What is Love? -- I John 4: 7-21

In this passage, John returns to one of his favorite subjects, love.

John isn’t talking about the love that is portrayed in the popular media or Christian culture.

For example, John probably wouldn’t understand our notion that love is a feeling. There is a feeling people often have when they are in love. But that’s really called affection, not love. There certainly should be feelings of sympathy and affection in love, but then that’s not love. A car has a radio, but that doesn’t make a radio a car. Love is bigger than affection. The idea of love as something we “feel” is unknown to him, and to the Bible.

If you are a parent, do you love your children?  Of course! Did you ever feel like strangling your kid? Probably! If you’re married, do you love your spouse?  Naturally!  Did you get angry with them?  Sure! Loving a person doesn’t mean we never get angry or disgusted. Love remains with us even when there are not feelings of affection.

We say that love is a choice. But if we choose to love, then we can choose not to love. If my love depended on me always making the right choices, then love becomes a burden quickly. Yet Jesus says our yoke is easy and our burden light. Love is not so much a choice as the reason we make choices.

A third mistake we make about love is to call only action. But just because we do for others, doesn’t mean we love them. Charity is good, but charity doesn’t prove love. Just because we are doing something that looks loving doesn’t mean it really is loving. Acts of charity are no proof of love. Paul said, “If I give away all I have, and even give my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.”

So if love isn’t a feeling, or a choice, or an action, what is it?  Into what mental category does love fall.  Let me suggest that love is more than a feeling or a choice or an action. Love is something different. It is what people used to call a virtue. 

A virtue is a habit we intentionally develop to be more like God. It is a pattern of life and thought that governs forever the shape of our life and bends us forever to the Good. The opposite of a virtue is a vice. A vice is a bending or shaping of our life in the opposite direction. A virtue is something we cultivate and develop with God’s help over a long period of time. As we walk around every day, we are not aware of even possessing a virtue, since it just feels normal to us. But other people see it in us, because it is natural to us. It is something we try very hard to develop. It is a habit of thinking, feeling, and acting.

The fruit of the Spirit, spoken of in Galatians 5: 21-22 are such virtues. They are the virtues that are produced by the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. These fruit do not come automatically, but over time through the practice of being obedient to God’s word.   The fruit of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Notice what comes first—love. They do not come just by prayer or just by some kind of Spiritual osmosis, but through the practice of doing what God commands in every situation. They are not feeling –how does a person feel faithfulness or self-control. They are choices we make, but they are also the reason we make those choices. They are aspects of Jesus’ personality that we seek to incorporate in our personality.

Let’s say a kid wants to be a basketball star. So he studies the life of Michael Jordan. He doesn’t copy everything Michael does, but he isolates certain aspects of his personality—his diligence, his perfectionism, his ability to come back after adversity. He tries to imitate those qualities that will make him a great basketball legend. Those qualities are Michael Jordan’s virtues.

Love is the virtue of Christ. Love is from God—it is God’s virtue. Everyone who loves is born of God, that means, he has allowed one of God’s virtues to be born in him. 

Loving as God loves is not natural to us—it is an unnatural act to us. But through prayer and obedience what at first is unnatural becomes natural.  Being loving becomes a healthy habit. A habit is something we do that feels like we were always supposed to do it. Once an act has been repeated a few times, then it starts to feel natural. In fact, it feels as if we have always done it that way.

Loving my family is a habit of the heart. When I don’t feel love for my kids, I still love because I always have. When I do something that makes my wife mad I feel guilty about it, because I have a habit of caring how she thinks. My whole personality is bent around supporting her and doing good for her. I don’t just feel love for my wife or choose lo love my wife. 

When a person says, “I don’t love my spouse anymore.” What they are really saying is this. “I have gotten out of the habit of loving my wife.” Habits that are not practices soon lose their power. But we can rebuild a habit in our lives quickly if we are willing to work at doing so.

But we have to have a reason to rebuild a habit of love. In the case of my wife, I have a good reason for keeping that habit going. My love for my wife is based on my relationship of my love to God, which is also a habit. If I quit practicing the habit of love to my wife, and God has told me to love her, then I am also breaking my habit of doing everything first because I love God. When I stop loving my wife I also stop loving God.  I can live without my wife, I cannot live without God.

What if I don’t show charity to my neighbor?  Showing charity to my neighbor is not just an act, it is habit I have developed in thought, feeling, and action. Again, it is an expression of the virtue of loving God. To become lazy in my charity is become lazy in my habits before God. To neglect loving my neighbors is to neglect loving God.

God commanded me to love, so I love. That means that whenever I have had to choose between doing something loving for God, my spouse, or for my kids I have chosen to love, so that love has become part of my nature. And obedience to God my purpose in life. 

In the old days, the church understood this. They used to write books about developing Christian virtues. Now they write books telling church people how they ought to feel. We hear sermons on how we are to get excited about the faith, how we should feel close to God at all times, how we should experience the joy of living. Guess what?  None of us experience Joy all the time. It is hard to imagine Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane expecting to receive a feeling of joy to replace the anxiety, or Christ on the Cross whistling, “I’ve God the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.” He had pain. He had suffering. But he also had love in his heart.

How do you know if you love God?  If you have to ask the question, then you probably don’t. A true lover doesn’t sit around thinking of love. They are thinking about the other. They work, think, feel, and act for the benefit of the other, without being aware of it necessarily. They don’t think about love—they just love. They may have to think about love at first, but then it becomes so natural to them that they are not aware they are loving.

The Diary of Anne Frank is a well-known account of the life of a young Jewish girl who was hidden with her family by Christians during the Nazi occupation. After the war, when the book became famous. The Christians in the town who saved the Jewish people were asked about their heroism. They responded, “What heroism? We just did what anyone would.” They didn’t’ experience it as being brave, they just had developed the virtue of goodness until it became second nature to them. They could not imagine how decent people would act in any other way.  

When a person is honest, it never occurs to them to cheat. They couldn’t imagine how a person would be happy if they got ahead of another though deception. When a person is faithful, it never occurs to them to have an affair, since their orientation of life is to their spouse. When we love God, the thought of not going to church just doesn’t appeal to us. It is part of our nature to be in God’s house. Our love for God is just part of who we are.

What we need in the church is not more people feeling love, or even acting loving, but more people who habitually love God and others. This may seem unnatural at first, but only at first. Once we have developed the practice of loving, we will naturally do the loving thing even if they don’t feel like it.

The habit of love develops in several areas.

Emotionally, it involves the development of empathy or affection of others. Part of learning to love people is learning to like them as well. Think about coffee. No one naturally likes coffee. It as an acquired taste. But once it is acquired, then there’s nothing like a sweet cup of coffee in the morning. If we can learn to like coffee, then we can learn to like people who we are not naturally attracted to. There are few people in the world that we cannot learn to like or at least tolerate. And while empathy comes more naturally to some or others, there is no one that we cannot learn to at least emotionally appreciate.

