Living Together In Christian Love Series

ENGAGE

We live in a rapidly changing world in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to live as a disciple of Jesus Christ. We have now taken those things which the Bible defines as sin and not only tolerate them, but actually celebrate them in our culture. And not only have we lost our moral compass, we see an increasing trend toward a loss of religious freedoms and governmental compulsion to adhere to unbiblical views. In many places around the world, and even here in the United States, those who espouse biblical views are often called bigoted and hateful and, in some cases, have even been prosecuted for “hate speech”.

TENSION

So, I suppose it’s only natural for us to long for the “good old days”. But even the good old days weren’t free from difficulties. I think many of us here would be surprised to learn that even in the very early days of the church, they faced many of the same problems we face today. And this morning, we’re going to look at a short letter that addressed how we are to live in the face of those kinds of attacks on our faith.

TRUTH

This morning, as we continue our sermon series on “Little Books with a Big Message”, we will look at the shortest book in the Bible. And next week, we’ll look at the second shortest book. Both of these letters would have been written on a single piece of papyrus and delivered to the addressee by a trusted person who was going in that direction.

So go ahead and take out your Bibles and turn to the book of 2 John, which, not surprisingly is found right after the book of 1 John. If you get to Jude or Revelation, you’ve gone a little too far.

[Read 2 John 1-13]

You’ll notice here that the author refers to himself merely as “the elder”. That word has several possible meanings in the underlying Greek. It can refer merely to a person who is older in age. It is also used elsewhere in the New Testament to describe a leader in the early church. Were that all we had to go on, it might be difficult to determine who wrote the letter, but a quick comparison with the Gospel of John and the other letters we call 1 John and 3 John clearly point to John the apostle as the author of the letter.

During Jesus’ earthly ministry, John was likely the youngest of the apostles. He never identifies himself by name in his gospel account or his letters. In his gospel account, he refers to himself merely as “the disciple whom Jesus loved”. He lived the longest of any of the apostles and was the only one who died of natural causes. This letter was likely written near the end of his life, probably toward the end of the first century AD.

The letter is addressed to “the elect lady and her children”. There has been a lot of speculation and debate about the identity of the addressee and since you will likely run into some of that commentary in your own studies I’m going to speak to it briefly, although, as we’ll see, it’s not really all that important in applying the message of the letter.

There are three main possibilities here:

1) The letter could be addressed to some unnamed woman that John knew and had been in communication with and her children. Given that this was a time of great persecution of the church, it would make sense that neither the author nor the recipient of the letter were identified by name in case the letter ever came into the hands of those who opposed the church.

2) It is possible that the phrase “elect lady” was actually the name of a specific woman. Since the Greek of the day did not employ capitalization, it is possible the letter was addressed to a woman named Eklekte Kyria.

3) The phrase “elect lady” is code for a specific local church and “her children” were members of that church. I personally think this is the most likely case, especially given that most of the pronouns and verbs in the body of the letter are plural.

For those of you who aren’t grammar experts, that just means that every time you see the word “you”, just substitute “y’all” and every time you see the word “your” you can substitute “yall’s”. But there are a lot of people way smarter than I am who think differently so I can’t be dogmatic here.

Regardless of which explanation is correct, I am confident in saying that the main message is found right in the middle of the letter in verses 6 and 7. In verse 6, John exhorts his audience to love one another by walking according to the commandments. And then in verse 7, he tells them why they need to do that – because there are many deceivers who have gone out into the world.