Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word. As I was editing this episode, I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that, you know, there’s no greater topic to discuss other than God’s love, His nature. It’s the enormity, the immenseness that’s given freely to us when we believe in Him and have accepted His Son. First John chapter 3: Love and the Social Test. We’ve been learning from the epistle of 1 John about the tests of life, the actual ways we can know that we have been born into God’s family and possess eternal life. With our lives here as short and unpredictable as they are, I can’t think of anything more important to know, can you?

But can we really know, Paul? Absolutely. That’s why this letter of the apostle John is part of God’s Word. In this brief letter, John uses the word know, K-N-O-W, more than 40 times. First John chapter 3, where we are today, has quite a lot to say about love and some things to say about hate as well. Not exactly the way we put those two strong emotions together, but in ways that we need to think through.

It begins like this: What great love the Father has lavished upon us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are. That’s an amazing thought to John, that he wants his readers, who are Christians, to fully appreciate. We should never get too used to this truth, and it should be just as amazing to us as it was to those John was first writing to. If we sincerely have put our faith in Christ, we are God’s own loved children. As John wrote earlier in his gospel, to all who received Jesus, to those who believed into his name, they were given the right to become children of God. A lot of people I know have had less than ideal human fathers, sadly, and that can negatively affect many aspects of their lives.

I don’t want in any way to minimize that fact. But God can be, and wants to be, our ultimate Father who loves us deeply and forever. John’s reminding us of that. For proof of his love, we only have to look at the cross. What happened there only happened because of God’s great love. There was no other reason for it.

But John is not addressing everyone when he says this, because not everyone can rightfully call God Father. Every human being is God’s creation, true, but we only become his sons and daughters, the New Testament teaches this many different places, by being born into his family by faith in Jesus Christ. John stresses that over and over in his writings. By hearing and responding to the gospel message, by turning from sin to trust in the Savior, that’s how we’re born into God’s family, and we gain a Father in heaven who not only accepts and loves us deeply now, but who has wonderful plans for our whole eternity. When he takes us home after our brief time here is done, his promise is that any and all the disappointments and pain of this lifetime will be gone. Any negative experiences we suffered during this lifetime will no longer hold a grip on us.

Our heavenly Father will wipe away all tears. There will be no more pain, no more sorrow, no more death. These are his promises. So yeah, lavish is a good word for God’s love toward his children. I know when I say this will strike different people differently. If you were blessed to experience the love and stability that comes from having a caring, involved father, emotionally, you’re going to be more easily able to relate to God as your heavenly Father.

It’s sometimes more difficult for those who didn’t grow up in such a healthy environment. But regardless of whether we are emotionally prepared to experience it and know it fully, God’s love for us is so much greater than anything we have lacked here. It’s immeasurable, actually. It’s infinite. As one psalm puts it, God’s unfailing love toward those who revere Him is as great as the height of the heavens are above the earth. And that’s why John begins this section with this exclamation, What great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God.

For the next handful of verses, John returns to describing the importance of the moral test we discussed last time. Remember, the chapter divisions in our Bibles are not part of what John originally wrote. They were added later to help people navigate around the Bible. This was one continuous letter, and sometimes the themes go back and forth. But the transition from the moral test to describing a third test of life comes at verses 10 and 11 in this chapter. There he writes, Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.

For this is the message that you’ve heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. By from the beginning, John means from the beginning of the Christian era, from the time of Jesus’ teaching ministry forward. The Lord answered the question as to what he considered to be the greatest commandment by saying, remember this: You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and to love others as you love yourself. John was deeply imprinted by those words. Jesus often talked to his followers about the importance of love, I don’t think any time more memorable than his final instructions to them in the upper room the night before he died. As I have loved you, John remembered him saying that night, so you must love one another.

By this all people will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. Think about this, because this is the way John understood it. God has shown his great love for us by sending his one and only Son into our world to become our Savior. Those who receive Jesus, the Savior God has provided, those who believe into him, as John likes to put it, are born into God’s eternal family and become his children. Then God himself loves us as his own sons and daughters. Because we’re born of God, we’re his children, and it follows that we have inherited some of his nature.

What could be more obvious to display about God’s nature than that he is full of love? Doesn’t the Bible actually define God that way? God is love. So what could be more obvious proof that we are really God’s children than that? It makes me feel good when I see aspects of my personality and nature show up in my children, whether it’s that their eyes are shaped like mine, or that their mind seems to work like mine, or they show some kind of distinctive expressions or characteristics of mine. When we see that in some of these children, we often say, Well, he’s a chip off the old block.

Or, what can I say? She’s her mother’s daughter. Children inherit their parents’ traits. This is what John is trying to say about love. Those who are really born of God. Have you ever thought of it that way?