In the choices, love is the habit of putting other people’s good above our own. This element of love involves trust, because it means we trust that God is looking out for our own interests while we look out for others. We don’t change that choice when we get frustrated or anxious, and say we made a mistake, without denying God’s provision at the same time.

This is particularly true in marriage. Once we have taken a vow before God, then the only way to love God is to keep that vow. We stay married in spite of how we feel. We have made a vow and the loving thing to do is to keep the promise we made.

In action, Love means doing what is best for others. That doesn’t mean doing what feels best to others, but what actually moves them forward towards flourishing. Sometimes that means making the person we love mad. We don’t love so we can be liked, but because God want us to seek their highest good.  It is not loving to let a leech continue to leech off people, nor is it loving to conceal another’s crimes. Sometimes love means letting a person walk away from you and never return.

“God is love.” God’s thoughts, actions, and feelings are bent in our direction. Sometimes we make him mad. Sometimes we displease Him. But this changes nothing. He still loves us, and is bending in our direction. Loving God is the same-- bending all we are in His direction.

One day I came back to my office after vacation. There on the ceiling I spotted a mushroom growing out of a spot of mildew. The mushroom had grown in a “u” shape, with the head up against the ceiling. Before I knocked it down, I asked myself why the mushroom didn’t grow straight down. There was something in the DNA of mushrooms that bend them into growing always upward. The mushroom didn’t think about it, it just grew that way. 

Love is just the same. We don’t think about it.  We just bend that way. 

Test the Spirits -- I John 4: 1-6

My roommate was a musician. Sometimes he would say, “The Lord gave me this song.”  I never could understand why, if the Lord gave him that song, it wasn’t so dull and repetitive. Surely the Lord could have given him a better song.

We should not confuse our voice with God’s voice. The Bible teaches that our reason, intellect, will, emotions, and even the impressions in our mind are affected by our sinful nature. There is still a lot of good in us, but it can’t save us completely from making mistakes or doing wrong.

The early church believed God spoke to them through apostles, teachers, and prophets. The apostles were with Jesus. Teachers taught the Bible and the words of the apostles. Prophets listened to God and spoke what God spoke to them. The apostles died out, but they left their words, so the teachers kept teaching it. Prophets and teachers remained. They spoke as the thought they heard from God, but original sin tainted what they said, and they could be wrong. This was the reason that they usually spoke in twos or three, and not alone. 

There was another problem, too.  False prophets and teachers started churches and ministries aimed at deception. They came among the flock looking for money, power, and sex. They used their influence to take what they wanted from the flock.

We still have the same problem today. This is why John wrote, “Believe not every Spirit but test the Spirits, to see whether they are from God.”

We use another word for testing the Spirits. We call it critical thinking.

Testing the spirits is not something we do by praying really hard. It is what we do when we hold up a subjective impression or proposed action against the objective reality of what God has already said.

We call the Bible the Canon. Canon means a plumb line, something we use to test the straightness of a wall. To test the Spirit, we don’t use feelings; we use our brain. We employ the same critical thinking we use to test everything else in our lives.

Suppose you buy a car. You don’t walk across a car lot praying for discernment. If you are smart, you will do your homework, and check out the gas mileage and resale values. We use our brains to test our hunches. We use critical thinking to test what car we buy, what food we eat, and where we go on vacation. It seems ridiculous not to. Why shouldn’t we also use critical thinking when it comes to finding God’s will in our lives about spiritual matters?

God may speak to our hearts through intuition, or He may not. But He has already spoken to us in two places.  First through the Bible. The authority of the Bible in our lives come from the authority of Jesus. Jesus gave the words of the Gospel. His disciples faithfully wrote them down. He promised that the Holy Spirit would lead the apostles to write down more. He also believed the Old Testament, saying not one dot of an “I” or cross of a “T” of revelation would disappear until it was no longer useful, but fulfilled in the Kingdom of God.  It provides the source of our knowledge for this world.

 Along with the Bible, He speaks through the person and work of Jesus. If you want to know how you ought to behave, then look at Jesus. If there’s something in your life that doesn’t match with Jesus, then you should change. Jesus is the model for our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. 

There’s more to believing that Jesus came in the flesh than just obeying Him. We also should believe in who he was and what He came to do. He is God’s only begotten Son who died for our sins. Faith in Him is the only way of salvation. 

False prophets with either add to or subtract from this. They either say, “You don’t really need Jesus. All you have to do is work hard and go to my church.” Or they add to the message by saying, “You need to believe in Jesus, be baptized, go to my church, have this experience, tithe, live a perfect life, etc. etc.” By the time they get through adding to what you need to be a believer, no one can be saved!

The Word and Jesus inform our decision making, and enable us to tell truth from error. What about questions such as who we should marry, what job we should take, or what church we should join? For those questions God expects to use critical thinking and our own intuition, informed by the Word of God and the person of Christ.

There are many people who would willingly and joyfully play the prophet in your life. They will freely give you the answers to all your questions. But they don’t know you, or the Spirit.  They give you advice, but they steal something from you while they are giving it. They are stealing your ability to think critically. They do not help you see the truth. They give you the truth—or at least, their version of it. In return, they gain a disciple to themselves.

There are also deceptive voices in your head, ready to give you the wrong answers.  A young man sees a pretty girl and something inside says, “She’s God’s will for you!” But is it right, or is it our own feelings? It’s our own feelings. 

That doesn’t mean its’ wrong. Just because our feelings or intuitions are not from God doesn’t mean they are wrong. God’s will is not a guessing game where there is only one right answer and everything else is wrong. God allows us freedom to create our own life, as long as our lives are in accordance with His word in Christ. If we make a very wrong answer, then He will let us know. If we make a mistake, he will correct us. But our intuition and feelings are not God’s voice. God’s voice comes from outside our heads, not inside it. It comes from Jesus and the Word of God, not from our personal intuition.

God uses our fallible and fallen flesh to reveal His good and perfect will, but it is still not to be trusted by itself. This is not unusual for Him. He spoke to Moses through the burning bush. He spoke to Baal though the mouth of a jackass, but that doesn’t mean the next time we have a spiritual question we should start listening to bushes and jackasses. We should trust the perfect Word, not imperfect feelings.

Jesus has come in the flesh. Divinity had taken on mortality. In this, He has shown us that God can reveal Himself to us through mortal means. Because He has come in the flesh, we can see Jesus through the means of flesh—through sound judgment and common sense. The problem with it is not that we don’t trust our minds, but we don’t trust them enough.

