So, we're going to look through this Sunday evening, next Sunday evening we're going to
look through second John, and then for the next couple of Sundays after that, third John.
So written by the Apostle John, who is by this time an old man, and he, first John reminds
us, if you remember anything about it, you'll remember that John really grasped the central
truths. If you've got time, reread it. If there's one book in the Bible I would encourage
you to memorize. It's not that long, it's a few chapters. It would be first John. It's
such a great summary of the Christian gospel. The more we understand it and live out the
truth of first John, the more we can be assured that we'll stay close to the very heart of
the gospel in the heart of Jesus. And so it's a great book that speaks about God's light
and God's love and the power of His love. And even that central truth which was so significant
and so fresh and new to the people to whom He was writing, was in danger of being swamped
by false teaching. Even at that early stage, there was people who were coming into the
churches there and deceiving them with a false teaching and false doctrine. There was division,
there was power struggles. Mmm, that sounds familiar. So not just from the early church,
but right through history, we found these temptations within us, not just as churches,
but also as individuals to drift from the truth, to be attracted to some new fancy message
or simply to be attracted to our own sinful, selfish lives and living. So first John is
a great book, and first, second and third John are great books to take together. I just
want to give free lessons at the beginning here by way of introduction. The first is
the great example of an old Christian who's a really great old Christian, John. He calls
himself the elder in the first introductory verses, words of the letter. Now that may
refer to his designation as an overseer of maybe a group of churches around Ephesus to
which probably first John was written. Or it just may be simply a designation to his
old age and being an old man in the faith. But he'd certainly matured, and over that
maturity had kept his perspective really good. So he'd kept his perspective around Christ
and around people. He loved Christ and he loved people. And that really comes across
in these letters. They are gentle but really courageous. He has a deep love that is willing
to expose things that's wrong about his children and the faith. But he does so with great gentleness
and with great attractiveness in many ways. He's passionate. He's a bit like what you
could imagine your favorite granddad to be like. That's the kind of character that John
seems to be. And he talks so beautifully to the people that he was responsible for, the
people that he was writing to so beautifully. It would be great if... It's a great thing
to learn to speak like that to whoever it might be we're speaking to. Even when we're
speaking, things that aren't easy to speak to them about in faith. And I think the danger
sometimes for us as we grow older in the faith, as we've been Christians for longer, that
we can become complacent or we can stop growing or we can become prayerless or middle of the
road kind of Christians so we're happy enough with what we've reached a certain level in
it. That's okay. We'll just... We'll carry on there. And we don't allow ourselves to
grow into the love of Christ as he intends us and wants us to be in the way that John
has done. Maybe becoming a bit cynical of the needs of others and or disinterested in them.
So I would always say, beware middle-agers of the faith. That middle-aged time, I know
some of you are much younger than that, but you may be middle-aged in your faith. I'm
not so much speaking about age in terms of your years as maybe age in terms of how long
you've been a Christian. Always take someone like John as a great example. An old man but
he was growing younger every day inside because he remained that... maintained that freshness
of being close to Christ. First lesson. The second lesson is to remember our own forgetfulness
of the basics, the fundamentals, the message of the gospel because the churches that John
was writing to were relatively new churches. They were church plants. They had grown through
conversion. People becoming Christians. It wasn't like it was... It wasn't like moving
the bits on a chessboard. It wasn't that they were Christians already, just happened to
move to that new church. They've become Christians. They've come to Christ, new converts. And
yet already they were forgetting the basics. Already they were tempted to follow another
path and go a different way. They were distracted. They were reverting sometimes to their old
ways. And the older I get, the more I see sins grip. See, even for new Christians, there's
this temptation to drift from Jesus Christ. Old habits, old sins are hard to... It took
God the Son. It took God the Son to go to the cross as we were reminded so beautifully
this morning. God had to die the Son. It took that... That was the cost. That was what was
needed to break the strength and the power of sin in our lives. And it's easy for us
to forget that sometimes and to forget how quickly we can drift from the fundamental
truths. You know, I think as preachers, any budding preachers here, just remember, we
think we make a huge difference in people's lives. We probably don't make very much difference
at all. It's amazing how little may be preaching, how little a difference preaching can make
in people's lives. But then I think of the disciples. We look at it in Mark's Gospel
and we think of all the disciples and how little they understood. We've been seeing
that over the last number of months. How little they grasped. It took the syrophoenician
woman to understand, wasn't it? Today we saw. And I take comfort from that because they
were under Christ preaching and they didn't even understand. And there's that reality,
isn't there, that we're quick to forget. It's not an easy thing to stay close to the important
truths of the gospel unless we're relying on Jesus Christ. So when we come to God's...
