Many people have observed that there are things in life that just belong together, like socks and shoes, peanut butter and jelly, peas and carrots, cookies and milk, or KU basketball and winning. These things just belong together! It doesn’t feel right when they are apart. There are also many things that belong together that can become harmful when they are separated, like a car and functioning brakes, a fire and a fireplace, or an airplane and wings.
In our study of the Word today, we are going to see two elements of Christian faith and practice that are always meant to be together. They support each other, they feed off of each other, and when they are together they prevent the harm that can be done if we try to separate them. These two elements are truth and love—specifically, the true doctrine of the Christian faith and the brotherly love that is supposed to exist between Christians. Often, people tend to think that these things are at odds with each other, as though you can’t be loving if you’re concerned about the truth, or you can’t emphasize truth if you want to be loving. But in reality, these two things are supposed to work together as the engine that drives a healthy Christian life and a healthy church. You can think of their relationship like this:
[Display cycle graphic on PowerPoint]
Truth and love are supposed to feed off of each other like this—truth is meant to produce love, which is then supposed to reinforce truth. Your high school science teacher would call this a symbiotic relationship—where two different organisms live together for the mutual benefit of both organisms. That is the way that truth and love should co-exist in our lives.
Let’s learn more about this relationship from our brother John. Turn with me, please, to 2 John. This short little letter was written by the apostle John to encourage the recipients to lovingly live according to the truth and to be on their guard against false teachers. We’ll get to that second purpose in another sermon, but today we’ll look at this relationship between truth and love that is described in the first six verses of the letter. Truth and love both receive their own emphasis in these verses, so let’s look at these ideas in that order.
I. Truth is the Foundation of Brotherly Love (vv. 1–3)
Let’s read through these verses and I’ll explain some things as we go. First, John begins in v. 1 by writing, “the elder to the elect lady and her children, whom I love in truth.” Now you might notice that this greeting is fairly different from the greeting that we find in many other New Testament letters. Most of the time, the author states his name and the name or names of his recipients, like “Paul to Timothy,” or “Paul to the Philippians,” or “Peter to the exiles who are scattered abroad.” But John uses a vague greeting here in which he doesn’t actually name himself or his recipients. What is the reason for this?
One reason that I think could be a good explanation is the possibility of persecution that Christians faced around the time that John wrote this letter. If this letter had fallen into the wrong hands, it could have been dangerous for the author and the recipients if they were identified. So perhaps John just took a little precaution and wrote this vague greeting instead.
He refers to himself as “the elder,” which no doubt referred to his position of leadership among the followers of Christ. It may have also been intended as a term of endearment, like the way we might talk about our “dear old dad” or “my old man.” So you can picture John saying, “listen to your old man here for a moment.”
He refers to the people he is writing to as “the elect lady and her children.” There has been discussion for centuries about whether John was writing to a woman and her children or whether he was metaphorically referring to a church and the members of a church. The church is called the bride of Christ in the New Testament, so it wouldn’t be unusual to refer to a church as a woman, particularly if John really was trying to conceal the identity of his recipients. The bottom line is that we don’t know for sure, but that doesn’t change a thing about the lesson that John teaches us.
He mentions his love for the elect lady by writing, “whom I love in truth,” and then he adds, “and not only I, but also all who know the truth.” Then notice the cause of these bonds of love in v. 2—“because of the truth that abides in us and will be with us forever.” The mutual love that these Christians all felt for each other was because of the truth. That was the foundation of their love; we might even say that the truth created their love for each other.
And notice that John describes the truth in terms that make it sound like a living thing—the truth “abides [or lives] in us and will be with us forever.” This could be a very deliberate reference to the Holy Spirit. In John’s Gospel, he records how Jesus described the Holy Spirit as “the Spirit of truth…who abides with you and will be in you.” The Holy Spirit guides us into the truth and reminds us of the truth.
So the truth is described as the cause for their mutual love; it is the foundation on which that love is built, which suggests that where there is no mutual commitment to the truth, there cannot be genuine brotherly love, either. Have you ever been to a family reunion with some members of your family who have very different religious or political beliefs than you? That can be a very awkward situation. You can all be friendly toward each other, but there really isn’t a tight bond, even though you’re all related. Everyone kind of understands that you’re all there because no one wants to disappoint grandma by not showing up!
On the other hand, have you ever met a complete stranger and then found out that he or she is a Christian, and all of a sudden you feel like you’re old friends? Even though you barely know each other, there is an instant bond because of your mutual commitment to the truth about Jesus Christ.
Now from many directions today, we are being told that claims about what is true can and should be downplayed for the sake of love. Just last week I saw a commercial in which a priest and a rabbi were sitting at a table in a park when they were approached by a Muslim with a box in his hands. There’s a brief moment where you think, “What’s going to happen?”, and then the Muslim man opens the box to reveal a dozen donuts, and all the men sit down and munch on donuts and chat like they’re all the best of friends.