Philip Cary in his book Good News for Anxious Christians describes a common situation at Christian colleges. A young man believes it is God’s will that a girl he’s dating marries him. But the girl feels that it is God’s will that they should break up. Who’s right?  Cary says the young man is just being silly. Nowhere in the Word does it say that a particular boy should marry a particular girl, but only that they should marry Christians, and stay together for life. He is listening to his feelings, not to God. But the girl is doing something worse. She can’t say no without saying, “God says no.”  She thinks she has to have a spiritual reason for saying “no”—that her own judgment is not good enough. Unable to muster the strength to say what’s really in her heart, she must put it in spiritual terms.

There’s nothing wrong with this girl’s judgment. She just thinks there is. There’s nothing wrong with us deciding as long as that decision is not against the Word. God gave us the responsibility of using our best judgment. We are stewards of our minds. But not using our minds, and learning the skill of critical, rational thinking, as well as listening to our intuition is laziness, and a sin. God called us to serve Him not as puppets but as stewards. Critical thinking is stewardship of the mind.

The problem with most of us is not that we are mentally lazy. We expect God to do to the work of deciding for us. We need to develop sound judgment so we can tell true prophets from false prophets. We do this not based on our feelings, but on God’s Word in Christ.

How do we develop critical thinking? Here are some pointers:

First, know God’s Word. Don’t just think you know the Bible—know it! Read it on a daily basis. Many Christians know what people say about the Bible, but they don’t know the Bible. This makes them easy prey for false prophets, since all a false prophet has to do is quote a lot of Scripture and act like an authority. Don’t be fooled by this. Read it and study it yourself.

Second, study the experts. Study people who actually know what they are talking about. A true expert has devoted himself or herself to a serious theological and academic education. A true expert has the backing to prove what he says. He also has the humility to know what he doesn’t know. A true expert has trusted credentials. He didn’t get his expertise from Wikipedia or from an article he saw on Facebook. He went to school and earned his knowledge though years of study.

Third, ask questions. False prophets hate questions, because questions reveal what they don’t know. People who keep asking questions eventually get answers.

 One caveat though—question your questions. Just because you don’t get answered to your satisfaction doesn’t mean the other guy is wrong. It may mean that you may not understand the answers!  Real experts don’t take it personally when you disagree, but recognize the importance of open discussion and debate.

Fourth, listen to tradition. A friend of mine had once had this discussion with a man handing out religious literature. The man said, “I’ve found the Messiah! I was lost in sin and this man changed my life!  He’s the Son of God! And he’s living right her in Chicago, and his name is______!”

My friend answered.  “I’ve also found the messiah too, and His name is Jesus!  He not only changed my life, but the life of people for two thousand years!  He has stood the test of centuries, and His word has survived.  Tell me, how long has your Messiah been around?”

Tradition isn’t gospel. We can’t always trust the wisdom of the past, but we are bigger fools to casually throw it out. Tradition is how people of the past struggled with what they meant to say, “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” It is the record of Spirit’s work in past generations.

Fifth, don’t take yourself too seriously, but accept your fallibility. Don’t beat yourself up when you get things wrong. We all do. Instead, correct your errors of thinking and go back to studying God’s word.

My mission is not to get you to agree with everything I say, or have you do everything the way I want it. It is to teach you the Word of God, and to get you using your brain. I think I’m right on most things, but I also know I’m surely wrong on some things. Don’t follow me, but to follow the Word of God. 

Jesus Christ has come in fallible flesh. We must use our judgment, formed by the Word of God and the Spirit of God, to see though that veil of flesh and see God’s Son.

How to Have a Peaceful Heart

1 John 3:19-23

By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him;

Recently I saw a reality television show called Hack my Brain. On the show, an ordinary man set a goal of walking a tightrope between two buildings, even though he knew nothing about tightrope walking. To prepare he visited a bevy of brain scientists who worked with him on overcoming his fear and anxiety. 

One such expert was a Zen master. He asked him to get on his knees and bow low in meditation. While he was meditating, the master took a board and whacked him across the back. He howled in pain. Then he told him to set his mind in stillness. To accept the pain, and not to run from it. He hit him again. It still hurt, but he did not move. The stillness of his mind did not take the pain away, but it took his mind away from the pain. This time the man did not flinch. He knew the pain was only temporary, and he was able to accept the pain as temporary.

We Christians do not practice that kind of meditation, but we should recognize the temporary nature of our pain. God is in control. If we have peace with God, then we need not panic. Anxiety and panic magnifies every blow that life brings upon us. But our assurance must be in the truth. It isn’t our ability to cope, but God’s ability to deliver that gives Christians the freedom from fear. Peace with God is having the peace to accept what life offers, whether it is good or bad, as being part of God’s will for us. It is an acceptance of the reality of God’s provision.  

We all have problems, but some people cope better than others. If we lose a limb or a loved one we grieve, but in time we can go on to survive, grow, and even thrive. But without hope for something better the pain of our lives will be magnified many times over. We may lose our job, yet we know that we are in God’s hands, and we know that we can find another job. But if we don’t believe it we can fall apart. 

Our well being requires that we have a sense of purpose and direction. With a sense of purpose, we can learn to live with just about anything, but without it our lives fall into depression, anxiety and despair. Only when we have a spiritual foundation to our lives can we have emotional and physical rest.

If we are of the truth as John was, then we will have an assured heart. Peace with God is the assurance in our heart that God is with us, and is working in all things for our benefit. Inner peace with God is not the absence of grief and trouble, but the recognition of inner stillness that comes from knowing we are being kept in God’s hands. We cannot keep bad things from happening to us, but it is the acceptance of what life dishes out. This acceptance means we are not deterred. We can survive our pain and go forward in time.  

What if we don’t have peace with God? Then we react to difficulty in our lives in one of three ways. The first way is to panic, the second is to blame others, and the third is to justify our false behavior.

But do we have peace with God? That’s the question! Are we really on God’s side, or do we just think He’s there. 

We are all guilty of doing things that God does not approve. We’ve been unfaithful to him and to others. We’ve been idolaters, seeking the wrong things. There is no exceptions to this. 

In Carl Menninger’s book Whatever Became of Sin, Menninger writes of a street preacher who walked down the street shouting out to everyone who passed, “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” As two men passed, they turned to each other and said, “How did he know?”  He knows because God knows the truth. We are all sinners. Every one of us. In the words of the Book of Common Worship,  “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.”  We know we are sinners, if we aren’t we are lying to ourselves.

Sin causes separation from God. Because we are sinners we cannot have that peace and assurance we need when trouble comes upon us. We think God is helping, but we wonder if we deserve His help, or we wonder if He is there at all. 

How do you know that God is on your side, and that you can have peace with God? John addresses this issue next in his letter.

“For whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything.”

This is John’s way of saying, “If you think you’re bad, then you don’t know the half of it!”

