|
Walking in the Light through Love 1 John 2:7-11 December 14, 2002
Open your Bibles this morning to the book of 1 John, chapter two, verses 7 through 11. 1 John 2:7-11. We come this morning to this very crucial passage of 1 John, in which John begins to exhort and teach his readers about the importance of love. It is a subject that John will revisit time and time again in this letter. He discusses it here in these verses, then again in chapter 3, verses 11 through 18, then verses 23 and 24 of that same chapter, then again in chapter four verses 7 through chapter five, verse five. Love is a major theme of 1 John, and especially love for other believers. John is very concerned that those who are in Christ, those who have been forgiven of their sins and received the mercy of God, become a family, a body, in which love is shown in the same way that love was shown to us. John is concerned that doctrine does not divorce itself from practical, daily living. John is most certainly concerned about doctrine, and that’s why he writes about such things as the atonement, the antichrist, false teaching, idols, and the deity and humanity of Christ. But John is also concerned that the truths he so dearly loves about God, the doctrine, produce fruit. He does not want the body of Christ, the church, to become an academic institution, but a loving, caring, sincere family where each member is intimately and genuinely concerned about the others. He wants to see a church where truth and living co-exist, and so he spends much of his letter talking about the importance of loving one another. This is no doubt due to the profound influence Jesus must have had upon John. He must have recalled Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:44, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” The words of Jesus, proclaiming the second greatest commandment in Matthew 22:39, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” were still ringing in John’s ears. He certainly remembered the actions of Jesus in the upper room in John 13:1, where John himself wrote under the influence of the Holy Spirit, “Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end,” or “loved them to the outer limit.” And he remembered Jesus, the God who created the world, getting down and washing his feet at the table. The very Son of God, washing John’s feet, and the other disciples’ feet, including Judas, who would betray Him in a matter of hours. The importance of love could not have been stated more strongly than after this foot-washing when Jesus said in John 13:34-35, “Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” The love of Christ so impressed John that he was overwhelmed. He couldn’t believe that the Son of God could love him, a dirty, filthy, sinner, and overwhelmed that Jesus loved him, John called himself with amazement, “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” John felt the love of Christ, and he knew the importance of love, and he expends a great amount of time and energy to write about love. Church history tells us that when John was old and unable to walk, members of the church where he lived would pick him up and carry him to the meeting place of the church, the house or wherever they met, so that John could give the sermon for that Sunday morning. On the way to the worship time, John was often heard telling those with whom he was speaking, “Little children, love one another.” And, in fact, the early church did love one another. A secular historian notes that the unbelievers of the first century were astonished by the love the Christians had one for another. But, tragically, looking back at the fourth century, he also notes this, “The enmity of the Christians toward each other [by the fourth century] surpassed the fury of savage beasts against man.” Something had changed from the first century to the fourth century. Controversies began to arise in the church, and instead of those with differing views treating one another with love, factions began to develop, and with factions came anger and hatred, so much so that by the time of the Reformation in the 16th century those who named the name of Jesus Christ were killing each other over doctrinal disputes and differences. This is not to downplay the importance of doctrinal correctness and being biblical in our theology. It is important that our lives be saturated with God-honoring, Christ-exalting, true, correct, biblical theology. But our theology, no matter how orthodox it may appear to be, is never biblical, God-honoring, or Christ-exalting if it does not result in love, first for the God of the Bible, second for our brothers in Christ, and third for those who are lost. And John knew this, and living in the Greek society of his day which so prized academic and intellectual knowledge and looked down on holiness and practical application, John had to spend a lot of time talking about the fruit of orthodox, biblical doctrine, namely, love. Let’s read the passage. Read text. John, now, comes to this point in his letter, and introduces the subject of love. And he does it by first reminding his readers that he is not saying anything new. He is not giving them any new law or commandment; rather, he is writing to them an old commandment which they have had from the beginning. He begins with the old commandment.
