Truth and Love
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
Illustration: The difficulty of parental discipline. Maintaining the balance between maintaining consistent rules and showing understanding and mercy. There’s probably a reason God the Father calls Himself that.
The elder:
To the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth—and not only I, but also all who know the truth—because of the truth that remains in us and will be with us forever.
Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, in truth and love.
I was very glad to find some of your children walking in truth, in keeping with a command we have received from the Father. So now I ask you, dear lady—not as if I were writing you a new command, but one we have had from the beginning—that we love one another. This is love: that we walk according to his commands. This is the command as you have heard it from the beginning: that you walk in love.
Many deceivers have gone out into the world; they do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist. Watch yourselves so that you don’t lose what we have worked for, but that you may receive a full reward. Anyone who does not remain in Christ’s teaching but goes beyond it does not have God. The one who remains in that teaching, this one has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your home, and do not greet him; for the one who greets him shares in his evil works.
Though I have many things to write to you, I don’t want to use paper and ink. Instead, I hope to come to you and talk face to face so that our joy may be complete.
The children of your elect sister send you greetings.
It’s no mystery to any of us that there have been a number of people who have abused the name of Jesus over the years. Even before Jesus there were religious leaders in Jerusalem who in the name of God misled the people. What inspires people who have the amazing word of God to get things so wrong? Well I would argue that a lot of it, though certainly not all of it, comes from a failure to balance truth and love, or a failure to remain faithful to the Bible, otherwise known as the word of God.
On the one hand if we focus completely on love to the exlusion of truth we let go of our moral standards and allow people to continue in slavery to sin and don’t help people shake off their bad habits. We can lose the line between love and mercy and enablement. On the other hand if we emphasize truth without maintaining love we become bullies at best and dictators at worst. This was the error of the Pharisees, who so obsessed over the letter of the law that they missed the whole purpose and summary of the law and became a burden to the people. Or we go beyond Scripture and create our own fancy rules and philosophies and so lose the word of God that we become disciples in name only, and any kind of abuse of what we should be becomes possible. So then how do we avoid these pitfalls effectively? Let’s take a look at 2 John and see what John has to tell us about how to be effective disciples of Jesus.
There are three major emphases that John expresses in this short letter. John talks about truth, a word he uses five times in just twelve verses. By truth John doesn’t only mean truth in the abstract sense of things that are true, but also the truth the Gospel Truth as taught and personified in Jesus Christ of Nazareth. The second emphasis is on love, a common theme to all of John’s letters, which he mentions four times in this letter. Love in the Christian sense, selfless love rooted in the love that God has first shown us. Finally John cautions against supporting those who “go beyond” the teaching of Jesus and lead people away from the truth about who Jesus is. He cautions against giving them any kind of support, lest they hurt the cause of the gospel by giving false teachers a platform from which to speak their false gospel.
That being said our three points for today are:
Truth
Love
Going Beyond
Truth
Truth
Illustration: It’s difficult to teach young children the importance of telling the truth, especially when you consider the weird sort of almost exceptions, like pretending and joking that aren’t true but aren’t really lies either. But it’s important. Especially as disciples of Jesus. That’s why John opens his letter this way:
The elder:
To the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth—and not only I, but also all who know the truth—because of the truth that remains in us and will be with us forever.
Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, in truth and love.
I was very glad to find some of your children walking in truth, in keeping with a command we have received from the Father.
I think it’s important to remind ourselves that Jesus didn’t say that He taught the truth (though He certainly did) He said that he is the truth. Truth itself exists in the person of Jesus Christ. So then if we follow our teacher as good disciples and He says that He is truth, well than truth must become a central value of who we are as believers. While love sums up all the law and the prophets, it can be easy to excuse straying from the truth in the name of so called love. We cannot allow ourselves to do that sort of thing. We must stand firm on the truth and make sure that our love is as John describes his love for this church in truth.
