Heavenly Father, as we open the word together, Lord, I pray that you would guide us into all truth. Lord, we're reminded that before you left, you said to your disciples that you were going to send them the Holy Spirit and that the Holy Spirit would expand and teach them many things about you, Lord, and that these things were things that we should receive as if from you. And Lord, as we look at this little tiny book of 2 John, Lord, we understand that this is as much from you as the Gospel of John or the Book of Romans. And so, Father, give us a tent of hearts and ears that are open and minds that are thinking, Father, as we consider what you have to say to us here. Lord, guide us, I pray, in Jesus' name. Amen. Is it possible for a church to be too loving? It's a weird question, is it? Is it possible for a church to have too much desire for truth? Both of those questions seem a little odd but it's interesting both of those questions at different times over the last year have come up in conversations that I've been in in the local ministerial. The ministerial is a gathering of a number of pastors from a number of different sorts of churches and in one of them I had a number of fellas that sit kind of on the liberal side of the divide talking about this other group of pastors that get together and I happen to be a part of that group as well And they said, you know, those churches, you know, that are all about doctrinal purity. And then they looked at me and they said, I don't know if that's a fair thing to say about you guys or not. And I said, yeah, that's a pretty fair thing to say about us, is that we're all about doctrinal purity. But the idea behind what they were saying is you guys are just too much after the truth. So much so that maybe some other things get forgotten about. Well, just the other day I was at ministerial again and the other side came up and somebody was talking about this church that was holding a soup kitchen regularly and the person said, well I went there and I think people are just using the church and maybe the church needs to do a little bit less of that because they're just being a little bit too loving and they're getting taken advantage of. And so this came into my mind. Is it possible that we might love too much or that we might be too dedicated or committed to truth? Is there a place where those two things balance, where you say, that's enough love, maybe a little bit more truth here, that's enough truth, maybe a little bit more love? And in this little book, this second epistle, this second letter of John, I think he shows us the answer to that question. It's interesting, John is often called the disciple that Jesus loved. In the entire Gospel of John that he wrote, he never identifies himself, but you often see him as reclining on the breast of the Savior at the Last Supper. He is in these situations and there's always a tenderness to John. John wrote the Gospel of John, wrote three letters, 1st, 2nd and 3rd John. He's also the one that wrote the book of Revelations. And if you want a full picture of Jesus, you need both the Gospel and the book of Revelations that shows us Jesus both is meek and mild and Jesus is the conquering Lamb of God. But John is often considered the apostle of love and he's often talking about love. Love is a major theme and I think this is an incredible little book because here in about 13 verses we have him saying over and over again, love, love, love, love one another, love God and at the same time, at the end of it, we're not going to deal with that this week, but next week, he says, and listen, have nothing to do with false teachers, don't show them any hospitality and give them no greeting. So somehow the love apostle is able to say to us, love should typify and exemplify what you do and at the same time you're to be absolutely opposed to false teaching and not even show any hospitality to a false teacher. So that's an interesting paradox. John's letter is a little bit scattered. It is a little bit of a post-it note that he kind of scratched out and then sent over. And I think what was going on is that John said, look, there's a few things that are very urgent and I want you to be aware of them. And when I come in person, I'm going to sort some things out. But just until I get there, here's a few things to safeguard you. And so, I'm going to try to deal with this letter sort of the way he wrote it, just moving through it in three different segments. First of all, this introduction that's the first three verses, and then the first piece of teaching is verse 4, 5, and 6, and we'll stop there today, and then next week we'll come together and go from verse 7 to the end, where he gives the warning about false teachers. Turn with me there to 2 John, just so you can see it. 2 John begins with this unusual greeting, the elder, that's how he refers to himself and an elder is a biblical name for a pastor or a leader and he refers to himself in this way, the elder to the elect lady and her children. And a little bit goes on in the scholarly thinking, who is this elect lady and her children? Well, the best thought and the thought I would propose to you is the elect lady is the church. The church is often referred to in a feminine sort of way. In both Ephesians and Revelations, the church is called the Bride of Christ. And in these times of persecution, it wasn't unusual for John and Peter as well, when they wrote to a church, to sometimes take a name or a title that seems a little different. And so we have here instead of, to the church in such and such a place, to the elect lady. and her children. So to the church and those who belong to the church. And if we go all the way to the end of 2 John, the 13th verse says, the children of your elect sister greet you. I think he's writing from one church to another church and this elect lady and the elect sister are these people who belong to the church. This is his way of identifying the church. We could get off on a rabbit trail, but I think we're a little bit late in the morning already to get into the whole doctrine of election. But I will say this, it appears in almost every book of the Bible. The Apostle Paul speaks constantly of the doctrine of election. The Apostle Peter speaks of the doctrine of election. The Apostle John speaks of the doctrine of election. Luke, the writer of Acts, all over the book of Acts, talks about the doctrine of election. Of course, Jesus regularly says things like all those The Father has given to me will come to me. That's as far down that rabbit trail as I'll go. But don't disdain the doctrine of election. Scripture testifies to it everywhere. Instead, I want to talk to you for a moment about truth. Count with me how many times in the first three verses the word truth appears. Ready? You're going to count. I'm going to read. The word truth. The elder to the elect lady and her children whom I love in truth. And not only I, but also all who know the truth, because of the truth that abides in us and will be with us forever. Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us from God the Father and from Jesus Christ the Father's Son in truth and love. You got four? Because I got four. Four times in three verses. It seems that one of the themes that is Heavy on John's mind is this theme of truth. How out of step he is with the 21st century where we live in a culture that says we don't believe in truth anymore. But that's not really true because we do believe in truth. It's just the things that we don't like, we don't think are true. The church, John says, that I love in truth and also all who know the truth So does John love this group of people he's writing to because of the truth or is it more of a cause thing? I think it's more of a cause thing that the truth sits behind their being part of the church at all. John can be a little hard to understand sometimes just because his thinking isn't quite as direct as Paul's. But look, he says, because of the truth that abides in us and will be with us forever. So it's because of the truth that you are loved by me and by all who know the truth because of the truth. There's this sense of love that's going on and it's somehow tied together with truth. Well, what is this? Let me see if I can sort this out a little bit. John states that he loves the church and all who know the truth love the church. This is important. Okay, hang on. I got myself distracted. Let me come back. There's a second theme that comes up here and it's the theme of love. And this is a fascinating thing. This theme of love and this theme of truth. And John keeps going back and forth on it. And what's interesting to me is that there's an especially special form of love that exists or that is intended to exist within the church. Jesus instructed me to love my neighbor as I love myself. And we are perhaps trying to work through that as we think of our physical neighbors even across the road. What does it mean to love our neighbor? And he says to love your enemies. But he also tells us to love one another and there's a particular type of love that exists within the church and I think it's of a different sort of quality and level because it's reciprocal. It's meant to go back and forth. It's not so guarded and it's given quite freely. Do I love everyone in exactly the same way? Well, no. I say to you often, I love you and that's true, I do love you but I don't quite love you the way I love your wife, my wife, right? That would be inappropriate, it wouldn't be comfortable for you and it wouldn't be right. There's something, there's a particular love, I just went past my birthday, found myself thinking there's no temporal thing in this world that God has given me that I love more than my wife. I'm not going to embarrass her any further than that but When I say that I love you, I do, I love you. And you should not discount that and say, well, he doesn't love me as much as he loves his wife. The church, I think, is intended to love one another on a higher level than we love those who are outside of the church. And that's not to discount the level that we have for our love for our neighbor, or our love for our enemy, or the love for the person we don't know. But there's something richer and deeper and more meaningful about this love for one another. We could go down another rabbit trail. We won't. But I will just open it up for further conversation in the future. God does not love every single person exactly the same way. You hear that all the time but that's not true. Scripture is quite clear that God has a particular love for his bride that is a love that is deeper and broader and richer than the love that he has for the world and that doesn't discount the fact that God loves the world so much that he sent his own son. Back to this idea of truth. This is going to be like a bowl of spaghetti for a minute, but I think at the end we'll pull it all together and see if we can't find one good meatball in the whole thing. What is this truth? Well, Jesus says this in John chapter 14 verse 6. You remember Jesus says, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. So Jesus says, I am the truth. Now, John says to the church, you are in the truth, you are abiding in the truth, and because of the truth, we love you and you love us, and everybody that's in the truth loves one another. How am I in the truth? Well, it comes down to belief. I have put my faith in Jesus Christ, and I believe him to be true. Maybe this is a helpful thought. I don't have any money in my pocket. If I had in my hand here a nice brown colored bill and over here a nice blue colored bill, which one would be worth more? The brown colored bill, right? We're a bunch of Canadians here. Because we know that the brown bill is a $100 bill and the blue bill is a $5 bill. But the reality is, if you were to talk about the material from which it was made, the material that the brown bill is made from is no more valuable than the material that the blue bill is made from. But we have an understanding and we all believe that this bill is worth more than this bill. so that I could actually give you this bill for something worth $100 and you'd give me that thing worth $100 and take that little piece of plastic and feel like you had a good deal made. Why? Because we have an understanding. This is where we believe certain things to be true. We say that's worth $100 and that's only worth $5. When we come to believe what Jesus says about himself, that I'm the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but through me, we put our faith in that, we rest on it, we believe in it, because it's true. Jesus opens this door for us to come into a relationship with God