Has your heart ever condemned you? Of course it has. We all know it when we have sinned, but often we cannot accept it if we did, and we know we don’t have peace with God. Without peace with God we cannot be assured when trouble comes that things will be all right. For this reason, we try to avoid our own self-condemnation. We run from it, deny it, try to force ourselves into believing that we are really good people. When our heart condemns us we have a whole list of excuses.

We say, “I’m not so bad. I’ve done good things, too.”  Is doing good sufficient payment for doing bad? How do we know? The BTK killer, a notorious serial killer, was the lay leader in a Lutheran church. Did that excuse his actions?  Al Qaeda does charity work in Muslim countries, does that make Al Qaeda good? How good do you have to be to atone for sins? No, sin is sin, regardless of how much good we do.

We say, “There are plenty of people who are worse.” Somewhere in the world there must be a man who is so bad that he can’t find anyone anywhere worse than him. This person has a great advantage over the average person in getting peace with God, since he can’t find anyone else to point at who is worse. He has no choice but to repent. The rest of us seem to take perverse pride in finding someone worse than ourselves, because it makes us feel so much better. This excuse doesn’t work with God.

I once took a course on juvenile delinquency.  The book told of a man who was called down to the police station, because his son was caught stealing cars. He said, “My son is a good boy. Sure he’s stolen cars, but he’s never stripped one in his life!”  We can always find something worse than what we’ve done, but that doesn’t minimize the damage that our sins have done.

Or we say, “I couldn’t help myself.” Of course you can! AA is fond of saying that alcoholism is a disease of the mind, not the elbow. Nothing forces us to bend the elbow to put a drink to our mouths. We do it with our own free will. We can stop any time we want, we just don’t want to.

If we left it here, then we might just think that having peace with God was a question of owning up to our responsibilities, and showing will power. But John doesn’t leave it there. Instead he goes one step farther in the condemnation that we are willing to go. God knows you better than you know yourself. He sees not only what our heart sees and denies, but he sees the greater sins that are still hidden within too. Growing in faith and knowledge doesn’t make you feel better about yourself. Quite the contrary, the more we grow in faith, the more we become aware of how bad you are. 

When my parents were young, they didn’t know smoking was bad for you. Later, they found that this seemingly innocent habit was deadly. My ancestors never knew that racism and slavery were wrong. They may have tried to follow Jesus, and avoid the sins they knew, but they fell victim to the sins they did not know. But God was greater than their hearts and knew it all along. 

You are not a good person—you are only slightly less sinful than others. Arguing about who is the most righteous is like a herd of pigs rolling in a sty arguing about which is less dirty. We are all sinners, but even so, we can still have peace with God. Listen to what John says next.

“Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God.”

God knows all your sins, but He loves you anyway. We can’t know everything, but we can follow the light we have. You will never be perfect, but you don’t have to be. Just deal with sin in the light you have. Leave the rest to God. Christ died for all our sins—past, present and future--so we can walk in peace with God. When you find something wrong in your life deal with it right away and be forgiven.  Trying to hold on to sin, or denying its existence just makes it worse. 

Have you ever found a roach on your kitchen counter? What did you do? You had a choice. You could call an exterminator, roach bomb your kitchen, or you could pretend you didn’t see it, and say to yourself, “I’m a good housekeeper. I don’t have roaches,” or “It’s just one little roach. What harm could it do?” If you don’t act, that one roach will probably invite hundreds of his friends to join him.

We have to deal with sin in our lives if we want peace with God. The proud, the lazy, the self-deniers, and the blamers condemn themselves to a life of lies, while protecting their false self-image. But the person who accepts their own vulnerability and culpability may grow in faith and peace with God.

And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. Whoever keeps his commandments abides in him, and he in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us.”

Peace with God comes through faith in God’s forgiveness. God’s Spirit will help us discern right from wrong. When we know what is right, we do right. When we know we’ve done wrong, we seek forgiveness. God’s love covers all our mistakes, all our weakness, and all our sins. His grace is sufficient to give us the peace we need.

One of my friends lost two of his children in a car accident. Few things produce more sadness than the loss of a child. Yet he testifies to how God’s peace came on him, and comforted him in that loss.

Does he cry? Of course--he cried buckets. Did he get instant relief? Of course not. He had many dark nights of sorrow. But in the end, he came through and survived. Christ can give you peace in your darkest times. He doesn’t take you away from pain and suffering, but He gives us the grace to go forward. 

Loving your Brothers and Sisters -- I John 3: 11-18

In this section, John is showing us what people look like who walk in the light. The way to know who they are is to see whether or not they love each other. John doesn’t say we know them by their love, but by their love for each other.

God wants us to love a lot of people--the lost, the poor, the sick, the suffering, and even our enemies, but this is not the sign of whether we are part of Christ’s body. We should love our fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, children, husbands and wives, but it is our love of other Christians, our brothers, which actually marks us off as His. We can give to charity, work with the homeless, fight for our country’s defense. honor our parents, and give ourselves sacrificially for our children, but so do pagans, Buddhists, and Muslims. The thing that makes Christian love different is that Christians love other Christians.

Jesus said in John 13: 35, “By this shall all men know you are my disciples is your love for each other.” John says, “Little children, love each other.”  We should love others outside the church, but if we aren’t loving those inside the church, then we aren’t doing what God commanded.

John understood the reason for this fully. He walked with Jesus for three years, and saw the pressure of crowds of needy people on Jesus and His disciples. If Jesus had given all his time and attention to the crowd, then the disciples would have been crushed under their weight. John was part of a persecuted church, surrounded by a society that hated Jesus. If the apostles did not stick together, then they would have died. In the early church if Christians did not care for Christians, then no one else would. If we want to have an impact on the world we must first provide a place of safety and healing for those who love Jesus, where we can come to rest and heal our wounds.

If the church does not take care for its own, then our impact on the world will be temporary. We may actually be doing harm to the name of Christ, since nothing gives more ammunition to the enemies of the church than burned out and disillusioned Christians.

John addresses two questions—why we love them and how to love.

First, we should love because our true hearts is revealed in the way we treat them.  

John says in 3: 11-12, “For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother's righteous.”

I once heard this statement made three times in the same week. “I love Jesus with all my heart.  It’s Christians I can’t stand.” I know how they feel.  My Christian family is often hard to live with, but then so is my earthly family. Any shepherd will tell you that sheep bite. Christians are also arrogant, disrespectful, gossipy, judgmental, narrow-minded, stubborn, overly sensitive, insensitive, and possessed of every other sinful characteristic we may name.  Christians are sinners, but they are God’s own sinners. They have been chosen to represent Him on earth in spite of their many shortcomings. Christ even calls the church His Body.  How can we disassociate ourselves from Christ’s body on earth and still associate ourselves with Him in heaven? If we can’t love our brothers and sisters who we see all around us, then how do we expect to love Jesus who we can’t see?