The Old Commandment (v. 7)
He begins his section on love by first reminding his readers of his love for them. He calls them, “beloved,” and this is the first of many times he will use this term. John does not stand above them as a drill sergeant barking orders at new recruits; rather, he stands alongside them, loving them as his own brothers and sisters, speaking to them out of love, and with love. And he tells them that he is not writing a new commandment, but an old one which they have had from the beginning of their Christian experience. From the time they heard the Gospel of Jesus they have had this commandment. This is nothing novel or new to them. It is not different than what they previously have been told. In fact he tells them that this old commandment is simply the word they have heard. John tells his readers that this is Christianity 101. This is not advanced; it is not complicated. They already know this lesson. What is the word they have heard? It is simply the truth about Jesus Christ. It is the message from chapter 1 verse 5. “God is light!” God is absolutely holy without any darkness at all, and all of the implications that flow from this central truth about God, one of which is found in Matthew 22:37, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” That is the greatest commandment, Jesus tells us, in verse 38 of Matthew 22. Failure to keep this command is enough to condemn anyone. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 16:22, “If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed.” Since this is the greatest commandment, John tells us in chapter 2 of 1 John, verses 3-6, that obedience to God’s commands demonstrates that we love God. In fact, perfect obedience shows that the love of God has been perfected in us. If we loved God perfectly, we would perfectly obey His commandments. Look at 1 John 2:5. In this verse we see this clearly. “If anyone keeps His word, truly in this one the love of God has been perfected.” Let us be careful, however, that we don’t see in this verse room for legalism that would say that keeping God’s commandments is the same thing as loving God. The doing is not the loving. John does not say that keeping the commandments of God is the same thing as loving God. Loving God is not fulfilling a checklist of duties. It is not, as some Jews were teaching in Galatia during the first century, keeping the Law. Loving God is prizing and valuing and treasuring God and all that He is for us in Christ. Obeying God is putting action to that feeling of love that desires and cherishes and longs for and aches for God. And we can measure the reality of our valuing of God by how we treat Him. But don’t confuse loving God and obeying God. Part of obeying God is loving God with our emotions, with our hearts, not just with heartless, legalistic actions. You cannot please God unless you prize God. So this prizing God because He is holy, because He is God, is part of the old commandment. It can be summed up as John does in verse 6 of chapter 2, where he writes, “The one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk just as [Jesus] walked.” This is the same thing as saying, “Be holy.” If you say you abide in Christ, you should walk exactly the same way Christ did when He was on earth. John takes this statement in verse 6, and transitions into verse 7 by saying that all of this is nothing new. It is an old commandment. But then in verse 8 he says something that, on the surface, appears to flatly contradict verse 7. He says, “On the other hand, I am writing a new commandment to you.” He introduces here a sense in which the old commandment is also a new commandment.
The New Commandment (v. 8)
We find here in this verse an allusion to Jesus’ words in John 13:34, where He said, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.” John expresses the same thought here that Jesus expressed in the upper room the night of his betrayal. Here is a new commandment. The idea of new here is not new in time, but new in type. John, like Jesus, is not commanding anything new, as in novel or brand new, never heard of before until now. The command itself is old. Yet it is new in form. While the command has been around from the beginning, the form it now takes is different; it is new. How is the command new? What is this new form? The new form it takes is how it has been embodied and demonstrated by God to us in the person of Jesus Christ. In one sense it is an old command, which even the Israelites received when they received the Law. But before Jesus came into the world, human beings had no conception of what it truly meant to love either God or other people. All they had were types and shadows of the truth, but never the full revelation. For this reason, John says that this command is true in Him, in Christ. Because Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners by obeying perfectly the will of the Father, we have an old command given to us in a new form. When we see Jesus Christ we have a new way of looking at an old command. The old way is found in the Law. The old way is found in the sacrifices, the ten commandments, the feasts, and the temple worship system of the Old Testament. This is a shadow; it is one way of looking at the old command. But now the command is true in Him, and we have a new way of seeing it, not just as a list of commands and forms of worship, but as a living, breathing, obedient, loving, bleeding, dying, resurrected, alive again Savior. We have this command lived out before us in the person of Jesus Christ, and in this sense it is new. That is why John can say in verse 6 that we ought to walk as Jesus walked. Jesus perfectly obeyed the Law of