple is describing is very different. It’s more of a spiritual reality. Let’s unpack what it means to make this confession — and to follow Jesus Christ.

 

Jesus, Prophet

For many centuries, the church has rolled out three great words to describe the person and work of Jesus Christ: prophet, priest and king.

First, Jesus is a prophet. Now that may sound strange to say when so many of us think of prophets as people who predict the future, but there’s a lot more to being a prophet than that. Prophets foretell the future, but they also speak powerfully to the present. Prophets are those rare individuals who defy convention, challenge injustice and raise a cry of protest when every other voice in the land is silent.

Prophets have vision — not so much of future events (though that may be part of it), but of the world as God created it to be. If Jesus is our prophet, it means he’s continually calling us to share his vision of things as they could be — ever leading us out of complacency and cynicism so we may make our little corner of the world a better place.

Let’s turn to the Bible to see a prophet in action. In 2 Kings 13, Elisha demonstrates prophetic vision. The pathetic King Joash is cowering in fear, quite unable to lead his soldiers into battle. Elisha tells him to take a bow and arrow, notch the arrow to the string and pull it back. Then, the prophet — near death himself but still strong enough to do this — walks over to the king and places his arms around him, laying his hands upon the king’s hands, as he holds the bow. Together, the two of them release the arrow to fly out a nearby window.

That arrow flight symbolizes Israel’s coming victory over Aram. Yet, without the prophet’s intervention, the arrow would never have left the bow — nor would the king have had the courage to lead his people to victory. Think of Jesus the prophet as being something like Elisha — reaching around us with strong arms, guiding and directing our lives, so that in word and deed we may bring our faith to bear, challenging the grasping, self-seeking values of our culture. With Christ as our prophet, the arrows of justice we release will always find their mark.

 

Jesus, Priest

Second, Christ is our priest. In the days of the ancient Hebrews, priests were those who made public sacrifices. Killing a prize sheep or goat, then roasting it upon an altar, was how you kept God happy, or so the people thought. The high priest of Israel had an especially important role. On the Day of Atonement, only the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies and perform the sacrifice for the sins of an entire people.

The letter to the Hebrews famously identifies Jesus as “high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek” (6:20). In going to the cross for us, Jesus has entered the Holy of Holies, that inner sanctum of the temple. There he has made a sacrifice for the sins of the world, not with a sacrificial animal, but with his own body and blood. Unlike the high priest of Israel — who had to make the sacrifice every year — Jesus’ high priestly sacrifice is once and for all.

The biblical accounts of the crucifixion tell how, as Jesus breathed his last, the veil of the temple was torn in two. The temple veil was a huge, floor-to-ceiling curtain that served as a gateway to the Holy of Holies. Only the high priest was permitted to venture through it, no one else.

When the gospel-writers describe the rending of the temple veil after Jesus’ death on the cross, the symbolism is powerful. No longer do we who are his followers need the offices of a priest to make sacrifices for us. Christ, our great high priest, has already done everything needful. Whenever we turn to God and forthrightly confess our sin — in worship or in private prayer — we instantly assure ourselves of God’s pardon, knowing Christ has paid the price.

To live our lives with Christ as our priest means we take seriously all he has done. It means that, when life deals us low blows and we sink into suffering, he’s right there with us. The Lord whose name we confess knows what it means to suffer pain, to endure indignity and heartache. More than that, he has — in his resurrection — triumphed over every human limitation, even death.

 

Jesus, King

Finally, Christ is our king. Now, this is no easy concept to take in — for there are precious few real kings left in our world today. What our tradition means to say, in talking about kingship, is that Jesus Christ, in being raised from the dead, has been exalted and rules the world from God’s right hand.

Of course, this vision of kingship is not only unfamiliar. It runs at variance with the ways many people prefer to see Jesus. Most would rather see him as a wise teacher, an extremely spiritual person who was closer to God than anyone else. Such people enjoy the lively vision of his parables and profess to follow his ethic of loving neighbor as self — but there’s no room in their worldview for one who’s Lord and Master. They prefer a spiritual sage, whose teachings they can take or leave, as it suits them.

In his classic book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis has this to say about the impossibility of separating Jesus’ teaching from his kingly rule: “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”¹

 

How to Conquer the World

Christ, then, is the Son of God. He is our prophet, priest and king. He was born in a manger, died on a cross and rose to defeat death itself. He came from nothing. He conquered everything.

But what does it mean, in this ancient disciple’s understanding, to conquer the world? Most of our Lord’s victory is yet to be realized. It won’t be revealed until he either returns one day or we find ourselves face-to-face with God. But in the meantime, we can take assurance in the promise that, if Christ is on our side, the world will never conquer us.

Sometimes it may appear that, in the great struggle of life, the world is winning. But those struggles are temporary. As Paul famously writes in the second letter to the Corinthians: “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies” (2 Corinthians 4:8-10).