Most of our devotion to Jesus is idealistic and theoretical. It’s is not just about going into our prayer closets, nor is it just becoming doers of good deeds on earth. It is also about showing attention to His family around us. If I have a friend who dies, I may not be able to show concern to him, but neither can I turn his son from my door, if I loved him. By honoring those in the church we honor Christ.

John uses the example of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4. Cain was a believer. His theology was straight. Cain worshiped God. He engaged in religious practice. Cain had an important, useful job.  It was not his doctrine or his lack of religious devotion which got Cain in trouble, but his jealousy of his brother. Cain thought that if he eliminated his brother, then God would have to love Him, since there would be no competition. But in the end, it destroyed him and his brother.   

Jealousy, domination, and self-importance is a huge problem in the church. We get jealous that someone else’s church is bigger than ours. We grow impatient with people who don’t see things our way.   

Look around you at the church. Are there people here you don’t like? Are there people here that you wish were not here?  Does the church look to you like a company of strangers with only a few people you really know or admire? Or do you see it as a family that you know and look forward to knowing better?   Jesus wants us to be a family, wholly committed to each other’s benefit.

Second, we love because if we don’t love one another, no one else will. 

1 John 3: 13-14 says, “Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you. We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death.”

The pursuit of the imitation of Jesus is a lonely life. Few people are on that path. Jesus calls it a rocky road through a narrow gate. Most people prefer the broad, smooth road and wide gate of selfishness, sloth, and ease, which leads to hell and destruction.

To pursue the life of Christ is to be a separate people. We will be called fanatics, “Holy Joes.” “Holier-than-thou.” Originally, the term “Christian” was a slur against the followers of Jesus.  But we eventually acknowledged the truth that we are different, and have to be different. 

The world is hostile to people who are as different. 

It’s easier to be different when we have a support group. The church is where you find those people. Our love, acceptance, and concern for each other gives us a safe place to be different.

Many don’t feel loved by the church. This is a tragedy, but it happens. Many of these people wind up leaving the church, sometimes going to another church, but often just leaving organized religion altogether. Sometimes they have good reason for doing so. At least a quarter of all people who leave one church never go to another. Many more just keep moving from one fellowship to another looking for a place where they feel loved. 

 Be we need to be careful here. There are legitimate reasons for leaving one fellowship of Christians for another, but unless we are going out with the blessing of our congregation, then we are hurting others.

Being a part of the local body of a church is a covenant commitment, like marriage. Like marriage, there are always troubles and adjustments. Many churches, like many marriages have communication problems. People get neglected, and other people are favored. This is why we need pastoral care and good leaders who listen to the congregation, as well as committed people who care. We must have open communication between everyone, and a willingness to risk complaint and confrontation. If our husband or wife isn’t all they should be, we don’t just go find another who is more to our liking. Covenant communities like families are safe places because we know that we are not held together by our feelings of the moment. We are held together by the love of Christ and His church. Like a good marriage, this commitment creates a safe place where we can be who we are, without having to pretend to be happy all the time. We can grow, argue, and heal, because we love each other. Our unity doesn’t depend upon how we feel about each other, but upon our commitment to Him. If I’m crabby or unlovable I still want someone who will stick by me. Our vow to Christ is such that we will stay with each other even on our worst day. This means the church can be a safe place to grow, heal, and repent.

Now John looks at how we love our brothers and sisters.

First, we love by recognizing their humanity.

In verse 13, John says that those who hate their brothers and sisters are murderers. That’s harsh! But it’s also true. Hatred, prejudice, and murder are all forms of seeing others as a non-people. Murder begins not with a feeling of animosity towards another, but with a feeling that they do not matter.  Most murders are committed in the midst of a crime that has nothing to do with hatred. The victim is simply in the way, an object to be abused or shoved aside. It’s not about being angry, but about ignoring their humanity. If I don’t think of you as a real person, then I can murder you without remorse.

If we ignore the person sitting beside us in church, then we do not care about them. They are unreal to us. Before we can love, really love, we must get to know them.   

 Second, we love by laying down our lives.

It sounds very heroic to die for each other, but that’s not what John is saying. We don’t die for each other, but we live for each other. We put our own lives on hold long enough to hear what someone else is saying. Are we willing to lay down our opinions to listen to what another thinks? Are we willing to keep our advice to ourselves, and simply listen? Are we willing to lay down our time, to stop long enough to listen? Are we willing to lay down our pride for another, to do things we may feel are beneath us? Are we willing to submit to each other, and do what others think for a change?  Laying down our lives is something we do daily.

Third, we love them by opening up our wallets.

If we see our fellow Christians in need we help. The early church held all things in common. The modern church doesn’t need the title to your car or your house, but you should open your homes and use your car to drive other church members where they need to go. Again, John says, “brothers” the needs of other believers comes first.

Fourth, we love them by feeling their pain.

In verse 17, John uses an interesting Greek word—splankna--which means your guts. Greeks believe that the guts were the center of emotions. If I can hear about your problem and not feel that problem empathetically in your gut, then I don’t know you well enough. If it rolls off me like one more bit of bad news, I have failed to feel for you.

When I worked as a lifeguard, for only one night. I was watching the pool when a friend was swimming laps. He was in the lane near the pool’s edge where I sat reading a book. I heard a quiet splashing in the water. At first I ignored it, since I knew there was only one person and I couldn’t see him. But I looked and my friend was drowning. He had had a cramp. I assumed that because he was all right, and under my nose he could reach the pool edge by himself.  I was wrong.

We Christians seem to think that those who are closest to us in the church can take care of themselves. They can’t we all need the help of others. That’s why we need to love one another. 

Sin and Righteousness -- I John 3: 4-19

The second half of John’s letter focuses on what it means to live as children of the light. The people who live by the light of God do what He does. Those who are not God’s people do not do what he does.  The first group John calls ‘righteous” and the second group he calls “sinners.”

It all seems very simple when we put it in those terms. Good people are righteous and bad people are sinners. But according to the Bible, and according to our own common sense it’s not that simple. Jesus said no one is good but God. The apostle Paul, quoting Psalms 14, says “there is none righteous, no not one.” Is anyone completely unrighteous?  Neither can we say that anyone is a total sinner. Even the worst sinner is capable at times of doing something good. There is a mixture of good and bad in all of us. 

Even so, John is right. His words are divinely inspired just like the rest of the Bible. John isn’t really dividing up the world into good people and bad ones. He is really saying something different. He’s giving us the key to tell good from evil.

People have always pondered what is good and bad. Plato, Aristotle, and the other Greeks all wrote about it. All religions define good and evil, and they have all come to different conclusions.