When we come at preaching or under God's word, you know, it's important not to keep looking
for novel truth. Yes, we're looking for insights and we're looking for a new understanding.
But it must come from the Spirit and it must come from our readiness to be responsive to
the Spirit. When you hear old truths from God's... from the pulpit, don't become weary
with that because it's very important to recognize that the old truths are the ones that John
keeps going back to in these letters. The message you heard from the beginning, the same
truths. It's not anything novel or new, he's speaking to these churches that are tempted
to wander from him. And there's a great need for us to recognize the need for the Spirit
to take that old truth and say, what is God saying to me with that old truth from His
word into my life today? There's a couple of illustrations about preaching that maybe
it will help us, it certainly helps me. You know, I wonder if I asked any of you what
you ate for three weeks ago last Monday. I know these are all... they're all illustrations.
I've only got old illustrations. You remember what you had for your meal three weeks ago
last Monday? Probably none of you would remember exactly what you had. But it would have nourished
you at the time and it was important for you to eat that meal at the time. And I think
sometimes that's true of preaching. We don't remember necessarily unless you've got particularly
good memory what the preachers preach. But you look for nourishment each time you come.
You look for being spiritually fed and for it to do you good for that moment and for
the weekend which you've entered. And that's significant. Or remember another preacher
who one of his members came up to him after the service and said, why do you keep preaching
on the same text, love your neighbour as yourself or love one another as I've loved you? And
he returned back and said, well, once you start doing it, I'll move on to another text.
And I think there's a reality of that too sometimes for us that we're looking to be
moved and touched and changed under God's word. And John is in these letters, he's taking
them back to the fundamental message that they heard from the beginning. And it's interesting
too, I think the third lesson is from these three letters that we can take is there's
a pattern to them. It seems very much like the first letter was in a sense a round robin
letter that was written to a group of churches, house churches probably likely around the
Ephesus area. John may well have been the overseer, spiritual overseer. Second John,
which we're going to look at briefly or a bit of it, was written to a specific church.
Some commentators think it was actually to an individual lady, the elect lady and her
children, to a woman and her family. But most would seem to suggest, and it fits in with
the whole of the letter, that that was his way of speaking about the church, the bride
of Christ would be similar to that, that it was a church and the children are the members
of that church. And first John, he speaks about the members of the churches as his children.
Ten times is a common way of speaking that he used. So the first letter is to the group
of churches, the second letter is to an individual church, and the third letter is to an individual
Christian, Gaius, who he's writing to. And he's bringing the same message to all of them.
And I think there's an encouragement there for us that the Word of God that comes to
us, it applies at every level. It applies to groups of churches, which we would call
presbyteries or affiliation of churches. It applies to the local church, the individual
church like St. Columba's. It applies to us as a corporate people. So it's not just
a message for people out there, it's a message for St. Columba's when we hear it. And it
also applies to us as individuals. So we take all of these things from God's Word and we
recognize the core message for the same is all. So just for a few minutes, we're going
to look at two of the main themes of the first six verses. We're going to look at verses
one to six. And the two main themes are inextricably linked and they're very simple. And it's
old truths again that John is speaking as he reminds them and continues to remind them
of the same truth from the first letter. And that is truth and love, the importance of
truth and love. He speaks about truth five or six times in these first few verses. And
he's reminding them of the kind of truth that's important to elder, the elect lady and her
children, the chosen lady and her children. He immediately sets it in the context of the
sovereign election of God, that these people are those who have been chosen by God and
are elect under God. God knows them, God loves them, He will keep them. And there's a great
mystery in that whole amazing reality of the elect called of God, the mystery of the dynamics
of our deadness and the need for God to breathe life into us. And yet not only that we are
chosen but that we choose Jesus Christ. And yet the reality for us of that truth that
there is an elect people who are being called by God, encouraging for our evangelism, encouraging
for our confidence. He's bedding it in God's sovereign work, the truth of God's sovereign
work. And it's truth, he says, as he's repeated throughout the first letter, it's truth that
is revealed. It's a message that can be known. It's a message that's been shown and given
to us. And he's telling this church that is in danger of welcoming in those who are preaching
a false gospel and being deceived by that. He's saying, you've got to go back to that
truth. It's not something we can make up. It's not something that we can choose to manipulate
or change. It is the truth of Christ, Christ and His finished work and the truth of the
Bible. And it's truth that lives in believers. He says, the elder, the elect lady whom I
love and truth not only I but also all who know the truth because the truth abides in
us and will be with us forever. So we recognize that this fundamental truth is not simply
