The Elder to the Lady

Introduction:

What is the most important letter that you have received? It’s sort of a funny question when most of us probably can’t remember the last time we actually sent a handwritten letter. In fact, there are probably some people sitting here who don’t really remember how to address a letter or maybe haven’t ever sent one! Do you have an important letter that you’ve received? For me, I actually have three letters that were sent to me by my older brother Maxwell. They were sent to me in March 2014, so not too long ago. Maxwell was at basic training for the Army and I was a freshman in college. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote in my first letter to him, but I know that I shared the gospel and asked him about his faith. I wasn’t quite sure where he was with faith because we didn’t really grow up talking about that stuff on the personal level. I remember asking a few of my friends in college to be praying for me and my brother as I sent that letter. I wanted to know that Maxwell had a personal relationship with Jesus and had given up his life to Christ. My whole family is an Army family, all three of my older brothers and my dad have all been deployed multiple times and seen combat, so it wasn’t like the military was anything new to me, but something was a little different. As I grew in my faith, I had a deep longing, and still do, for my family to have a faith in Jesus as well. What if something happened to Maxwell while he was deployed? What would happen to his soul? So I wrote the letter with the prayer that Maxwell would know Jesus. The first letter I received back was the most moving letter I have ever received. Max talked about going to church on Sunday and hearing from the chaplain and praying and singing. He talked about how all the guys around him would cry during the worship sets because of how moved they were. He wrote about how prayer had been changing his life and that he would pray for the things of his day that he was worried about or nervous about and God would give him a peace. I remember getting that letter and immediately opening it and reading it. I was so excited, I ran to the cafeteria to tell some of my friends and as soon as I started to tell them the great news, my eyes started to fill and my words wouldn’t come out. All I could do was cry tears of thanksgiving that God had so moved my brothers heart and that he recognized Jesus as Lord of his life.

The most important letter in my life came from my brother and that letter has motivated me to continue to pray for my other siblings and family members who don’t know Christ. It’s motivated me to continue to live into the call that God has on my life to share the good news of Jesus with those who have not heard. If handwritten letters from people have the power to move hearts, how much more do the New Testament letters that are written as the very word of God?

Today, we are beginning a four week series through the letter of 2 John. This letter is short! It has only 245 words in the Greek and would have been written on one sheet of papyrus. One scholar, Daniel L Akin, referred to it as “the Postcard Epistle” which is what I’ve titled this series. Sadly, we’ve often viewed the shortness of this letter as meaning that it doesn’t actually have a depth that is important for us. But, for a man that is 5’5, I’ve never allowed shortness to equate to unimportance! This postcard epistle has so much for us if we are willing to read it and live it out by the grace of the Holy Spirit in us. Akin again writes, “The neglect of this epistle throughout the history of the church has been unfortunate because no letter more beautifully balances the twin Christian graces of “love” and “truth.”

So my goal for this series is to go really deep into the book so that we may see how to better live out love and truth, and so each Sunday we are going to spend the whole service going through only a handful of verses at a time. Already we have read the entire book this morning and Marta has given us some background and context to New Testament letters. If you are signed up to receive the innerview emails from LifeWay, then starting last Monday you received a daily email devotional walking through 1 John in preparation. And today you should have received an email with this weeks reading plan through the Gospel of John. All of the outside reading is aimed to give you a better understanding of the themes and words and ideas that John uses and that the original audience of this letter would have been familiar with. So if you haven’t signed up for the innerview, then feel free to go to our website to sign up or at the very least, just start reading a chapter a day of John’s writings. Especially 1 John.

2 John is often seen as a miniature version of 1 John. He references a lot of the same themes in 2 John that he expands on in 1 John. Throughout the letter, John uses 6 words repeatedly to cue us into the main ideas of the letter. He uses Trust 5 times, Love 4 times, Commandment 4 times, Walk 3 times, Teaching 3 times, and Children 3 times. Grant Osborne and Philip Comfort write in their commentary on the letter that both 1 and 2 John tell the readers or ‘the children’ to “(1) live in the truth, (2) love one another, (3) be on guard against false teachers, and (4) adhere to the apolstolic teachings.” This is especially in light of the fact that so many false teachers were moving around, taking advantage of Christian fellowship and hospitality, and corrupting the faith. Daniel Akin in his commentary also notes that, “The spiritual safety of the believing community is confidently affirmed, being further heightened by the fact that John begins and ends his letter with a reference to their election or chosen position (vv. 1, 13).”