During most of the last two thousand years, most of our thinking has seen good and bad as whether or not we follow a list of rules for living. These rules given by God or inferred by nature are a list of “do’s” and “don’ts” such as the Ten Commandments in Judaism and Christianity. Behavior makes us good or bad. 

My grandmother had such a list. She once said, “I thank God I never sinned.” Then she thought about it and said, “Well, I did dip snuff!”  She had a list of sinful things that she had learned from childhood. This list included smoking, drinking, cussing, lying, killing, playing hooky from Church, and getting mad in public. Everyone’s grandmother had such a list. If you did them, then you’d go to hell. If you didn’t do them, then you’d go to heaven. This righteousness by obedience making is called “legalism.”  Sin is a violation of divine law. Even a small infraction of divine law is enough to send you to hell. Sin (as John says) is lawlessness. 

On the surface, this seems to be what John is saying, too. Sin is lawlessness. When we break the law, then we suffer the consequences. No one born of God is going to sin.

Today most of our world no longer sees sin as a list of “do’s” and “don’ts.” Instead they believe that good or bad is determined by the situation. This was the idea of Joseph Fletcher, who wrote the book Situation Ethics. Fletcher taught that no behavior was really bad or good in itself, but whatever was the most loving thing to do at the moment was good.  Love defines good or bad behavior. He gives a lot of extreme examples to prove this. If we lie to prevent a murderer from finding his victim, then was it bad to lie to the murderer?  If we shoot a murderer who might kill dozens of people, then does that make the killing good? If the only way a woman could feed her family was to become a prostitute, then is she really sinning?  If we lie, cheat, or steal to accomplish a good end, are those really sins? According to Fletcher, every commandment or rule can and should be broken if love demands it.

Again, you could use John in this passage to support that idea. John says that one is righteous when we love our brothers. Any act committed out of love may be called legal and ethical.

This is the way our society defines good and bad. Anything is good as long as you can make a case that it was the loving thing to do. People aren’t good or bad, just loving or not loving. This has created a huge blurring of the difference between good and bad. On television it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys any more. It’s gone so far that whenever we watch some drama on television, we know that whoever appears to be a good guy at the beginning of the show will wind up being the villain at the end. So who’s right—is being “good” all about the law, or is it all about love? Is it okay for Robin Hood to steal from the rich so he can give to the poor? Is it okay for Batman to beat people up, if he only beats up the “bad guys”?

So who’s right—are the legalists right, or are the situationalists?  Is Grandma right or is television right?

This isn’t a small question, but one that is fundamental to our society and our very existence.  Should our president obey the law of the land, or should he ignore laws which are not in the interest of the greater good?  If a politician cheats in an election, is he really sinning if his opponent is “evil”?  If so, who’s to say what constitutes an evil opponent?

The Bible does not support either the legalists or the situationalists. John as a Jew supports the morality of the Old Testament law. We need a list of rules that we should or should not do. Some things like lying, cheating, stealing, killing, and adultery are fundamentally wrong. All those things your grandmother said are right and wrong are still true. 

The problem with the situationalist way of thinking is that we are not smart enough to know what the loving thing to do is. Our feelings are sinful and misleading. Suppose a woman is bored with life and marriage. She blames her husband for it, whether he’s guilty or not. He doesn’t give her “enough” attention. (Remember she’s the one who defines what “enough” is) Then along comes a man who is interesting and fascinating, who says to her that her husband doesn’t deserve her, but that he really needs and wants her. She rationalizes that her husband doesn’t need her, but that this man does. Soon she is in an adulterous relationship and she is telling herself that it’s okay, since the new man needs her more than the old one ever did. Her feelings have convinced her that this is love, so she feels ethically bound to commit the sin of adultery.

Or imagine a man who feels that his children are deprived. By “deprived’ he means that they can’t afford all the things his neighbor has like flat screen giant televisions, computer games, etc. He tells himself his children “deserves” these things as much as his neighbor does. So he steals from his neighbor, telling himself that it is out of “love” for his children. 

You may be saying that these people are lying to themselves, and you’d be right. But that’s the problem with situational ethics, because it gives us permission and incentive to lie to ourselves as much as we want. There is no distinction between lies and truth. “Love” is whatever we want it to be.

Righteousness to John is defined by God, not by us. Righteousness is not a law or a situation. It’s a direction. It’s a who, and not a what. We are either going towards God, following His direction, or we are going away from Him, following our own.    

Your grandmother was right. There really is a list of good and a bad actions. But we live in a fallen world, and sometimes we must choose the lesser of the two wrongs. That doesn’t make the wrong right.  Wrongs are bad for us, and good deeds will still be good. If we keep doing bad things, then it will kill us. But if we are born of God, then we will continue to become both more loving, and in line with God’s law. 

Sin is like a toxic substance in our food. If we keep eating poison it will eventually kill us. But it may not be possible to avoid all sin. But the person who follows God’s commands purifies himself or herself from sin. The person tries to stay away from as much of it as possible. They are on a quest to remove every toxic thought, idea, action, or feeling from his or her body and become pure. We can’t avoid all sin, but we can try. We are not satisfied with the lesser of two evils. But will seek to avoid toxic sins altogether. There are some things that are wrong and harmful to us in our relationship with God, others, and ourselves, even if they appear to be unavoidable at the time.

Violence is an absolute evil. There are no “good” acts of violence, even if some acts are sometimes necessary. General Sherman was right when he said, “War is pure hell.”  I have known men who have been haunted their whole lives over things they have done in a “good” war. It nearly destroyed their souls, as they destroyed the lives of others. These men would be the first to tell you that violence is bad, and only a fool would ever resort to violence and think it is a good thing. Lying may be necessary in extreme cases, but it is still destructive. When we engage in evil behavior, it still leaves a mark.

The question for us is this==when we have done evil things what can we do to erase that mark? What can wash away the effects of our bad choices and behavior? John tells us in verse 5, “You know that he appeared to take away sins, and in him there is no sin.” Jesus came to wash away our sins.

We cannot live a righteous life. But there is someone who can erase the sin in our lives. Jesus died so we can be cleansed from all sin. The sins we did willfully for selfish and self-seeking reasons, those we did in deception which seemed at the moment the right thing to do, those we did ignorantly when we just didn’t know right from wrong, and even those we do out of seeming necessity when we weren’t sure we had any other choice. To all of them, Jesus says, “I forgive you. Go and sin no more.”  Instead of worrying about the sins of our past, Jesus want us to focus on following him in the future. Will you accept His forgiveness of the past and follow Him, or will you continue to go your own willful way, ignoring Him?

That is the choice we all must make. 

How to Spot an Antichrist -- I John 2: 18-29

John, at the beginning of this letter writes, “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.”  Light shines from the throne of God. All living things face that light and bask in that light. As we behold His face, we shine that light out to others. As long as we face Him, we continually transmit that light to the world.