an intellectual knowledge but is a relational truth that lives in us in the person of Jesus
Christ. It's a real... the word. Jesus is called the word because He's truth revealed,
but yet it's a truth that lives in us relationally in Christ. So we have this knowledge of God
in Christ, not simply theological and intellectual knowledge. And it's a truth therefore that
is our unbroken companion into eternity. A truth that will be with us forever. It's
the permanence, the absolute solid rock of our existence that though we've grown older,
though we lose our lives, we simply pass on into the nearer presence of Jesus Christ
because the word is in us. The Spirit of God through the Holy Spirit is with us and overcomes
our greatest enemy, death, our greatest fear, our greatest unknown of being forgotten, of
being lost, of being alone. God says that we are... He is with us eternally. That is
the great truth that John is reminding us of here. And he explains... he describes that
truth and that word of Christ as grace, mercy and peace be with us from God the Father.
Great benediction at the beginning of His letter. The grace of God is His help to you
in your helplessness. Again, it was highlighted very powerfully this morning. That's what
God wants from us. He wants that sense of our own inability and our own need and our
own weakness and we come to Him for His grace. And mercy, His pity, His compassion on the
guilty and on the undeserving. I don't have many illustrations but this is an old one that
I've heard but congregation changes so much. Maybe some of you haven't heard it. A soldier
who deserted from Napoleon's army but was caught and was to face Napoleon who was going
to sentence him to death for his desertion. And the soldier's mother was there and rushed
up to Napoleon and fell on his knees and begged for mercy for her son. And Napoleon said,
he doesn't deserve mercy. And she returned. If he deserved it, it wouldn't be mercy.
And that's the reality of our position before God is that it's not something we deserve,
it's the compassion on the guilty that as we fall before Him we can know His acceptance
and His peace. That great recognition, the Old Testament shalom, the New Testament truth
of where we get the word, ironic from someone who's ironic is someone who promotes peace.
And that's the kind of believers we become. We promote peace within the family of God,
within the church of God, within the community of God, within your workplace, within wherever
you study. It's a wholeness that allows us to have our discorded hearts and lives brought
into that sense of oneness and peace because of what God has done for us.
And the truth and the reality for us is joy, which we sung about at the beginning of the
service. I rejoice greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth just as
we were commanded by the Father. And there's a great reality there of the response of truth
in the life of the believer. John had this great shepherd's heart. And I do think we're
all called to have shepherd's hearts. I know there's some that are maybe specifically gifted
in one way or another, leadership gifts, pastoral gifts, but we're all called to have pastoral
concerns and love and a desire for one another. And it's a great mark of our spiritual maturity
if we are able to have fine joy when we see others walking in the truth, when we see those
around us following Christ and coming to Christ. The greatest joy that we have is to hear someone
that we know and love coming to Christ and finding out and recognizing the wonder of
His grace, His mercy and His peace. And that is the joy that should mark our Christian
lives. That's the joy that should mark our understanding of His commands for us, His
commandments which are so glorious and beautiful. And so our Christian lives shouldn't be marked
by a legalistic, critical, judgmental, doer or permanent sense of struggle. Of course
there's struggle, of course there's difficulties. But as we remain in Christ and as we found
ourselves on the basic realities of the gospel and that personal relationship with Him, we
recognize He is good and His Word is good and we want others to enjoy that goodness
and that walk with Him and we care about them and we encourage them and we say things like,
I'm delighted and I rejoice greatly when I see you walking in the truth. I wonder when
the last time we thought, we said that to anyone in our Christian life. Probably, there
were probably someone who would think you were weird if you said that, but it's a great
thing to do. And to be encouraged when you see someone growing in the faith, evidently
growing in the faith and sharing that with them. So truth is something that John keeps
going back to the truth of the gospel, which he is challenging them and reminding them
not to drift from, not to be deceived by, not to listen to the false teachers who are
tempted to come in and divide the fellowship, even this young fledgling church. And then
of course, his great theme, the apostle of love, is love itself, truth and love. And
time is though I'm writing a new commandment, but the one we had from the beginning that
we love one another. And this is love that we walk according to His commandments. And
this is a commandment, just as you've heard from the beginning, so that you should walk
in it. And He uses this kind of repetitive language all the time. He's saying the same
things, going around them, looking at them, different perspective, but saying the same
thing, truth and love. And what He's saying to them, look, I'm saying, just as I've said
from before, there's never been another way. This has always been, this is always, from
the beginning, this has always been the way, is the way of Christ's loving sacrifice and
His grace that's poured out into our hearts. It's the beauty of divine love. We speak a
lot about love from the pulpit, don't we? And it's so hard, therefore, to make it something,
to recognize the uniqueness of the divine love that God promises to us. It's discovered
and enjoyed only in Jesus Christ. And it's where we find true meaning and true hope.