To conquer the world, in Christ, doesn’t mean we get everything we’ve ever desired. It doesn’t mean we can crown ourselves anything. It doesn’t mean we’ll all become Pacific-Northwest software barons, Wall Street tycoons or even emperor of the French. It does mean that in the daily struggles we undergo and persistent challenges we face, the world has no power to master us. How could it? For we are not our own masters. We belong not to ourselves, but to Jesus Christ. And he has conquered everything.

—Carl Wilton contributed to this material.

 

Sources

1. Mere Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco, 2009), book 2, chapter 3.

The Other Texts

What Is One Possible Approach to the Text?

Jesus 101. In this text, the apostle Peter is preaching to the household of Cornelius — basically a roomful of foreigners (Gentiles) — as opposed to the Acts 2 crowd that consisted of a city full of Jews. As he does so, two remarkable things happen that turn the world upside down for the “circumcised believers.” First, the Holy Spirit comes down, and second, Peter baptizes the entire lot of them! The key to this text is verse 48: “The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles” (emphasis added). Now go back to 10:34-43. Luther famously referred to John 3:16 as the gospel in a nutshell. Yet, these verses might also lay claim to that metaphor: they’re just a bigger nutshell. Peter, who kick-started the church into existence at Pentecost, is now speaking to a largely Gentile audience. So, he gives the house of Cornelius a crash course in Christianity. His opening message is startling: God is not Jewish, not Roman, not Asian, not American and not European. God is transcultural and “anyone who fears him and does what is right” is acceptable to God! Wow! This is epic! Then, Peter explains how this is all possible: Jesus. He was anointed, he “went about doing good,” he was “put to death,” he was buried and rose after three days, he ate and drank with people after his death, and he’s now the only one authorized to judge the living and the dead. Believe in him and receive “forgiveness of sins through his name.” It is at this point that the Holy Spirit breaks through, and everyone is subsequently baptized. These are the basics. Develop each of these basic ideas, and you have yourself a sermon, only a little longer than the one Peter preached in Joppa.

What Does the Text Say?

In Acts 10, Peter and Cornelius receive visions and visitations that change them. Peter’s visions and visitation convince him to cross the threshold between the Jewish and Gentile worlds and begin intentionally leading non-Jews to Christ. Acts 10 begins not with Peter, but with Cornelius, the Gentile who has a vision from God to send for Peter and listen to his message. Once in Cornelius’ house, Peter explains the gospel to him and his household, and another miraculous visitation takes place. The Holy Spirit surprises the Jewish-Christian brethren who came with Peter by resting upon the Gentiles in the house so that they, too, can speak in tongues and evidence other signs of acceptance by God. Like the visitation of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost in Acts 2, the revelation occurs to all gathered in the place. However, in Acts 2, it is presumed that all those visited by the Spirit are Jews gathered for the festival of Pentecost. Here in Acts 10, the same gift of the Holy Spirit is given to non-Jews. This is what surprises Peter and the others. At this point, however, they can no longer think of any reason why these persons should not be baptized into the Christian faith. They have obviously been chosen and validated by God. Initially, baptism, such as that practiced by John, was an act of piety engaged in by Jews to help establish or re-establish religious purity in light of repentance. Here, however, it becomes that which makes the unclean convert to clean. Baptism becomes their gateway into religious purity. Conversion to Judaism and traditional circumcision, apparently, is no longer required.

What Is One Possible Approach to the Text?

A New Song. The tone of this psalm is ecstatic, almost euphoric. The writer cries, “O sing to the Lord a new song ... make a joyful noise to the Lord all the earth, break forth into joyous song and sing praises” (vv. 1, 4). The psalmist wants a new song. Wait! What is wrong with the old song? There is a lot of praise music in the psalms. The writer has already fiddled around with his lyre and harp and composed and played many songs. Today, we have scores of books of praise music. So why would the writer call for a new song? You’d think we have plenty of songs with which we can praise God! Yet, he calls for a new one. He does so because God has, yet again, done something new! And when God reveals the power of the divine presence anew, the writer can do nothing but sing a new melody with new words to praise God for what God has done. Can we write a new song? What has God done for us that would cause us to break forth in a “joyful noise”?

What Does the Text Say?

The central theme of Psalm 98 is that Israel (vv. 1-3), along with all the nations of the earth and the rest of God’s creation (vv. 4-9), is to sing praises to the Lord because the Lord has brought victory and reigns as King. The psalm’s imperative verbs are plural, reminding us that biblical worship is characteristically corporate. So, all of you/y’all/all y’all “sing to the Lord a new song.” The people of Israel had experienced God’s powerful and miraculous deliverance; thus, they were joyfully singing praises to the Lord. God’s delivering power was a public act (v. 2) — “in the sight of the nations.” “All the ends of the earth” (v. 3) have seen what God has done. The witnessing by the nations of God’s victory for Israel is important to Scripture. It is not only Israel, but all the earth — all peoples and even inanimate creation — which is joining in the chorus of praise to the Lord. All the earth/world (vv. 4 and 7, see Psalm 24 for parallels) makes a “joyful noise to the Lord.” Our voices and instruments, along with sounds of creation/nature, resound together in praise to God.