When we look away from Christ and look to the world, we are poor transmitters of that light. We become spotty, dirty reflectors of that light. Our sins prevent people from seeing Jesus through us.

In our country there has been a great falling away from the church. This is not because the church hasn’t been trying. It’s largely because we haven’t been reflectors of Jesus. We’ve not shown the real Jesus to the world. Our leaders have been caught in scandal, we’ve pursued political power and social prestige instead of godliness. People have had a taste something that they presume to be Christianity, but is really a watered down version of it.

When people don’t transmit God’s light, but they get in the way of it, John calls them “antichrist.”   The word “antichrist” in Greek doesn’t mean “against Christ” or “opposed to Christ” but someone who takes the place of Christ, and obscures who He really is. An antichrist is someone who stands in the way of Christ, like a big person in a crowd who obscures our view. An antichrist is a false interpreter of Christ, who claims to be interpreting Christ to the world, but is really just speaking his or her own words. A false leader or false interpreter of the Word is antichrist. Anyone who wants people to follow them, instead of following Christ is what John calls antichrist.

Such people are all around us, but how do we know them? There are so many people demanding our attention and allegiance that it’s hard for us to know who really deserves to be followed. So in this passage John gives instructions to help us make such a determination. Specifically, he gives us four signs to watch for to spot a teacher who will lead us astray.

  

1.  False teachers deny the people of Christ. 

 John writes in verses 19 and 20,

 They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us. But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge.

Christians do not have to always agree. Disagreement is a sign of a healthy church. It means that people are not just taking what is said at face value, but are using their brains to search for God’s truth. There are issues on which the church must agree, but there are many more issues on which we disagree.

False teachers seek more than disagreement though, because they desire separation. We may agree to disagree, but false teachers use minor disagreements to tear the church apart. 

The Jehovah’s Witnesses argue that Jesus was crucified on a pole not a cross. The Way International, another cult, argues that there were five crosses on Calvary, not three. Seventh Day Adventists argue that Saturday, not Sunday, is the real Sabbath. Some Churches of Christ believe that churches should only be named the Church of Christ.  Jesus Only Pentecostals believe that baptism must be done in the name of Jesus Only, and not in the Father Son and Holy Spirit. If all of these people were right, (and I don’t believe any of them are) what difference would it make before God?  These are minor, frivolous issues. Far more serious in God’s eyes is whether or not we deny God’s people and separate from those we love. To denounce the rest of the church over minor issues is like seeking a divorce, because we can’t agree on the design of the wallpaper in the kitchen!

John says we have an anointing from the Holy One—the Holy Spirit.  The church, the Body of Christ, is the abode of the Spirit. To deny the reality of the Church on earth is to deny the reality of God on earth.

In one of my classes I gave an assignment to trace the roots of their local church. One girl wrote that Jesus Christ started the church, but it was lost for two thousand years until twenty years ago when her pastor restarted the true church, and Christ’s church was reborn. I marveled at the arrogance of this--that Jesus would allow His church to disappear so that people would be deceived into thinking they were following Him when they were only going to hell, even though Jesus declared that the gates of hell would not prevail against His church. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which denies the Body of Christ and the Spirit of Christ.

2.       False teachers deny the person of Christ.  

Verses 21-25:

I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth. Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also. Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that he made to us — eternal life.

The great truth that unites the church is that Jesus is God, the Son, and not just the Son of God. For the Jehovah’s Witnesses, he is a lesser god, the same as the archangel Michael. For the Mormons, he is the physical son of God, and Satan was his brother. For the liberal church, Jesus is just an enlightened man. For the Christian Science practitioner, he is a disembodied Spirit. Yet Jesus made in John 8 when He said, “Before there was Abraham, I am.”  I AM is the literal translation of Jehovah. He accepted worship, He told his Disciples to pray to Him. He said, “I and the Father are One.”  For hundreds of years, the church debated this, struggled with this, but came to a unanimous decision that this in fact was what Jesus is.

Christians disagree about many issues, but we all agree on the basics. Those basics center on Jesus, His person, life, death, and resurrection. False teachers become false in one of two ways.  Either they deny the basics of the faith, or they add to those basics with their own rules or doctrines.

Getting close to Jesus means study. There is no way around this. If you want to understand Jesus, you have to read the Bible, and not only the Bible, but what people have thought about the Bible. You should read this critically, but you must become involved in seeking to understand just who Jesus is.  Any sermon, any teaching that does not include Jesus Christ is not Christian teaching. Any message which may be preached by a Muslim or Jew is not Christian. Christ is the center of all we teach and all we do.

3.  False teachers deny the presence of Christ. 

John continues in 25-27:

And this is the promise that he made to us — eternal life. I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you. But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything—and is true and is no lie, just as it has taught you—abide in him.

Knowing Christ is not enough. We must also live in Christ. This means spending our time, energy, and power seeking to be united with Him.

In school, students often come to class not realizing what they are doing in higher education. They assume all they need to do is “learn stuff.”  By that they mean there is a body of knowledge they need to memorize. That’s fine for elementary education, but not for higher education. Higher education is all about applying stuff, analyzing stuff, synthesizing stuff with other stuff, and being able to restate and refine stuff, so that it becomes part of us.  They swallow information the way we would swallow a rock—we don’t digest it; it just goes right through. 

Jesus is a living person with whom we have a relationship. We have to come to know him with our heart as well as our head. We must talk to Him in prayer, seek Him as our friend and companion, and imitate His Lifestyle.

False teachers see Jesus as a packet of information that they alone possess. They have no concern whether Jesus lives in his followers, but they seek to have people depend on their knowledge. But Jesus wants us all to abide in Him. A preacher is not someone who goes up on a mountaintop to discover God, so that He can come down and lead the people. He lives among the people, constantly training them to go up on the mountaintop, and discover God for themselves. We are all children of God and responsible for discovering the Father for ourselves. 

4. False Teachers deny the practice of Christ. 

John ends the chapter in 28-29:

And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming. If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of him.

Antichrists put their will above God’s will.  They do not look to God, but to themselves for guidance. They may say Jesus is Lord, but they practice something else.

Language leads us to hypocrisy. We are comfortable saying, “Jesus is Lord” because “Lord” is an archaic word we no longer use in common language. Can we say, “Jesus is Boss”, or “I must do whatever Jesus tells me to do”?  Making Jesus Lord means doing what He says---all of what He says, and not just a part.

False teachers lift one part of Christ’s commands and lift them above the others. They may lift up personal holiness and deny love, or else do it the other way around. They may lift up the life of personal prayer, and deny the commands to go out among people. They may lift up the commands to be faithful to the church, but deny the need to constantly renew and reform it. There are antichrists who are innovators and traditionalists, activists, and separatists, emotionalists, and intellectualists. When really Jesus is commanding us to do all. 