And so He encourages them as a response to false teaching and as an outworking of understanding
the truth that we love one another. Now in John 13, that's expressed slightly differently
as a new commandment. John here says, I'm not writing you out, a new commandment is
an old one. But in the gospel of John, he says, it's a new commandment. I'm asking you
to love one another as I have loved you. So the motive is Jesus Christ and the kind of
love and also the gift of love that He alone can give. It's John's restatement again and
again that the core of His life is coming to know this love that is as different from
our own disordered loves as light is from darkness. Can I say that again? It's Christ's love
is as different from our own understanding of love as light is from darkness. So we do
need to put aside our complacency when we talk about or think about love from a Christian
point of view. And we need to fall on our knees and ask the Holy Spirit to open our eyes
to see what the love of Christ will look like in my life, what it looks like in my marriage,
what it looks like in my home, what it looks like in my workplace, what it looks like with
my colleagues, what it looks like in every moment of my life. And it's what John is saying
again, it's what Corey was saying this morning that we need the Holy Spirit to open our eyes
to unstop our deaf ears and to recognize that this is the love He gifts us that we need
to ask for a love for the unlovely, a love for those who are undeserving in our own eyes,
a love for those who maybe hate you, a love for the needy, a love that covers a multitude
of failings in others. It's a love that doesn't idolize human love or even brotherly love
or sisterly love or friendship love. There's nothing wrong with friendship love, but friendship
love becomes an issue when we favor friends over those who need our love or when we idolize
our friends or when we exclu-exclusivize our friends at the expense of those who are in
need, who are isolated, who are not naturally of our friendship group but who are children
of God or maybe who are not children of God. It recognizes not to make friendship of people
in a worldly way which puts them on a pedestal and then when they let you down, that you
dump them because they have failed the standards that you hoped they had, that you hoped you
had for them. And there's that recognition of it changes the perspective and the direction
and the way we think about every love relationship because we understand our own hearts and the
sinfulness and the way we let people down and the way we prioritize wrongly and the
way that we choose to ignore some people's failings and then choose to highlight other
people's failing because it suits us. It suits our selfishness. And so it's moving selfishness
out of the middle of our love relationships and putting Christ in there which is a radical
change. It's a radical transformation. It took God, Son, to be nailed to a cross to
enable us to love like that. And we need to throw ourselves onto Christ. And every day
you say, I can't do that. I can't love like that. I don't naturally love this way. I
need the Spirit's help. I need my eyes to be opened. I need to be selfless and I need
to be committed to the strength and power of the Holy Spirit. And He says here, the
aid that enables us to live like this, to love one another and this is love that we
walk according to His commandments. This is the commandment, just as you've heard it
from the beginning, so that you should walk in it. So there's this interesting parallel
and it's kind of paradoxical because there's love and there's command. But the two come
together in Christ. As we walk in obedience to Christ, in His strength and in His power,
because we recognize the debt we owe, we find ourselves, it's a bit like, I was going to
say it was cori, it wasn't the cori this morning, it was the Bible verse that I was, the video
that I watched from the Bible verse about the fruit of the Spirit. It's not so much
we work for the fruit of the Spirit to have all that fruit, but we work to be connected
at the root to the water of life and the fruit comes almost naturally. And the same is true
with the love as we're grounded in the commands of God. We find that love is the fruit of
that. It's an act of our wills. It's not really an emotion simply, it includes an emotion,
but in our extremely expressive individualistic age where feelings are everywhere and feelings
are everything. And it's more than that. It's an act of our will where we walk according
to God's commands in our lives and follow Him and love as an act of our will, not simply
an emotion. The word for walking there is peripatio, which is the word that we get,
the pathetic from. So if you're a peripatetic gym teacher, it's one, you go around the different
schools, you walk around the different schools, you're not based in one place. And anyone
who does work that peripatetic, that's what it means. And that's, it's really what John
is saying here is wherever you are, the walk that you're on, wherever you happen to be,
that's what he's talking about, walking in His commands. Wherever we go, we're walking
in this way of obedience and love. Wherever we find ourselves in our lives, it's certainly
not just in the church. It's in all of our lives and in all of the reality of our lives,
wherever we are, we're seeking to do God's will. His commands about worship, His kingdom,
thankfulness, dependence on the Spirit, forgiveness, sexual purity, faithfulness, it's all inclusive.
