Living the Life Series: The Test of Loving My Neighbor
Scripture Reference: 1 John 2:7 – 11
Introduction
I agree with one pastor who stated that he had yet to meet anyone who actually likes to take tests. In fact some people have a phobia about taking tests, they freeze up as soon as the test is passed out, suddenly the light seems brighter, the room seems smaller.
I came across what I thought to be some impossible test questions that are sure to strike fear into the heart of any test taker.
For example, try this final exam question from a history class: Describe the history of the papacy from its origins to present day, concentrating on its social, political, economic, religious and philosophical impact on Europe, Asia, America and Africa. Be brief, concise, and specific.
Or how about the final for a medical student: You have been provided with a razor blade, a piece of gauze, and a bottle of Scotch. Remove your appendix. Do not suture until the professor has inspected your work. You have fifteen minutes.
Here’s one for an engineering student: The disassembled parts of a high-powered rifle have been placed in a box on your desk. You will find an instruction manual printed in Swahili. In ten minutes, a hungry Bengal tiger will be admitted into the test room. Take whatever action you feel appropriate, and be prepared to justify your decision.
Or how about this question: Define the universe; give three examples.
Even when we come across test questions that seem simple on the surface, we find that they’re often not as simple as we first thought. For instance, the answer to the question, "How long did the Hundred Years War last?’ seems obvious, but the answer is 116 years.
When a test asks, "Which country manufactures Panama hats?" the correct answer is Ecuador. Here’s another: From what animal do we get catgut? From sheep and horses of course.
In which month do Russians celebrate the October Revolution? November. What was King George IV’s first name? Well, everyone knows it was Albert. Ah yes...many test takers are glad to be out of school...far away from trick questions like that thought up in some teacher’s lounge.
But as far as we try to get from the rigors of the academic life, we find our lives are filled with other kinds of tests. We take driver’s tests, drug tests, polygraph tests, sobriety tests, eye tests, and entrance exams.
People in law enforcement have to qualify on the shooting range at least four times a year; many of you have to take a test for your chosen profession. Like it or not, tests are a part of life.
But is there a test to determine whether a person is on the right track spiritually? Several weeks ago we started a new series through the New Testament book of 1 John called “LIVING THE LIFE”.
One of the main purposes of 1 John is to help the Christian, the child of God to know that they are truly in a right relationship with God, to know that your standing is true in the Lord.
The Bible speaks clearly that there is a way to know with assurance that you have eternal life, which is a quality of life that is built upon knowing who God is and experiencing that life through His Son Jesus Christ.
We’ve been treating the apostle John’s little letter to the Christians living in Asia Minor as a kind of roadmap for living the life the way God intended for it to live. We started looking at our need to have the view about living as it related to God, His Son, and our present walk.
Then last week we looked at what was the first of seven tests John gave to help us to answer the question: How do we know if we really know God? Or as one translation of the Scriptures puts it, “How can we be sure that we belong to Him?”
The first test was covered in verses 3 – 6, The Keeping of God’s Commandments (We know Him, obey Him, love Him, and Live in Him). Now allow me to reread verses 7 – 11 and see if you can pick out what the second test is. (Reread 1 John 2:7 – 11)
Transition
Here is a thought to transition into our text of the morning. When we are in fellowship with God, walking in the light, we also walk in love. It is a basic spiritual principle that when Christians are out of fellowship with God, they cannot get along with God’s people. We are all members of God’s family, so we ought to love one another.
In our English language, love is a very imprecise term. We use this word in so very many different ways. In order to understand its meaning we must understand the context in which it is used.
Consider the following. I love ice cream. I love blue skies. I love my dog. I love my wife. I love you. It is obvious that you love your wife or husband in a different way than you love ice cream. So it is important for us to understand just what we mean when we use this word love.
It is obvious at times that people have no idea what either Christianity or true love really is. But whatever love really is, we all find ourselves longing for it. It is the greatest need in people’s lives.
Josh McDowell said, "I believe two of the greatest fears people struggle with today are the fear that they will never be loved and the fear that they will never be able to love." Christianity is all about meeting that need.