through him. When we go just a little further here, verse 3, we hear these words, grace, mercy, and peace will be with us. This is the truth. This is what John is saying. Here's the truth that grace, mercy, and peace belongs to all those who are in the truth. Well, what is grace? Grace is the unmerited favor of God. That is God saying, I'm going to adopt you as my own children. I'm going to make you co-heirs with Christ. I'm going to give you an inheritance that you could never have fathomed or imagined before. That's grace. Well, what's mercy? Mercy is God saying, I am not going to give to you the penalty you deserve. You have earned a particular penalty and instead I give that to my son who did not deserve it and he is willingly taking it. So you go free. I break the bonds of your imprisonment. I set you free and I do more than that. In grace I adopt you as my own son. And the result of grace and mercy together is peace with God. And we go on through our life with this Understanding the sense that we have been reconciled with God. This is what it is to live in truth. That we live believing in the grace of God, believing in the mercy of God, believing that we are at peace with God. Let's get into the heart of the message here in these verses four through six. This is what it says, I rejoiced greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as we were commanded by the Father. And now I ask you, dear lady, not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but the one we've had from the beginning, that we love one another. And this is love, that we walk according to His commandments. This is the commandment, just as you have heard from the beginning, so that you should walk in it. John says, I rejoice greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth. I don't think that that means only some were, but he encountered some of the people from this church and when he spoke with them, he said, wow, look, these people are walking in truth and how much joy that gives them. I find joy in that when I encounter somebody, not from my congregation, and you start talking to them and you go, these people know the truth. They've been instructed in the truth. They believe the truth. Wow, I'm excited about that. You can go anywhere in the world and find brothers and sisters in Christ. And he says, I was rejoicing in the fact that I found these people who were walking in truth. Truth has content. Truth is found because here we move from simply talking about truth and love. John starts to talk about commands. In a book I recently read, the author who self-identifies as an evangelical proposed a new way for the church to conduct itself in a culture that is foreign to Christendom. In a chapter on holiness, he recommends what he calls a narrative approach to holiness and this caused me grave concern. He says, a narrative approach to holiness is different than a static approach that takes the Bible as a book that was written and finished years ago and now must be applied and obeyed as an external law that has been handed down to us. Narrative holiness is guided by the idea that we are called to live by our story, not by a set of rules, to live according to a narrative that orients us in a way that runs in harmony with the story of God. I think that's exactly the sort of thing that John the Apostle would come out and say, no, no, not at all. There is a reality here that when you get into the world you'll encounter situations that the Bible didn't address directly and there you're going to need to say, well listen, here's what scripture says and this is how I extrapolate out of that. Teenagers, bad news, the Bible says nothing about dating. And yet I do believe that there's a moral design in scripture that will inform you of how you should conduct yourself if and when you should ever be so fortunate to get a boyfriend or a girlfriend. Okay? And so we do have a certain narrative approach to how we conduct ourselves, but here's the problem. When we start to take this and say, we don't see the Bible as a set of rules to be obeyed, but we rather want to live our lives in a narrative approach to the story of God, what you end up with is people saying, well, we reject that part of the Bible. And that's what John is trying to deal with here. He says, Now, dear lady, not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but one we've had from the beginning, that we love one another. So here's what he wants you to do. He says, I want you to love one another. OK, how do we do that? Well, he doesn't leave you guessing. He says, and this is love, that we walk according to his commandments. Not singular, but plural, his commandments. This is a commandment, just as you've heard from the beginning, so that you should walk in it. We ask ourselves, well, What commandment? The commandments. And that brings us back to the whole of Scripture. Jesus says this just before he goes. He gives the commission to his disciples to go into the world and to make disciples baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and to teach them to obey everything that I've commanded you. And then he says, Lo, I'm with you always to the end of the age. But listen, here's what Jesus also said in John chapter 16 when it comes to his commandments. John chapter 16 verse 12, he said, I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears, he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take what is Mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is Mine, and therefore I said that He will take what is Mine and declare it to you." Alright. Feels a little bit like a bowl of spaghetti, doesn't it? Right now we're going around and around. Here's what Jesus has to say. Jesus says to His disciples, I want you to go make disciples. Teach them to obey everything that I've commanded you. John has to say here, here's the commandment, it's not a new one, an old one, that you love one another. And how do you love? Well, you love by keeping the commandments. So this is where we come back to the original question that started this all. Can a church love too much? Can a church desire truth too much? It's impossible. The one thing that can happen is that a church can love and exclude truth and then their love becomes deficient. Or that a church can desire truth but exclude love and so their truth becomes deficient. We