The kind of love God has, which is essential to His nature, will be evident in real believers, in His true children. This is the third test of life, as we’ve been calling these, and we’re going to call it the social test. If we claim to be a Christian, do we really love others with the kind of love our Father does? That’s the test question. I’m certainly not saying as much as or as perfectly as, because we’d all fail that test. But the question is, do we exhibit the same kind of love as our Father in heaven does?

Do we display that trait of our Father? Just as Jesus urged His disciples to love each other and stick together in unity during His last talk in the upper room, John is urging his own disciples near the end of his life, the believers he had been teaching and training in and around Ephesus, to do the same thing. They were coming into difficult times. When John wrote this, there were several apostles that had already been martyred. There was at least one pastor around Ephesus where John was writing this who had been martyred as well. Just as Jesus had told His disciples not to be surprised if the world hated them because it hated Him first, John delivers the same message in verse 13.

Don’t marvel, brothers, if the world hates you. It’s puzzling on the surface. Why do some people hate Christians just for being Christians? The Christians in the late first century were not a bunch of criminals or dangerous political revolutionaries. But they became hunted as enemies of the state. I’m not sure it’s explainable apart from the reality of spiritual warfare.

That is, that the hatred was satanically inspired. Satan stirred this up. And that’s still true today in places. I could tell you horrific stories about Christians in the Islamic Middle East, or in some places in Africa, and in some communist countries like China and North Korea, who are suffering and even being martyred today for no crime other than being a Christian. I’m thankful it’s usually not physically violent where I live, but there’s plenty of anti-Christian hate even here. In the Roman Empire, there were ten emperors who persecuted Christians sporadically, off and on, from the time of Nero, who had the apostles Peter and Paul killed, to the time of Diocletian in the early fourth century, for those approximately 250 years.

During that span, some prominent Christians appealed to the powers in Rome to stop these injustices. One powerful voice of the Christians, a defender of the faith, was a man named Tertullian, a North African from Carthage. He wrote a book called Apologeticum, which means defense in Latin. It was a plea for justice for Christians. In it, Tertullian refuted the common charges against Christianity and explained misunderstood Christian beliefs. It was in that work that some now famous lines are found.

He wrote, It is mainly the deeds of love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See how they love one another, while our opponents are animated by hatred. See how they are ready to die for one another. While our opponents would sooner put men to death, he’s describing what the pagans knew was true, and asking, Why for this do you want to kill us? As you no doubt know, persecuting and putting Christians to death in the early centuries after Jesus’ time did not stop Christianity’s spread and growth. In fact, may have aided it.

It was Tertullian who also remarked that the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church. It was because of how the Christians loved one another that so many were drawn to the faith. Something very real going on when people pray for their enemies, even when they’re being persecuted, when people will die for one another and for their faith. That reality drew people to Christianity like a big spiritual magnet. The early Christians learned this from Jesus and John well. In chapter 3 of his letter, he writes at the beginning at verse 14, If we love our brothers and sisters who are believers, it proves that we have passed from death to life.

We know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us. So we also ought to give up our lives for our brothers and sisters. And then he gets down to brass tacks. If someone has enough money to live well and sees a brother or sister in need and shows no compassion, how can God’s love be in that person? Dear children, let’s not merely say that we love each other. Let us show the truth of it by our actions.

He adds in chapter 4 at verses 19 and 20 very memorable lines on the same theme. We love because he first loved us. If someone says, I love God, but hates his brother, he’s a liar. For the one who doesn’t love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God, whom he has not seen. The social test for the reality of faith is about a change in our heart attitudes toward others when we become believers in Christ. Toward everyone, actually.

But John stresses particularly a special love for other Christians, who he calls our brothers and sisters. Let me give you first an example or two of what I mean by a heart attitude of love toward others generally, and then an example or two of the special love we have toward one another in the family of God. People who are critical of Christianity often bring up to me examples of so-called Christian ministers and ministries that seem to be all about enriching themselves and taking advantage of people. Unfortunately, there are too many of them, and I respond that I agree with them that this is terrible. It’s despicable. Sadly, there have even been counterfeit Christian frauds around ever since the first century.

The apostles regularly called them out then; we should regularly call them out now. But I tell them, don’t think that that’s the norm, like Tertullian did. I try to tell them, point to the critics the way real Christians love each other. I ask them to consider all the Christian relief organizations, for example, like Samaritan’s Purse or the Mercy Ships, Compassion International, World Vision, Operation Blessing, the Salvation Army. That’s just a handful of the largest and best known. There are scores and scores and scores of Christian organizations operating all around the world, all started by, staffed by, funded by—not governments, but Christians.