How important of a letter for us today when it seems like so many followers of Jesus are neglecting one or more of the things in that list?

Like Marta has already mentioned, a New Testament letter consists usually of an opening with a Sender and Recipient with a prayer of thanksgiving or some sort of salutation, followed by a body that usually has two parts, an exposition and exhortation. The exposition is a description of a theory or an idea and exhortation is really a call to action, a call to put to practice the things that have been told, finally, letters conclude with final greetings, travel plans, requests, or prayers. Even though it is so small, 2 John still followers that pattern, and each sermon in this series is going to follow those parts: the introduction, the body, and conclusion. I’ve titled my sermons in a way to hopefully help you remember the content of the book and hopefully to help you understand and apply the book to your lives. This sermon is titled, “The Elder to the Lady.” Today we’re going to look just at the introduction, the first three verses of the book.

Body:

The Writer and Recipient(v. 1a) “The Elder to the elect lady and her children whom I love in the truth”

Let’s begin with The Elder.

You’ll probably notice by now that the book is called 2 John, and yet no where in this letter do we actually see that the author is John. Here, the author refers to himself simply as ‘The Elder.’ Throughout most of Christian history, scholars and the early church associated this book with the Apostle John, the son of Zebedee, the brother to James, Zebedee’s other son, and close follower of Jesus. How do we know this? Well, we know this from a couple of clues that the text gives us. Now for some of you, you may not really care about this and if that's you, I want to ask that you just hold on and follow along, trust me this is important! If you’re like me and do think this sort of stuff is interesting, then you’re welcome…

We can conclude that the same person who wrote 1 John most likely wrote 2 and 3 John because of the way it is written. The grammar, style, and words of the letters are all very similar. If I were preaching this at youth group, I’d say that the general vibe of the letters are all the same. In some instances, 2 John has almost identical verses as 1 John. In fact, 5 of the 13 verses in 2 John are almost identical! (cf. 2 John 1 with 1 John 3:13; 2 John 2 with 1 John 2:4; 2 John 5 with 1 John 2:7 and 5:3; 2 John 7 with 1 John 2:18 and 4:2; 2 John 9 with 1 John 2:23–24).

If 1, 2, 3 John were all written by the same person, then we need to ask who wrote 1 John. Well again, we don’t see a author explicitly mentioned in 1 John, but we do see again the same sort of words, grammar, themes, vibes if you will, in these letters that we see in the Gospel of John. We know from 1 John 1:1 that the author was an eyewitness to the “Word of Life,” that is Jesus and thus the Gospel of John and the letters can safely be concluded as having the same author.

1 John 1:1 CSB

What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have observed and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—

So who wrote the Gospel of John? Well in the Gospel of John we see the author identify himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. John 21:24 describes this beloved disciple as the “disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down.”

John 21:24 CSB

This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true.

To add further weight, many early church fathers and early church writings, such as Irenaeus and the Muratorain Fragment, had the view that John the Elder was the same person as John the Apostle, the disciple whom Jesus loved, as the author. Not to be confused with John the Baptist, or John Mark who comes up in Acts and who many believe to have been the author of Mark. Irenaeus even writes that when he was young, one of his teachers was Polycarp the Bishop of Smyrna from AD 69- AD 155. Polycarp claimed to have been tutored by John and gave account to John as the author of the letters.

A few other views that could potentially be true is that the author John was possibly one of the 72 disciples, but this view doesn’t really have a lot of meat to back it up.

It is thought, through dating of the letters, that they were all written around the same time period which would make sense as to why the same author would have said somewhat of the same thing to different people. Most scholars believe the letters of John to have been written between AD 60- AD 90, with John’s death being put at AD 100. This would also have been about the same time period the the Gospel of John would have been compiled and written. If that is true, John would have been around 80 years old. Which would make sense as to why he referred to himself as “the Elder” and not the Apostle or some other designation. Not only was a spiritual elder to the recipients, he was also quite literally an elder.

All of this, I hope you’ll see, helps to give us more certainty as to the truth of this book. We can have confidence that these letters were written by a real person who was a real disciple of Jesus, it is not some fairy tale account compiled hundreds of years later to tell a good moral story. We can have confidence to the historicity of this writing.