I. A Commitment To A Commandment (vv. 7 – 8)
7 2Brethren, I write no new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had ifrom the beginning. The old commandment is the word which you heard 3from the beginning. 8 Again, ja new commandment I write to you, which thing is true in Him and in you, kbecause the darkness is passing away, and lthe true light is already shining.
Thinking of these words. Now at first it sounds like John is contradicting himself, that this is not a new command but an old one--but on the other hand it is a new command.
Now remember that John is writing to Christians who were being influenced by some pretty deadly false doctrine. Most likely these false teachers--who’d once been part of the Christian community--were claiming to have new and novel ideas, in fact that was part of the draw because their ideas seemed fresh and new. It’s against this background that we need to understand what John says here.
The command for God’s people to love each other has been around since the Jewish Old Testament Law. Leviticus 19:18 says, "’Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD."
This command was reiterated throughout the Old Testament, so there’s nothing especially new or novel about the substance of the command. But when Jesus Christ came to this earth he demonstrated visibly and publicly--in a way never before imagined--what it meant to love.
The cross was God’s public demonstration of his love, and no one had every seen God’s love demonstrated in such an incredible, sacrificial, and wonderful way before Jesus Christ went to the cross.
Jesus’ command is for us to love each other in the way we saw him love us by going to the cross, and that’s what made this command new when he told his friends at the last supper to "love each other, just as I have loved you."
John 13:34-35--"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
John 15:12-- My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.
But this command that was new in its depth and substance when Jesus said these words was well known and established by the time John wrote his letter.
By the time John writes this letter, decades after Jesus had given that command, he wants to make sure that his friends know that he’s not advocating something new or novel, but he’s simply telling them what they’ve already been taught. So in this respect it was an old command.
Not new in quality, but old in that it was communicated before. But the newness that it still has is seen when it’s truth--it’s reality--is experienced in our lives.
Look at v. 8. This love is “true in Him.” When Jesus came into the world and started loving as only He could, it was something new on the face of this earth!
This world had never seen such a demonstration and display of the love of God as Jesus gave in His everyday life. He loved His disciples in spite of their bickering and fighting. He loved other people, too.
The poorest of the poor, the lowest of the sinners could feel the warmth of the love of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ gave love a new meaning. Jesus…
Loved not only friends, but enemies.
Loved not only good people, but bad people.
Loved not only the righteous, but the sinner.
Loved not only the acceptable, but the rejected.
Loved not only the clean, but the dirty.
This was totally a new concept of love. Man has always felt free to mistreat others, especially those who had mistreated him. He has felt free to…
Hate, ignore, be unkind, strike back, neglect, backbite, hurt, criticize, or retaliate.
Jesus not only laid down His life for His friends, He laid down His life for His foes. The greatest accusation they could ever bring against Jesus was He is a friend of sinners.
Let me give you another thought on this love that Jesus talks about here. It is MORE than just a warm, fuzzy FEELING … it is a COMMANDMENT from God. If it is COMMANDED, that makes LOVE a CHOICE … an act of OBEDIENCE. It’s not just an EMOTION … it’s an OBLIGATION we have to God.
We are to love others whether we FEEL like it or not. Some people are EASIER to love than others … AMEN? “Some Christians are like porcupines … they’ve got a few good points, but they’re hard to get close to!”
Then John leads into discussion about how the spiritual darkness of this world--and the spiritual darkness of the false teachers he’s trying to protect his friends from--that darkness is already passing away.
God’s light is already shining and it’s getting stronger and stronger. Whenever you see God’s light mentioned, that’s usually a reference to God revealing himself, God making Himself known through Christ and through His book, the Bible.
In contrast to the latest fashionable ideas about Jesus, John is simply calling them back to what they already know, what they’d already read in his gospel, which he’d written at least ten years before this letter.
The old command, the word of God--that’s what the "message you have heard" in v. 7 refers to--this is what pleases God.
God’s book contains everything we need to live a spiritually vital life that pleases God, we don’t need spiritual fads or the latest spiritual fashions, we have all that we need.