What Is One Possible Approach to the Text?

Servant or Friend? The text is verse 15. Here, Jesus reveals to his inner circle that he does not think of them as servants. Or, as their teacher/rabbi, he does not think of them as students. He thinks of them as friends. The difference? A servant is not privy to all that the master is doing, thinking or planning. There’s a gulf between the boss and the employee, a respectable distance. Servants function on a need-to-know basis. Generally, servants are not invited to the master’s house for dinner on Saturday night. They don’t share a pint together in the pub. Jesus says, “I don’t think of you as servants.” Jesus thinks of us as friends, because he has shared everything he knows with us. There is no respectable distance, no gulf and no divide. Jesus has confided everything he knows. He has held nothing back. This marks the intimate nature of friends. They share openly, freely and without reservation. Jesus is such a friend, and, more remarkably, Jesus considers us to be his friends. But are we? Have we been faithful friends? The congregation, soloist or choir could sing the old, old hymn, “What a friend we have in Jesus.”

What Does the Text Say?

Verse 9 declares that there is no distinguishing difference between the love of the Father for the Son and that which the Son has for his chosen disciples. But even though this love is steadfast and sure, it is also a love that may be lost. Thus, Jesus urges his disciples to “abide” or “remain” in his love. The direct implication of verses 12-14 is that, if the disciples obey Jesus’ commandments, they are, by definition, his friends. As his friends, they know Jesus will gladly give his life to save theirs. The mark of Jesus’ love and friendship for his disciples is further demonstrated by the openness, respect and reciprocity that define their relationship in verses 15-16. Jesus clearly distinguishes the kind of relationship that exists between himself and his disciples from any sort of master/servant or rabbi/student hierarchy. He now says that his followers are more than his students — they are his friends. With his friends, Jesus has openly shared all that his Father has told him. There is no secret cache of esoteric knowledge that keeps Jesus artificially elevated above his disciples on some “master” level.

Worship Resources

God, the world does not know you. But all of us in this place have heard your Word proclaimed. We may not completely agree with each other, but we are unified in our belief in you. May we leave this safe haven and go out to tell others of our unity through Christ, your beloved Son. This we believe. Amen.

O God, our help in ages past: We confess that often we do not have much hope for years to come. As we read or watch the news, our faith falters. We wonder about the future — about the world’s future and our own future. We forget your promises along with your great, saving acts on record in your Word.

We thank you, most patient God, for keeping faith with us in spite of our doubt, and particularly for providing for us examples of steadfastness, of belief in the future, to shame and hearten us.

We thank you for the old man who is planting trees up and down his street, even though he knows that he will not live to enjoy them.

We pray for the young woman who is dying a slow, painful death, but who has left her body to a hospital so that, out of her anguish, healing may come to persons unknown to her.

We pray for scholars who write plodding, faithful chronicles of bygone times, because they consider humankind’s ongoing history worth recording.

We thank you for scientists, politicians and grassroots folk who struggle to preserve our environment, so that our children and grandchildren may inherit a habitable world.

And we pray, with thanksgiving, for women and men who agree that, in spite of the news, this world is still a fit place for having and raising children.

We know, merciful Lord, that all these servants of yours who believe in the future and who are striving to make sure that it is a future worth having, are not necessarily doing so in your name. But we believe that you acknowledge them as yours, and we pray that you help us, each of us, to join their ranks. Restore our faltering faith. Remind us that you are our hope for years to come. For the sake of him who willingly died young so that we might have a future. Amen.

Leader: Let us worship a God of surprises! Too often, we are told that winning is everything.

People: Here, in this place, we glimpse God’s reality that we must lose in order to gain.

Leader: Too often, we believe that freedom means autonomy, that we are in charge of our own lives.

People: Here we learn again that true freedom comes from God. We are free when we follow Christ and obey God’s commandments.

Leader: Too often, we are told that we are what we have, that wealth reigns and power rules.

People: Here we remind one another of God’s good news: “The stone that was rejected has become the chief cornerstone.”

All: Let us worship a God of surprises! Let us prepare our hearts to hear God’s startling good news once again.

Hymns
O God, Our Help in Ages Past
The Church’s One Foundation
A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

Worship and Praise*
This I Believe (Fielding, Crocker)
Jesus Paid It All (Nifong, Hall, Grape)
Never Lost (Brown, Furtick, Hammer)

*For licensing and permission to reprint or display these songs on screen, go to ccli.com. The worship and praise songs suggested by Homiletics can be found in most cases on Google by using the title as the search term.

COMMENTARY

on 1 John 5:1-6