So why doesn’t John just come out and state who he is when writing the letters? Why does he seem to somewhat secretly sprinkle throughout details as to his identity without actually saying it? I think in part John is intentional not to overtly state his identity, rather he is striving to give the facts of faith and, in living in meekness, trying to follow the words he quoted John the Baptist as saying in John 3:30 “He must become greater; I must become less.” Yet, that is not John’s aim in writing. John seems to never want to make much of himself, rather he wants to make much of Christ!

John 3:30 CSB

He must increase, but I must decrease.”

It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. I believe I’ve shared this before. The full quote is by Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf. Many people summarize this quote by saying, “Preach the Gospel, die, and be forgotten.” John, who humanly speaking, had ever right to make the claim to his authority, his position or title, to the fact that he literally was called by and walked with Jesus yet he cared so little for his own glory rather, he desired to make much of the name of Jesus. The same should hold true for us.

Only two words into the passage and i’ve already taken about 15 minutes. Let’s continue. The Elder is writing to The Elect Lady and her Children. Again, we don’t see a name are and somewhat left to wonder as to who the Elder is writing to. There are three views as to the identity of the recipient and two that are more commonly held. 1. The elect lady stood for the universal church and her children would be all believers. 2. The elect lady was a specific woman; her children were her literal children. And 3. The elect lady was a metaphor for a specific local church and her children were the members of that specific church. To be honest, the first view isn’t really held by too many people. It was made popular by the church father, Jerome, but the view has little credibility. The main two views are the latter two. So let’s look at the other two views:

First, the view that The elect lady was a specific woman. The greek words here are eklektos kyria. Eklektos literally meaning “chosen by God,” and often translated as “elected” and Kyria which is a feminen name and is almost always translated as lady or woman. Some have thought the name of the woman to be Electa. Possible where Carmin Electra get’s her name from… Clement of Alexandria had this view, but ultimately if this were the case, then we are to believe that her sister who greets her later in the letter was also named Electa. Similarly, some have thought that the lady’s name was Kyria and that the word ekeletos was there to show that Kyria was in fact chosen. The letter would then read, “the Elder to chosen Kyria,” but many scholars point that as the issue. If Kyria were the name of the lady then there would most likely be a definite article to confirm this. Many of said that if this were written to a specific lady then it would have more so been a love letter from an elder to a women. Theologian John Stott writes, “Johns language is not appropriate to a real person, either in his statement of love or his exhortation to love. The elder could hardler refer to his personal love for a lady and her children as a ‘command’ which ‘we have had front he beginning.’”

Most scholars today believe the third option to make the most sense. The Elder is writing to a specific local church that he would have had a deep relationship with as a leader and who would have viewed him as their elder. This seems to be the most held view for the reasons stated above and in part due to the different movements within the Greek from second person singular to first person plural.

Without putting Heather on the spot, I found out that she has 8 years of Greek under her belt so if you have any further questions feel free to direct them to her!

Still whether one holds the view of a specific individual or a local church, the application of the letter for us today essentially remains the same. As Daniel Akins writes, “Regardless of how one interprets these words, however, the basic application of the epistle remains unchanged. What the author would expect in belief and behavior of a lady and her children he would also expect of a local church and its members.” As we will see, the recipients of this letter are urged to walk in the truth, love one another, and be on guard against false teachers. This message and purpose of this letter is what we will dive deep into for the next four weeks.

So why does John use this wording, this ekletos kyria? Well because it offers a certainty of our salvation in Jesus. In being part of the chosen by God, it means that we are grafted in by the blood of Christ. Being chosen by God means that we now have an avenue of relationship with Jesus that allows us to abide deeply in Him. Abiding with Christ, as Jesus talks about in John 15, is the result of your election in Christ. Jesus calls us into right relationship with Him by His blood and we therefore can connect with Him, depend on Him, and remain in Him. John, in writing to those who are chosen by God, and is confidently affirming their faith as a community of believers. What sets followers of Jesus apart from other faiths is the fact the we can have certainty of our hope in Jesus Christ. We can have certainty of our new life in Him, we can have certainty of our election as saints not by what we can do, but by what has been done for us on the Cross when Jesus died, was buried, and rose again! If you believe this, then you are one of The Elect.