God, and He Himself is our righteousness, and He demonstrates for us in a new and profoundly deeper way than ever before the love of God. So this command is true in Christ. But what John is writing to us is also true in us! Not only is it true in Christ, but it also is true in every believer and follower of Jesus Christ. This statement is mind-blowing. How can this be true? We know from experience that we do not perfectly walk as Jesus walked and that the love of God has not been perfected in our hearts yet. We still sin and stumble and disobey God, so how can John say that the new command is true in us? The new command is higher and grander and more unattainable than even the old command because it is so crystal clear and perfectly embodied for us, and yet somehow John says it is true in us? Why does he say that? He tells us in the following phrase that the reason he can say that is “because the darkness is passing away and the true Light is already shining.” What does this mean? How does this make the command true in us? What John is saying here is that in us the new command is true because the darkness that we once lived in is passing away in our lives, while the light, the true light of Jesus Christ, is shining more and more radiantly. These verbs are in the present tense: passing away and shining, and this means that both of these are in process in us. Our lives are not perfect light, and John knows that, because his life wasn’t perfect light either. But, he also knows that day by day the darkness fades as we become more and more like Christ and as we abide in Him. The darkness is passing away because the true Light, which is Jesus Christ, is in us shining. And since Jesus Christ is in us and we are in Him, and the command is true in Him, it is of necessity true in us. Wherever this command is true, the light shines and the darkness is fading or passing away. This command is so new and so wonderful because in the Old Testament they only had a dim light. They did not have the true light shining in their hearts. The believers of the Old Testament did not have the Holy Spirit in them like we do as believers in the New Covenant of God. All they had were the Law and the Prophets. Christ was not in them like He is in us through the Holy Spirit. The people of the Old Testament had the Law, which was a shadow of what was to come, but Christ is the Light itself, the true light. So John says that he is not writing anything new to us. The command to be holy and loving is not new or novel. It is the Gospel message itself and the eternal command of God. Yet at the same time it is new because Christ has embodied it and made it clear and lived it for us, and now He lives in us, dispelling the darkness and bringing us light, and this is all brand new. It was an old promise that is now realized in Christ. Let us thank God that we have the light of Christ shining in us and the darkness, while not yet completely gone in our hearts, is passing away day by day. We have an old command that we now can keep because of Christ in us, our hope of glory. So we have this old command, which is now seen by us in a new way because of Jesus Christ, who is the true light. Christ, the true light, is shining, but the question now arises, who is in the light? Who is in Christ? Who is in the truth? Many people in John’s day claimed to have the light, and they claimed that the light consisted of mere intellectual knowledge and understanding. To them, the light shining in their hearts simply meant having the knowledge in their heads. John, however, wants to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt who has this light shining within them, and who is in the darkness.
The Test of Love (vv. 9-11)
In verse 9 the claim is made, “I am in the light.” We have here a person who claims to be in the light. What is the evidence this person gives of being in the light, and what is the verdict? This person who claims to be in the light lives a life characterized by hate. This is a person who hates as a regular practice. Who does he hate? He hates other Christians. He hates his brother. Brother here is not used in the sense of a physical brother, but of a spiritual brother, a Christian. And John says of this person that he is in the darkness until now. This simply means that this person who claims to be in the light yet hates his fellow Christians has never been in the light at all. He has always been in the darkness and remains in the darkness to the very present moment. In verse 10 we meet a second type of person, and this person is characterized by being one who loves the brothers. He loves other believers. What does it mean to love other believers? In 1 John 3:16 John defines it for us. He wrote, “We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” Love is characterized by being willing to give up everything, including life itself, for the sake of another. That is what Jesus did for us. He loved to the outer limit, as we read earlier in John 13:1. He loved us to the maximum amount and this is demonstrated in the fact that He willingly, of His own free will, gave up His life for us when we were yet sinners, enemies of God and hating Him in our minds. This is the example of love we have been given! So when John says that this person loves his brother, he cannot mean anything less than this! Our brothers are children of our Father in heaven, not our enemies, so how much more should we be willing to lay down our lives for them? This is to love our brothers. There are two things that are true about the one who loves. First, he abides in the light. He remains in the light. He remains in Christ. We are commanded in John 15 to abide in Christ, to