So then, what is the Biblical definition of truth? We’ve already talked about how Jesus claimed to be the truth Himself. This is found in John 14:6
Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
That means that everything that is true is true because of Jesus. God is the foundation for all truth. This makes sense of course because God created all the universe. So there cannot be anything true that is true outside of God, and Jesus is God. More than that when Jesus said that He is the truth He didn’t just mean that He’s the grounding for all truth, but He meant one truth in particular. Sometimes the Bible refers to it as “the Faith,” the gospel truth that saves wretched sinners like you and I. The truth that we were lost but are now found. That while we were still sinners Christ died for us so that we could be made alive with Him through His resurrection.
That’s the truth that the members of this church are walking in. No wonder it brings John such joy! They are living out the truth of the gospel in their daily lives and living righteously. That’s a big key to the importance of truth. It’s not enough to know the truth, you’ve got to live it. In fact if we don’t live according to truth we basically make the truth into a lie, since what God says about His people becomes untrue.
Then how do we make sure that we are walking in truth like this church was? We make sure that we know the truth in both senses. That we know God, that we know Him relationally. That we pray and seek after Him and live according to the leading of the Holy Spirit. And that we know His Word, the Holy Bible, so that we can know the written facts truth of His Word and live by it. There’s no other way to live according to the truth. And one cannot live according to that truth without living in love.
Love
Love
Illustration: How does a dog show love to its owners? A few different ways, but one is obedience. Have you ever seen how happy a dog gets when it gets a command right?
So now I ask you, dear lady—not as if I were writing you a new command, but one we have had from the beginning—that we love one another. This is love: that we walk according to his commands. This is the command as you have heard it from the beginning: that you walk in love.
Heaven help me if I ever stop talking about the importance of love. It’s the centre of everything. I mean John went so far as to say in 1 John, twice, that “God is love.” What does that tell you about how important that love is? And we know also that Jesus said that all of the law and the prophets could be summed up in the commands “Love God” and “Love your neighbor.” I’m not sure how you could walk away from reading the New Testament without seeing that love is the most essential thing about being a disciple of Jesus.
So what does John have to say about love in this short letter?John stresses that love has been the command from the beginning. The beginning likely meaning the beginning of their relationship with Jesus. Nothing has changed just because false teachers have taught otherwise: love is still the message that matters. This is very reminiscent of what He said in 1 John 2:7-8
Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old command that you have had from the beginning. The old command is the word you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new command, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining.
So although the message about love is fresh and given new life by Jesus and through His death and resurrection on our behalf, it is as old as time and has been true since the beginning of our walk with Him.
Again, the idea that we express love by obeying the commands of God is also found in the first letter of John. In verse 6 of this letter the emphasis is not on the definition of the command but on the encouragement not just to know it but to live by it. Hence the command to “walk,” figurative language for living our daily lives according to love and the commands of God.
If you think about it it sort of works in a kind of spiral. John says that we ought to love. How do we love? By obeying God’s commands. How do we obey God’s commands? By love. And so on. So we build to better and better heights of righteous loving living by reinforcing everything in the foundation of God’s being love Himself by living out love in our daily lives.
The call on us today then is to strive to live every day by love. Not just in knowing and feeling love but in action. To do for others what we would have them do for us. To give mercy to those in need of mercy, food to those in need of food, clothing to those in need of clothing and so on. To show with our actions what we say with our lips and to so grow in love and obedience to God every day that we live.
Going Beyond
Going Beyond
Illustration: There’s a reason there’s boundaries in sports. If there was no out of bounds things could get very chaotic, and games could go very long.
Many deceivers have gone out into the world; they do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist. Watch yourselves so that you don’t lose what we have worked for, but that you may receive a full reward. Anyone who does not remain in Christ’s teaching but goes beyond it does not have God. The one who remains in that teaching, this one has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your home, and do not greet him; for the one who greets him shares in his evil works.