After establishing the sender and the recipient, the Elder encourages The Elect to Embrace Truth and Love (v. 1b-2). “-- and not only I, but also all who know the truth - because of the truth, which lives in us and will be with us forever.” It is here that we pick up the glasses through which to read the rest of the letter. As we continue on, all of what John writes is in light of the Truth or aletheia and Love or agape. If these are to be the lenses that we read the rest of the letter through, then it would serve us well to spend some time reminding ourselves of what John means when he writes these words.

First, let us look at the first part of that statement. The Truth by which John loves. Often, people wrestle with whether or not what Jesus says about himself or what the bible says, is true. People have this desire for truth and so we study and look and try to figure out what is true and what is false. You may hear people who do not believe in Jesus or Christianity say something along the lines that they don’t believe that the bible is true. Now of course, many of us here have come to the realization that who Jesus is and what the Bible says is true. But there is something more that I think we often overlook. It is not only that what we read about Jesus in the bible is true, it is also that Jesus is the Truth. Jesus refers to himself in John 14:6 as “...the way, the truth, and the life.”

Jesus is the Truth. He is the embodiment of what is True. If you have a relationship with Jesus, that necessitates that you know the truth. Therefore your belief in Jesus as the risen savior leads to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The truth lives with us and in us. It is that indwelling that binds you to the Father forever. And as we will see in later weeks, it is that indwelling that binds brothers and sisters in Christ together.

John here is not merely concerned with a philosophical idea of truth, he is not using this word in a shallow way, he is concerned with a deeply spiritual subject. In the truth, there cannot be any hint of error. We must constantly strive to know the truth and to make the truth known because it is that truth that will set us free. At the same time, we must remember that Truth relates to both belief and behavior. Our knowledge of God should propel us forward into action and love, otherwise it may be that we do not actually know the truth, you may just know about the truth.

There is much more that could be said of truth, but as we will see as we look at verse 3 in a bit, love and truth then launch us into the body of the letter that we will dive deeper into in weeks to come.

Next, let us look at The Love portion of embracing the truth and love. We are told to Love in the truth. We see this in how the Elder writes of not only his love for them in the truth, but also the love that all of those who are also in the truth must have. Loving someone in the truth can only be done by those who are in God, that is, for those who have been washed clean by the blood of Christ. If you have been washed clean, if you have been made new, then your life should be marked by a love for others.

So who are we to love? Really there are two types of people that scripture commands us to love. As followers of Jesus we are first commanded to love fellow believers. People who are a part of that group that was chosen by God. The second group of people we are called to love is everyone else. So if you can find someone who isn’t in either one of the groups, feel free to not love them. Folks this is such a hard thing to do. We do not naturally desire to love everyone, sure we may love those who are easy to love, we like to love them. I love loving Rachel! But it is something else completely to love those who are difficult to love. That is something that can only be down by the power of the Holy Spirit in us. We cannot fabricate the emotion of love for our enemies. We can only do it if something inside of us is empowering us to love them.

Many of you know last week, while Rachel and I were asleep someone broke into our house and burglarized our home. They even opened up the door to our bedroom while we were asleep. They stole about $5000 from us worth of electronics. Do you know what broke our hearts the most in this whole ordeal? That this person was so broken and hurting that they felt they either needed to or wanted to break in and steal as opposed to seeking help some other way. Our hearts feel so heavy for this individual. Rachel even said that she felt so bad that this person felt like they needed to break in the backdoor at night while we were asleep instead of coming through the front door where we would have welcomed them and gave them all the help we could. I don’t say this as if to try to bolster myself or Rachel up. Honestly, we were both really shocked by our response. I say this because it could only come from Christ. The fact that we love that burglar and want them to come to faith in Jesus, want them to know the love that the Father has for them, can only come from something outside of our human, sinful, broken selves.

I love how the author Carl Meaderis illustrates loving those outside of our faith and who are sometimes our enemies: In his book, Muslims, Christinas, and Jesus, Meaderis recounts an experience he had in 2003 in Iraq when he and his team were pulled over and taken from their car to a dry river bed and made to kneel down. AK-47’s were pointed at them and their lives threatened. Sometime after, he asked himself if he could go back and change his life so as not to live in the Middle east would he do it? He writes, “I had my answer immediately. The Holy Spirit Spoke inside of me so strongly that my body trembled. I heard the words I love these people. That’s when I realized the truth: I loved these Arabs too. But it wasn’t my love that drove me - it was His love for them. I was simply a part of the story.” That is the sort of love that can only come from the truth that dwells within us.