remain in Him, because He is our life. And here John says that the one who loves his brother abides in Christ. He remains in the vine, so to speak, and receives all the spiritual nourishment he needs. He lacks nothing because he is in the light, which is Christ. The second thing that is true is that there is no cause for stumbling in him. There is some debate about what this means, but it seems most clear that what John is saying here is that the one who loves does not cause his brother to stumble. The one who loves is not a cause of stumbling for any other Christian. This was a major problem in the early church, as it is today. Because we as Christians have freedom in Christ, we also have the possibility of using our freedom in such a way as to cause another person to fall into sin because that person is a weaker brother, having a weaker conscience. The church at Rome and the church at Corinth both experience this difficulty. Turn to Romans 14. Paul here is dealing with matters that are “gray areas” of the Christian life. Certain Christians at this time believed they could only eat vegetables, while others believed they could eat all kinds of food. What was Paul’s solution for the Romans? He writes in Romans 14:13, “Therefore let us not judge one another anymore, but rather determine this – not to put an obstacle or a stumbling block (same word as 1 John 2:10) in a brother’s way.” He goes on to say in verse 15, “For if because of food your brother is hurt, you are no longer walking according to love. Do not destroy with your food him for whom Christ died.” What’s the point? Here’s the point. Some people are not comfortable with activities that we are convinced in our own hearts and consciences are pleasing to God. If we walk according to love, however, we do not do the things that cause others to fall into sin. We willingly and lovingly give them up for the sake of our brothers for whom Christ died. We would rather miss out on some activity or pleasure or event, if we love our brothers, than engage in that activity and see a brother destroyed, a brother for whom Christ died. Don’t think too lightly about that. The word is “destroyed.” We should love our brothers to such an extent that we are determined to do nothing that could cause them to stumble and be destroyed. Some might say, “Well, you can’t blame me. That’s his conscience, and that is between him and God, and if he can’t handle it, then he better toughen up, because I know this isn’t sin!” Paul says that God can and will blame you for destroying your brother. It’s not our concern whether our brother has a strong or weak conscience. It’s only our concern to not cause him to stumble! Paul went as far as to say this in 1 Corinthians 8:13, “Therefore, if food causes my brother to stumble (same word, verb form, as in 1 John 2:10), I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause my brother to stumble.” Paul said he would give up meat forever if it would help his brothers in Christ to be holy! Christ gave up His life so we could be holy; are we willing to give up our own personal, private preferences for our brothers? If we’re walking in love we are not a cause of stumbling for our brothers in Christ. We are not a hindrance to God’s kingdom. We do not do anything that could destroy a brother for whom Christ died. Not only is the person who loves his brother in the light, but he also is not a cause of stumbling for his brother. He builds his brothers up and never tears them down for his own freedom and private pleasures. For emphasis John returns to the one who hates his brother to complete the contrast of these three verses between love and hate. The one who hates his brother is in the darkness. This is simply a restatement of verse 8. But he goes on and adds to it, saying that this person walks in the darkness and doesn’t know where he is going. What does this mean? Darkness carries the idea of death. It produces death, as seen in John 8:12, where Jesus said, “I am the light of the world: he that follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” Darkness produces death, but light brings life. Those who hate their brothers walk in darkness and their don’t know where they are going. The word for “going” in this verse literally means “to depart.” The idea is that of final destiny. The one who hates his brother walks in death and does not know his final destiny will be eternal darkness and death, separation from God in eternal torment. Notice, finally, that this person not only is in darkness, but is blinded. The darkness has blinded his eyes. He is in darkness, he walks in darkness, he doesn’t know where he will end up, and the reason is because he is blind. This person is in the dark, and even if he was put in the light and shown the light he could not see because the darkness has blinded his eyes. Only the supernatural power of God can open the eyes of the blind, show them the light, and give them a heart to love the light, embrace it, and abide in it. The one who walks in darkness does not know where he is going, constantly is in a state of confusion, stumbling, causing others to stumble, and is blindly heading toward a destiny of “black darkness” as it is called in Jude 13. Only God can give us the eyes to see and the heart to obey. Let us seek Him, and pray that we might have the true light shine in our hearts more and more daily, and if any of you find yourselves failing these tests and fear you may have come short of the light, turn to Christ in faith, and embrace the light, and love it, and allow Christ to shine His light in your hearts. Come to Jesus and let Him do His work in your heart and in your life. Let’s pray. [Home page] [ ]
|