The commercial offers the suggestion that there’s no reason in the world why these three men can’t share the deepest bonds of friendship. Now don’t get me wrong—there is a sense in which we can and should show love to everyone, but you cannot share the brotherly love of the family of God with someone who is not your spiritual brother!
Likewise, there are many people today who claim the title of Christian and yet deny some of the core beliefs of Christianity, such as Jesus’ virgin birth and resurrection. How can I share a true, brotherly love with someone who denies the core beliefs of my faith? When you remove the foundation of truth upon which brotherly love is built, what you end up with is not love—it is simply a vague sentimentality in which no religious beliefs mean anything anymore. Some people may attempt to downplay truth for the sake of love, but they actually end up losing both.
As John says, the bonds of Christian love exist “because of the truth that abides in us and will be with us forever.” And he goes on in v. 3 to say that the marriage of truth and love will allow us to enjoy God’s grace, mercy, and peace. He says, [READ v. 3].
Then in the next few verses, he switches his focus to love, and we find that…
II. Brotherly Love is the Expression of Truth (vv. 4–6)
In v. 4, John writes, [READ v. 4]. Apparently, John had encountered either some children from this family or some members of this church and had seen that they were living according to God’s commandments. This gave John tremendous joy, and in the next verses he encourages all of his letter’s recipients to “keep on keepin’ on”, so to speak. So in v. 5, he writes [READ v. 5]. John was certainly correct in saying that this was not a new commandment. As Jesus spent time with His disciples on the night before He was crucified, He commanded them four times to love each other. In fact, Jesus said that love among His followers would serve as the calling card of Christianity. In John 13:35, Jesus said, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Love should be the defining characteristic of any group that would call themselves followers of Jesus. And notice how John defines love in the first part of v. 6—“and this is love, that we walk according to His commandments.” This is really a pretty simple statement—to love each other is nothing more than to live out the commands of Jesus. In other words, love is simply the expression of God’s truth as He spelled it out in the commands of Jesus. Love is simply the proper outworking of God’s truth in our lives
That is a pretty challenging thought if you think about it, because it tells us that we cannot truly say we love each other unless we are actually living the right way toward each other. If I am failing to do something that God has commanded me to do for you, then I can’t really say that I love you. Thus, love is more than just a feeling we have for each other, and its even more than just a desire for someone’s well-being; it is the active expression of God’s truth being lived out in my life.
John touched on this same idea over in 1 John 3:16–18. Why don’t you turn there with me? [READ 1 John 3:16–18]. Again, we discover that true love is shown by actually living out God’s commands.
This is a very important lesson for us to remember in our church. At churches like Morningside, we pride ourselves in our doctrine and in our teaching. We know that doctrine matters, and false teaching is a dangerous threat, and so we teach and we study and we learn, and then we teach and we study and we learn some more. We carefully protect our doctrine, and we respond with appropriate disapproval when denominations or other churches reject the plain teaching of Scripture.
But let’s not think that we’re really being all that we should be simply because we have a good statement of faith! That would be like saying you have a beautiful house simply because you have good blueprints. It doesn’t work that way; you actually have to act on the blueprints. Or it would be like saying that you have a good basketball team simply because you have a talented roster. Putting together a roster is just the first step; you then have to act on that potential.
And so, as a church, we must embrace the truth of God’s Word and proclaim it and protect it, but I hope you can see that that’s just the starting point. We have to then live out the commands that God has given us to create a true community of love here in our church.
At the end of v. 6, we receive a reminder that love always looks back to the truth and becomes a support for it. Let me read all of v. 6 [READ v. 6]. As we read the first part of v. 6, we might think, “Okay, what are God’s commandments?” The second part of v. 6 then reminds us that they are simply the things we have been taught from the beginning of the church—the things taught by Jesus and the apostles. So to love someone, you just need to follow the commands of Jesus and the apostles.
Its important to remember this lesson, because people are constantly trying today to re-define what it means to love someone. We hear today that loving someone means that you never tell them they’re wrong; you never correct them because that would damage their self-esteem and that would be unloving. But what does it really mean to love someone? Well, if you want to know exactly what it means, you could really just read the New Testament and write down every command that you find. The list that you would come up with would tell you exactly what it means to love another person. You would see: “Oh, I’m supposed to forgive that person and confront them if they’re caught up in sin. I’m supposed to be generous to them and say kind things to them and not gossip about them.” We could go on and on, but you get the idea.
So we really don’t need to be confused about what it means for us to love each other. It is simply living out the truth of God’s commands in our relationships with each other. This means that we must first of all revere God’s truth, as we have seen. We must not minimize it or reject it—we must embrace it. But we have not completely embraced it until we start to live it out toward other people, and that’s what love is. And as we keep trying to love each other, that desire will keep pointing us back to the truth of God. When we keep truth and love in this kind of cycle with each other, we will have a dynamic duo that will produce healthy lives and a healthy church.
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