After writing that the Elect would embrace truth and love, John then moves towards encouraging The Elect to Enjoy Truth and Love (v. 3). We read in the final verse we will study today, “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.” These three words are so easy to scrub over, but I hope I have already shown that John, and all of the biblical authors for that matter, pick their words extremely carefully. A slow and deep look at each word yields a beautiful picture of the experience of the Gospel. I love the poetic imagery that Alexander MacLaren writes about in regards to this phrase. He talks about a fountain that brings water into a stream that leads to a great, still lake. That is grace, mercy, and peace.

Grace refers to God’s attitude and thought. MacLaren writes, “The very foundation and notion of the word ‘grace’ is a free, undeserved, unsolicited, self-prompted, and altogether gratuitous bestowment, a love that is its own reason…” Grace is the thing that comes freely from God and flows eternally. Again, in following MacLaren’s beautiful analogy, Grace is the fountain whose waters come from an artisan well that shoots forth unprompted to the surface. You do not have to digging too deep to find God’s Grace, rather, it is the thing that He freely gives because it is who He is. MacLaren writes, “Grace is love that is not drawn out, but that burst out, self-originated, undeserved.”

And how do we experience that Grace? The experience of God’s grace is the experience of His Mercy. Again, MacLaren writes, “Mercy is the manifestation of grace in act, referring to the workings of that great Godhead in His relation to humanity;” Mercy is the stream that flows with the waters of life. When you search for it, you find it, and when you drink from it, you receive life. You receive God’s grace. Mercy is the experience of Grace.

And the result of that experience? Peace. Jesus said in John 14:27, “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Don’t let your heart be troubled or fearful.” Jesus’ peace in our lives is the result of His mercy and grace. It is peace that calms the storms of our lives and renews our souls. It is a peace that surpasses whatever the world can offer and a peace that withstands whatever the world could throw. For the one who knows God through the truth, through Jesus, there is one whose heart and soul can rest in the peace of knowing that what Jesus set out to do he finished. But for the one who is an enemy of God, that is the one who has not believed and been renewed by the truth of Jesus Christ, there cannot be any true experience of peace, rather there will ultimately be an experience of God’s judgment.

John 14:27 CSB

“Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Don’t let your heart be troubled or fearful.

Grace, Mercy, and Peace can only have eternal consequences if they are From God and Jesus, that is, from the eternal one. John here is making a distinction between a worldly belief that an individual can obtain some sort of self enlightenment, as if one can skip over the Grace that can only come from God and go straight to the peace. At some point, if you neglect the fountain where the water begins, the still lake of peace will dry up in your life. The experience of grace, mercy, and peace come from God and are for our good and God’s glory.

These things all come from God and Jesus In Truth and Love. Again, these are the lenses through which the book should be read. Truth and Love are the foundation of our relationship with Jesus who is the Truth and who connects us to God who is Love. As we continue to read the letter in the following three weeks, I pray that you would see how deep a role both of these things, both Truth and Love, play in your relationship with Jesus.

Conclusion

This Embracing and Enjoying Truth and Love is what distinguishes the Elect. The elect are those who embrace and enjoy truth and love. As I hope that you have seen, this short postcard of a letter is packed with beautiful and deep exhortations for us. This Elder is writing to his people who he has a deep love for as their spiritual leader. He cares first and foremost for the truth of the Gospel and the love that flows from that truth. And he also cares for them because of that truth. He desires for them to hold fast to the truth and love of Jesus Christ. In the CSB study bible it asked of the recipients, “Would they would neglect to embody God’s love for one another? Would they fall prey to false teachers?” I imagine that John, in writing this, is asking himself the question of whether or not they would they hold fast to the truth that has set them free by the blood of Jesus Christ on the cross? Would they embrace the truth and love from God the Father through Jesus the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit or would they turn away and as Paul says in Ephesians 4:14 , and be tossed by the waves and blown around by every wind of teaching. Would they enjoy the Grace, Mercy, and Peace from God and Jesus? Would they be The Elect who Embrace and Enjoy Truth and Love? Will we?

Let’s pray.