And the more obedient we are to His pathway, the more we will see our own hearts, the more
we'll be amazed by His grace, the humbler we become, and the more we love and bear that
out in others. John is passionate about these truths. It's central truth to him. It's not
peripheral. He writes these letters because they're in danger of moving from that fundamental
truth of truth and love together. And if we are struggling in our lives, if you're not
caring about worship or church or sermons, if you don't read the Bible or pray, if you
have a week, it's because it's a weak foundation, maybe exposed, or you're listening to a re-imagining
of the truth that's maybe more acceptable to believe and follow today, whether it's
to do with sexuality or with political allegiance or relational idols, they say in the truth,
time and distance doesn't change the truth and the love that springs from it. So in conclusion
to the lady at St. C's and her children, let's walk with one another in God's love.
Let's do this walk of life together. We live in a challenging and complex world and it's
getting more challenging and complex by the day. But the way of the cross is actually
very simple even though it's profound. It's always for us far more than just this weekly
gathering on a Sunday, significant and important and vital though it is. Let us always maintain
this ethos of supporting and loving and walking together in faith. Let us be those who move
beyond as if it ever were the case that your sermon tasters are theological tourists and
recognize the importance of being together, importance of a radical gritty loving one
another walk together. But John sees that that needs to be reminded of again and again,
repeated on and acted on. And the interesting thing is sometimes there's an old Scottish
phrase that says it's better felt than tell. And that's probably quite true. We can talk
about love and we can talk about the significance of Christ's love. But you know that when you
experience that both from Him and from one another, it's more powerful than a hundred
sermons, better felt than tell. Don't let anyone change what we're striving for. Go
up. I might be here for another six or seven months and we've got Corey coming and we know
that Corey gets exactly what we are. And that's why we want him here as the preaching
elder. Let's never move from what we are. And it's the message that has been from the
beginning of the church is truth and love. It's as simple as that. And that's what we
need to be. And that's why we're doing what we're doing. And that's why we have a succession
policy with someone who knows that and who will lead the elders and the whole congregation
towards that more and more and more. The second half of this is about bewaring of deceivers,
be aware of deceivers and division. And all I can say is Corey, it's all yours because
he'll be doing that next week. Amen. Let's pray. Father God, we thank You for Your goodness
and grace. We thank You for Your love. We ask, we can only ask for forgiveness for how
quickly we are blinded and selfish and proud and careless of others. How little we love
one another with the love of Christ sometimes. How quickly we revert to quid pro quo love.
I love because they will love me back because we like each other and love each other and
we're like one another. Forgive us Lord when we fail to love with the compassionate, pastoral
eyes of Jesus. And when we think we can live the Christian life without prayer or without
dependence on the Spirit. How quickly Lord we are deceived. How quickly we're blinded.
Forgive us we pray. And ground us in the truth. Help us to walk wherever we are, whatever
part of our lives we find ourselves in, that we're walking in the truth, in the light,
in the love of Christ. With the challenges that that brings and with also the beauty
that that reflects from our hearts of the Christ who redeemed us. So help us in that
we pray and help us to help one another. It's such a battle. It's such a struggle. We live
in a world that really doesn't appreciate Christ and His message and their faith. So
we need to encourage and build each other up, support one another and find here a Christian
family, children of our Father in heaven that are bound together in Greece. We ask it in
Jesus' precious name. Amen.