II. A Commitment To A Christian (vv. 9 – 11)
9 mHe who says he is in the light, and hates his brother, is in darkness until now. 10 nHe who loves his brother abides in the light, and othere is no cause for stumbling in him. 11 But he who phates his brother is in darkness and qwalks in darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.
What does he mean here by hate? -- "He who hates his brother." The dictionary tells us that hate is "a feeling of extreme hostility or extreme dislike of another."
That suffices as far as the definition is concerned. We know well the feeling, this dislike, this aversion to someone, a sense of extreme hostility toward another. Yet, you and I need to understand that it can be expressed in two different ways.
It can be active, in that we indulge in malicious talk or injurious actions toward another. We can strike them, or beat them, or throw our garbage over their fence, or mistreat them in some way.
We can attack them; we can slander them behind their back. All these are active expressions of hate, and perhaps most of us think of hate only in this sense. But hate can also be expressed passively and still be hate.
It can be expressed by indifference, by coldness, by isolation, by exclusion, unconcern for another.
Someone has well said that indifference is the cruelest form of hate. You only need to read the Gospel records to see how true that is.
What hurt our Lord most I believe was not the active enmity of those who were trying to accomplish his death, but the coldness and indifference of those who once followed him yet turned aside from him and idly stood by as he was put to death.
Now John says that he who hates his brother is not a Christian. He is "in the darkness until now," i.e., he has never come out of it. He is in the state of darkness in which the whole race is plunged and into which we were all born.
He has never been removed from that. To say you are in the light and yet hate your brother is a basic denial of faith. We have seen this all along. There is a
contrasting of differences in vv. 9 and 10. There is a contrast between light and darkness, between love and hatred. These things do not mix. They are mutually exclusive.
The Bible says the man who says, I am in the light, I am saved, and yet has hatred in his heart is in darkness. You cannot hate anybody and be saved. If you claim you are a child of God and yet hate any man because of his face, his place or his race you are in the darkness. But specifically John is addressing other Christians.
It seems to us as modern readers that John’s speaking in extreme terms here, opposites of love and hate, light and darkness. Most of us tend to think of a few people we really love--probably our family, our spouse, our children, a few friends--and maybe a few people we really dislike, and everyone else is kind neutral.
We don’t categorize people as either lovers or enemies, but we treat most people indifferently, in between, not particularly loved, but certainly not hated.
Yet John doesn’t seem to leave that option open for us. If we claim to be living in God’s light--that is living a spiritual journey that pleases God--but then we hate our brother we actually are living a spiritual journey of darkness.
John seems to categorize passive neutrality toward other Christians as a kind of hatred toward them. There’s no room for neutrality here, says John, we either align ourselves with God by loving other Christians, or we hate them by default.
Our love for our fellow Christian is the evidence that we’re walking in God’s light.
IF we hate our Christian brothers or sisters --- neglect, dislike, disregard, criticize, backbite, and mistreat them --- we are not living in the light, not living in Christ. We are making a false profession.
We do not know God, not really, no matter what we claim. We are living in the darkness of this world --- living like the people who have yet to come to God and His Son Jesus Christ.
Now I just like to mention and caution that this does not mean that loving others is what enables us to walk in God’s light, as if we somehow earn our way into God’s light by our works.
An author by the name of Raymond Brown says, "Not that loving enables one to be in the light, but that being in the light given by Christ enables one to love--because love is from God and is not a purely human action."
By walking in God’s light--thus also loving our fellow Christians--we won’t cause ourselves to stumble and fall in this walk, but neither will we lead others to fall also.
How many people have been driven out of the Christian community by hatred they’ve experienced from other Christians or that we show to other Christians in their presence?
When we fail to love each other through Christ, we actually set a trap for each other, a snare that ultimately drives people out of our churches, broken, hurting and disillusioned.
How many church fights have made people stumble and fall? I mean, is it really that important what color the building is painted or the style of music we worship God with?
Is it worth adding to the growing population of unchurched Christians, men and women who want to walk with Jesus Christ but who’ve given up on the church?