I like to tell them about my own church that has a food truck ministry to feed the hungry, a ministry to feed children from low-income families we call the Backpack Ministry. It happens in our local schools so kids can be sure they have enough food to eat through the weekend when they aren’t getting school lunches. We have other ministries for drug and alcohol addicted people, ministries for those going through grief or extended illnesses, all staffed by volunteers, all funded, again, not by taxes and government programs, but by Christians who love one another. And it’s not just about programs either. Tony, who oversees our care ministry, will tell you it’s also about just seeing needs and trying to meet them in the name of Jesus. Isn’t that what the parable of the Good Samaritan was all about?

Personally, I’ve had the privilege of giving and also benefiting from this kind of godly love. In the last few years at my house, we’ve had the opportunity to have two different young men who had no safe or good place to live, live with us for extended periods of time. Why would we want that expense and that imposition? It’s just a natural thing to do for Christians. The impulse to love others, to help those in need, is pure and simple following Jesus. It’s what he did.

I love Peter’s line in one of his sermons recorded in the Acts. He put it just this simply: Jesus went about doing good. He loved and cared for people that he came across in need. He came out of heaven because God cared enough about all of us to meet our greatest needs. And as John reminds us when he wrote the most famous verse in the Bible, God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son. Real Christians throughout the centuries have demonstrated that same character of love that Jesus showed.

As verses 18 and 19 in this chapter put it, My little children, let us not love in word or speech, but in action and in truth. By this we will know that we are of the truth and will assure our hearts before Him. John believed we can know that we possess eternal life by this social test. If this kind of love is in your heart, he thought, you can know that you’ve been born of God. I’ve also been a recipient of this kind of brotherly love recently. Just a few months ago, I probably have told you about this, one of my daughters died unexpectedly.

Needless to say, that was a huge shock in my family, unlike anything I’ve experienced before. I’m very blessed to have a group of lifelong Christian friends who went way out of their way to be with me, to help me out financially, practically, in every way during that rough spell. I mean, some drove hundreds of miles to be with me, just to hang out, take care of practical problems at my house when I was in no place in my mind to do it. It was real Christianity that I got to experience again from brothers and sisters in Christ. It was the kind of loving one another that John’s talking about here, far more than just words. No different than in John in Tertullian’s generation, today when people are looking on and see that kind of love displayed, it demonstrates the reality of our faith, and it’s very attractive.

Since my mind seems to be stuck in church history, there’s another story I’ll finish with that comes down to us from the early church fathers involving the Apostle John. While he was living in Ephesus in extreme old age, he would often be carried into meetings of Christians on the Lord’s Day when he was too feeble to walk. And because he was John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, for heaven’s sakes, he would always be asked to say a few words. Who wouldn’t want to hear from the man who was with Jesus for three years, who was on the Mount of Transfiguration and saw his glory, who heard the parables, saw the miracles, who stood by the cross and watched the Savior suffer and die, who witnessed the power of the resurrected Christ? Of course everybody did, and everybody was excited when he would show up at their congregation. What would he tell us today?

What can he remember from the past that he will pass on to us today? According to a story retold by the church fathers, whenever John was asked to speak in the last days of his life, the early Christians strained to hear what the apostle would say. He usually would say much the same thing: My little children, love one another. He was old at that point, most I’m sure smiled understandingly, graciously accepted those words because he was the last living link to Jesus. But on one occasion, when John said that, a young man near him dared to question, Teacher, why do you always say the same thing and nothing more? To which John replied, Because that was the Lord’s command, and if you do that, it’s enough.

Get this right, sonny. If you do this, you’ll be doing okay. For John, love was central. He knew and experienced Jesus’ love like very few others, and he never forgot what Jesus said: As I have loved you, so you must love one another. That’s how all people will know that you are my disciples. Love is the heartbeat of Christianity, John believed.

It not only proves to us that our faith is real because we pass the social test, but it’s proof that our faith is real to the unbelieving world who are looking on. John is still encouraging us through these writings that he left for us 2,000 years ago to love one another, and reassuring us too, we know that we have passed out of death and into life because we love one another. You know what? I just realized this time through 1 John that the last verses in chapter 3 tie all four of the tests of life together. Listen. Now this is God’s command that we believe into the name of the Son of God.

That’s the first one, the doctrinal test. And that we love one another as He commanded us. That’s a second one, the social test. And the one who keeps His commandments remains in Him. That’s another one, the third one, the moral test. And the way we know that He remains in us is by the Spirit whom He has given us.

That’s the fourth test, and we’ll take it up next time on Share the Word. Thanks for being a listener, and if you’re enjoying learning God’s Word this way, please pass the podcast URL along to your friends and family. Thanks, Paul. The more we listen and invest our minds, bodies, spirits, and hearts in God’s Word, the more profound the impact on our lives. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard, You’re just like your father, but not until now have I looked at what that actually means. Is God’s love reflected in your life?

If we truly are followers of Christ, then love should be the encompassing trait we display. Don’t just be a person of words. Reflect the nature of God our Father. Reflect love. If we could simply do that, what an amazing world this would be. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.