In the Greek verse seven starts with “because,” meaning that the reason we walk in love according to God’s commands is because many deceivers have gone out into the world. They teach falsely who God is and what we need to do to be right with Him. In the case of the Gnostics they taught that you had to have secret knowledge and escape your body of flesh and overcome your desire for the material in order to be right with God. Imagine how different a path that would set you on as a disciple of Jesus.
You see they did what John describes as “going beyond” Christ’s teaching. If someone does that they demonstrate by their actions that God does not remain in them. This is a slightly different idea than presented in 1 John. In 1 John he seems more concerned with pure action, and here instead he focuses on remaining faithful to the ideas, the teaching of Jesus. If we remain faithful to what Jesus taught then we have both Him and the Father. It seems that for some people rather than serving a different God or no God they strive to change who God is in order to follow their new god, which is truly no god at all.
This means that we can insist all day long in the importance of living according to truth and love, but if we change the definitions of truth and love than we can justify anything. And isn’t that what we see the world doing? Instead of truth being rooted in who God is, truth is “your truth” and everyone gets to decide for themselves what is true and what is false. And instead of love being caring for everyone despite their failings it becomes loving everyone’s failings.
That’s why it’s important that we not only live by truth and love but guard jealously the teachings of Scripture against any who would twist it to other ends. John tells those he is writing to to not even greet a false teacher, let alone receive them into their homes. Now there was more involved here than just having them over for tea.
It was common practice in the early church for teachers in the churches to travel to teach in other churches. They would rely on the generosity of the hosting church, where they would be fed and likely where they would do their teaching.
“Welcoming someone into your home in the ancient world often involved elaborate hospitality, including providing food and lodging. People often stayed for extended lengths of time, since travel in the ancient world was slow and difficult. Visitations regularly involved practicing a trade in whatever location people found themselves. John realizes that the false teachers (the antichrists) will not be able to economically sustain their efforts if they are not received by the Christian community. In addition, hospitality in the ancient world would have been perceived as an endorsement and thus confused people in the community.” – Faithlife Study Bible
John warns not to do this with false teachers, but to make it clear that deviation from the true gospel is not supported by the church. This does not extend in modern practice to some sort of “shunning” of people who teach things other than us. It means we make clear our lack of support for them and certainly don’t support them financially in their cause. That we remain careful to vet those who claim to speak for God according to the standards of God’s word.
Conclusion
Conclusion
So we have read 2 John together and have explored together the importance of holding to the truth, meaning that we live by the truths of our faith and hold fast to Jesus, who is Himself the truth personified. We also revisited the importance of living by love, and how loving means keeping God’s commands, but keeping God’s commands means being loving in a spiral that grows us in righteousness. We also learned the importance of guarding against false teachers and false teaching to preserve the true meaning of truth and love so that we can serve the one true God. With those things in mind let’s reread 2 John together.
The elder:
To the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth—and not only I, but also all who know the truth—because of the truth that remains in us and will be with us forever.
Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, in truth and love.
I was very glad to find some of your children walking in truth, in keeping with a command we have received from the Father. So now I ask you, dear lady—not as if I were writing you a new command, but one we have had from the beginning—that we love one another. This is love: that we walk according to his commands. This is the command as you have heard it from the beginning: that you walk in love.
Many deceivers have gone out into the world; they do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist. Watch yourselves so that you don’t lose what we have worked for, but that you may receive a full reward. Anyone who does not remain in Christ’s teaching but goes beyond it does not have God. The one who remains in that teaching, this one has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your home, and do not greet him; for the one who greets him shares in his evil works.
Though I have many things to write to you, I don’t want to use paper and ink. Instead, I hope to come to you and talk face to face so that our joy may be complete.
The children of your elect sister send you greetings.
So my brothers and sisters in Christ as we continue to grow in holiness every day let us keep first things first. Let us walk in truth, and live lives of love, and let us guard the gospel against any who would try to change it. In this way we live lives that are pleasing to God and help also to spread His gospel message by making our lives a testimony to Him.