Certainly we shouldn’t compromise God’s truth or our commitment to fulfilling God’s purposes, but some of the disagreements in the Christian community aren’t really worth sacrificing my commitment to follow God.
The churches John was writing to were being torn apart by division, controversy and dissension. It was bad enough that some of the former members were now denying that Jesus was truly God’s Messiah, the Christ, but now those who remained in the churches were fighting and criticizing each other.
Now if this happened in our day, those people would’ve just found a new church, but they didn’t have that option back then, they had to get along for the Christian community to survive because they knew that their love for each other was the way the world would know they were followers of Jesus Christ.
Just as dangerous as the false teaching that was attacking them from without was the lack of love that was destroying them from within. It is not easy loving each other, especially loving people we don’t have a natural affinity for.
Sure it’s easy loving my wife, and loving my kids--at least most days--and loving my friends, but loving people I find irritating, people who I think are weird, or loving people who grate me the wrong way...that takes God’s love.
That’s why the word John chooses here is the Greek word agape, which describes God’s kind of love, the kind of love that’s given freely and generously, regardless of the worthiness of the object.
Loving the lovable, anyone can do that, but loving the unlovable among us--a Christian who betrays our trust, a friend who lets us down, a president who lies to our faces--this is the kind of love that’s supernatural, God’s kind of love.
C. S. Lewis was right when he wrote in Mere Christianity that we spend too much time worrying about whether we really love our neighbor or not, when we should just act as if we do, and as we do loving things, love will happen.
C. Verse 11 Explained
Our papers today are filled with crimes of violence, unusual incidences of appalling, senseless violence. People are asking, where is all this coming from?
Why is it that this kind of thing is breaking out all over the country? Where is this violence coming from? Remember the word of our Lord in Matthew 24? "When wickedness abounds, the love of many shall grow cold," {cf, Matt 24:12}.
There is an inevitable consequence here. When the moral life of a nation degenerates to the place where immorality and wickedness abound, then there is a hardening, a deadening of the life of that nation.
The love that is intended to be like a fire in the heart of man grows cold and unresponsive and, as a result, there come outbreaks of senseless violence and injury.
The Apostle John is tracing the same thing here. He says that he who hates his brother is in the darkness and has no idea where it will lead.
He does not know where he is going. He has no understanding that this can lead to mayhem, to heartache, heartbreak, a stunting of spiritual growth, the lack of desire to serve God.
He goes blindly on, stumbling on in his hateful attempt to do ignore or remain angry to his friend, or brother, or companion, whoever it may be. But the result is, he is only damaging himself and all he loves. He has no idea where he is going.
Furthermore, he is blinded, John says, "the darkness has blinded his eyes." The word that is used here is a word that means, "to make insensitive" and it implies that if we live in this way, we ultimately come to the place where we no longer can respond.
Hatred grips us and hardens our heart and any force that comes upon us can no longer soften it. This is the warning that runs all through the Scriptures about the nature of human life. When we give way to feelings of hatred we inevitably harden our own heart.
It is possible for a Christian to walk in darkness, as we find in Chapter 1, Verse 6: "If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness..." But he is not in the darkness. This is something that the Spirit of God will inevitably deal with in the Christian and break, and it may sometimes be by very difficult measures.
Ray Steadman once told of counseling with a woman about a physical problem, which really had a spiritual basis in her experience. He discovered she hated another person and had hated her for years.
She told him the circumstances, and, undoubtedly, she had been treated unjustly, but the thing had eaten like a canker in her heart for years and years. Hate had turned her bitter and rancid and had poisoned all her thoughts.
He said to her, "You must find it in your heart to forgive this person, as God has forgiven you." She looked at him and said, "I can’t forgive her, I’ll never forgive her!" He said, "But God says you must."
She said, "But I can’t." He said, "If you can’t, then you need to face the fact that you are not a Christian, because if you can’t forgive, then you’ve never been born again." She looked at him, and said, "I guess you’re right.
I know I am a Christian, and I see I have just been deceiving myself. I need to forgive." And she did! There came a change in that woman’s life, which was like turning from night unto day.
Conclusion
The Message
13 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.
If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.
If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.
Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