Let’s summarize like this. A true reflector of the Light is one who love Jesus with all his heart, mind soul and strength, and loves God’s people the same way. He follows Jesus, but not alone. He knows he needs the others, and he loves the others as well. In all ways, he bows his knee to the Christ, and worships Him alone. 

Like the World -- But Love God - 1 John 2: 15-17

John, the apostle writes about getting real with God. But first we must make a choice. Either we look to God revealed in Christ, or we look to something in this world.  Jesus said in Matthew 6: 24, "No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”  Mammon is all the peace, security, pleasure, and influence that money can buy or assist in receiving. It is the world and all we know in this world. 

Loving God requires that we stop loving everything else. This is spiritual marriage. The more we try to love God and the world, the more miserable we become. 

Before we go any farther, we should make sure what John is saying. First, what does he mean by “love”?  

There are several words in Greek for love.  The Greek word sturge means “enjoy.”  If I sturge chocolate ice cream, then I prefer it over other kinds of ice cream. Another word is eros, meaning to consume to possess. If I eros ice cream, I want to eat it. John uses the word agape. Agape means to make a choice to pursue it, and to build my life in seeking it. Eros is a decision to pursue. I may like ice cream and even desire to eat it, but until I’m willing to break my diet for the sake of ice cream, then I don’t love it. I like ice cream but I love health more. 

God doesn’t say we shouldn’t “like” the world. But worldly enjoyment is best found not by pursuit but by accident. We don’t seek the beauty of a sunset—it is just there. Everything God has made in this world has an element of joy and pleasure about it. To love the world is to make a choice to devote our lives to the pursuit of worldly things. If we do not pursue it, then pleasure will come. If we pursue satisfaction in worldly things, then the pleasure will elude us.  

The second word we must define is “world”—cosmos in Greek. Watchman Nee wrote that “world” has three meanings.

The third definition of cosmos is the fallen world—the world controlled by Satan.

Second, it is all the material things-- not just sex and money, but also bunnies, butterflies, and ice cream.

 Third, the “world” is also the worldwide social network, which is any and all human organizations and associations, including countries, schools, sports teams, and clubs as well as churches, families, and Facebook friends.  Even an organization such as the church or a Christian ministry is still part of the world. Churches and families can become idols, too, if they are loved more than God. Anything we exalt above God and serve above God is the world. 

John doesn’t just say don’t love the evil world. Don’t love the good world, either. Satan doesn’t tempt us only with evil, but with good. He wants us to abandon the greater good for the lesser good. In this way, choice by choice, he tempts us progressively with difficult choices that eventually lead us to evil.

We see this in Luke 9: 57-61. Three men wanted to follow Jesus. One turned back when he found out that Jesus had no home, and another turned back to bury his father. The last man turned back to say goodbye to his parents. Jesus did not wait. There’s nothing wrong with having a home, burying your dad or kissing your mother, but all of them are worldly concerns, and God is greater than all. These three picked good things, but they lost the best.

Satan will if he can lead us away from prayer by suggesting that our prayer time would be better spent packing school lunches or walking the dog. He tempts us off our diets not with candy, but with the birthday cake of a dear friend. Later, it gets easier for us to abandon our resolve for worse reasons, but only after we’ve abandon it for some seemingly “good” thing. 

Family can come between you and God.  Your house, your car, your job, your lawn, and even the good things you do for others can come between you and God, because they are all part of the world. Everything that touches your life may become an idol if you love it too much.

Enjoy the world, but just don’t love it. 

Look at another word in verse 16—“desire” or in Greek epithumia. “Lust” is really more accurate. Thumia means “desire.” With the prefix epi it is a strong or overwhelming desire.  We enjoy the things of this world, but when we start following them, then we come under their spell, and lust after them.  At some point, this becomes an overwhelming desire, and we cannot break away from them without great effort and the help of the Holy Spirit.

 I watched a show where two men were testing how to escape from quicksand. Quicksand is ordinary sand, but underneath the ground there is surging water. When you step on it, the sand pushes into the water, liquefies, and creates a suction that pulls you in.

To test this, they filled a large vat filled with sand and put hoses near the bottom, with a run off system for the liquid sand. One of them stood on top. At first, the sand supported him well. But when they turned on the water he immediately sank to his knees, then his hips and finally to his waist. He was trapped. They brought in a crane and tried to pull him out, but not even a crane could move him. The force required to move him would break his legs.

 John says that the world is passing away. He does not mean that it is the end of the world, but that the world underneath its calm exterior is falling apart. Underneath the surface, the world is passing away. When we put our love in worldly things, then we commit to a dying system. We get sucked into it, and it takes us down with it.  At some point, it becomes almost impossible to free ourselves from the downward pull of worldliness. Only by letting go do we have the strength to break the suction into the world.

  “For all that is in the world— the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

John classifies worldly love into three categories. First, there is the “lust of the flesh”—things our body physically craves. These include food, drugs, alcohol, comfort, shelter, and sex. We crave a physical feeling and will do anything to get it. Then there is the “lust of the eyes”—those are the things that give pleasure from watching. These include television, pornography, video games, sports, and the endless search for novelty. It even includes books and learning and the desire to discover the secrets of others. Gossips and busybodies are caught up in the lust of the eyes. Finally, there is the boastful pride of life—this is the insatiable desire for reputation. The desire to be someone important drives our consumer culture. It is this pride that drives us to dominate others.

In Philippians 2, Paul says that Jesus, being God did not act as if he were God, but humbled Himself, taking the form of a servant. How few of us would be satisfied being an anonymous servant!  Yet Jesus took on that role. 

By humbling Himself, Jesus never became trapped in pride and worldliness. It is impossible for worldly pride and ambition to ruin the lives of people who really don’t care.  All that mattered to Jesus was that He did the will of His father, not that He looked good in the eyes or the world, or received any reward for it.  The more we love the Father, then the less appeal the world will have for us.

Jesus is the author and finisher of our faith. Trusting in Him is the most important thing in the world. But the first step to coming to Jesus is to let go of the world, and not just the bad things in the world, but the good things as well.  We must let go of our pride, self-assurance, egotism, lusts, desires, and false hopes in deliverance through worldly things and methods. 

There’s a story about a man who fell off a building. Halfway down, he grabbed hold of a flagpole sticking out of the side of the building.  He shouted to the heavens, “Help, is there anyone up there?”

God answered from heaven. “Yes son. Do you trust me?”

“Yes, Lord.”

“Then let go of the pole.”
“Help!” he cried. “Is there anyone else there?
That’s us. We must let go of what we know and trust a God we cannot see. Satan doesn’t need bad things to tempt us away from God if good things can work as well. Jesus will save us, but first we must let go.

 “Do not love the world, or the things of the world. If we love the world, the love of the Father is not in us.”