hear that in Paul's writing to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 13, if I speak with the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am a clanging gong." He says, listen, if you get everything right, and you know the truth, and you can pass every theology examination, and you've read every systematic theology textbook, and you can recite the entire Westminster Catechism, and the entire London Baptist Confession, you know this stuff inside out, and backwards and you don't care at all about people and you don't love them and there's no impetus in you at all that says I want to do something for my brothers and sisters. I want to share in their suffering and rejoice with those who rejoice. He says what you have is actually not the truth because he says part of that truth is that it's going to lead you to love people. And if on the other hand what you have is this great, great love for people and you have a desire that the people know that you love them and that you care for them and you want to take care of them and nurture their needs and that causes you to reduce the quotient of truth so that you don't actually tell a person that they're a sinner and that God is opposed to sinners and will find them guilty in the end and condemn them to eternity in hell. You're not loving them, you're hating them and you're just wanting them to like you more because you won't tell them the truth. So your love is deficient. But here is the reality that John wants us to get to. This is a bowl of spaghetti, it keeps going around. That love brings forth obedience, and that obedience brings forth love, and that love brings forth obedience. And so the church, as it is rightly functioning, doesn't fit the misconceptions of the world. And here's the reality. The world has a misconception about the church. Because the world sees the truth aspects and says, yeah, you guys are mean-spirited and narrow-minded because you believe certain things are sin. And you call them sin. You'll say to somebody, it is sin for you to engage in a sexual relationship outside of the confines of marriage, and marriage only exists between a man and a woman. They say, that's narrow-minded. And you go, that's truth. And scripture declares it, God commands it, and for us to reduce it is not a loving thing to do. That's truth. But let it never be true of us that we're narrow-minded, mean-spirited, or bigoted, so that a person comes in and meets you and goes, I can't believe how much these people care for people, love them, are willing to serve them, willing to share with them, willing to sit down and talk with them, and draw them along and say, won't you come to know the truth and believe the truth and follow after the truth? You see, these two things have to fit together. Jesus once said to us that we would be maligned, that we would be treated poorly, that we would be misunderstood. But let those things be misunderstandings and not the truth. Let us never be people that are so much about the truth that we have no place for love, nor people that are so much about love that we have no place for truth. John Stott, who is dead now but was an Englishman and Anglican and no stranger to theological disagreement in his own church and denomination, once wrote this about this very passage in 2 John. If this is so, and Christian love is founded upon Christian truth, we shall never increase the love which exists between us by diminishing the truth we hold in common. In the contemporary movement towards church unity, we must beware of compromising the very faith on which alone true love and unity depends. So friends, I wrap this up, hopefully with a meatball here in this bowl of spaghetti. With this instruction to you, some of you are more naturally bent towards love. That's just the way you've been put together. And you need to be reminded that truth goes right along with that. One of the reasons I urge you so often to be in the Bible and studying the Bible and reading the Bible is I don't have an opportunity to preach the entire Bible to you in your lifetime or in my lifetime, but if you're in the Word, as you come on things, here's what I would say to you. When you come on something and it commands you to do something, do it! Don't go, oh, I don't think that's relevant to the 21st century. Do it! You're supposed to be a strange alien people. You're supposed to live in ways that are different from the world. Do it! Obey the Word of God. Obey the commandments you find there. Let nothing in scripture condemn you and say, you should not do this. And you say, I'm going to do it anyways. Do what you find there. If you're a person that's given to love, discover truth and blend these things together. Some of you are given more to truth. Say, yes, but this is right and we need to separate from those people because they're wrong. But before we separate from them, can we love them and say, we have a desire that you know truth and we're going to care for you and walk alongside you and pray for you and urge you and even share with you what we have while we do this thing. You see here what John is saying. He says, I want you to walk in truth. I want you to walk in love. And as we walk in truth and as we walk in love, we walk in the footsteps of the Lord Jesus who was both love and very much truth. Next week, we'll hopefully have less spaghetti and a little bit more direct as we get into the warning about false teaching, how to identify it, and what to do about it. Let's pray together. Father, Lord, I pray for this congregation and Lord, for this little book, Lord, Help us to understand and come to grips, Lord, in a meaningful way. John repeats over and over again these themes, Lord. Help us to hear them, that we need to walk in truth, Lord, that we need to walk in love. I pray, Father, that you might work in conviction upon everyone in this room. Father, the one who has perhaps shown too little love, that Lord, that they might be shown there's no such thing as being too loving as long as the love and truth fit together, Lord, and the one who has erred on the side of loving without truth, Lord, that they might come to a place of correction, Lord, of having a desire for truth and obedience to you. And Father, we commit each one now to the hearing and doing of your word. We ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen.