Good morning. We're going to look at a little epistle today, but it makes for a long text. So why don't we begin with prayer and ask the Lord to bless our time together in his word. Our Father, we thank you for summoning us to your presence, forgiving our sins, consecrating us, Lord, we pray that you would now instruct us. We pray, Lord, that from this epistle, Lord, that you would comfort people. I pray that through my words, Lord, that I would comfort all whom you intend to comfort. I pray that you would challenge us. Lord, speak directly to our lives. And I pray that through my words, Lord, all would be challenged that you intend to be challenged. Lord, we pray and seek your blessing, and apart from you, we know we can do nothing. In Jesus Christ's name, amen. Would you please stand with me as we tend to God's word? We're in 2 John. As we continue to work our way through the Johannine literature, we find ourselves at this epistle. As we read, I would encourage you to look at the things which John or this elder is encouraging the people to do. What does he want from them? What is he writing them regarding? He says, 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. I rejoiced greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as we were commanded by the Father. Now I ask you, dear lady, not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but the one we have 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. For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist. Watch yourselves. so that you may not lose what we have worked for, but may win a full reward. Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God. Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house or give him any greeting. for whoever greets him takes part in his wicked works. Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead, I hope to come to you and talk face to face so that our joy may be complete. The children of your elect sister greet you. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. One of the issues of interpretation that is often raised in understanding this letter is who is this elect sister? There are a number of different views as to what is meant here. The word elect, electas, the word lady, curia, those are both names that were found from time to time in the Greco-Roman world. So it could be the mistress electa, or it could be the elect curia. It could also just be a chosen lady, or I take it to be the church, a specific church. There are a number of reasons for this, which I won't go much into, except that it seems to fit well with the way in which The apostles and prophets talk about the church as being the bride of Christ, as being the bride of the Lord in the Old Testament. And so that seems to fit. There are a number of plural pronouns. It's not a conclusive reason to see this as referring to the church. Plural verbs. directed to this person. But I do want to just simply say that regardless of whether or not this is a single lady and her children, her household, or if it is some church that is dear to this elder, whom I also take to be the Apostle John, Regardless, the directions in this letter apply to us generally anyway. So it doesn't change much by way of interpretation. But I like the idea of it being of an elect lady. And I like the idea that when I'm speaking to you today and representing, as it were, this elder, this apostolic elder, I'm speaking to an elect lady. And I do believe there's, Much reason for that. He identifies this elect lady. He says, 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. It is a community that is committed, not just generally to truth. These aren't just people who are just truth seekers, but are people who have committed themselves to the truth that is found in Jesus Christ in the gospel. And that truth dwells in them. It says he dwells in them forever. And we know that is referring to the spirit of truth, the Holy Spirit. This is a community of truth. And RCC, you are a community of truth. You're a community that upholds the gospel and always seeks to measure what is said and what is going on in the world by the standard of God's word, by the standard of the gospel. So I think it's fitting to, as we read this letter that was written to an elect lady, that we also understand that we are very much in that same situation. I believe this elder would say these same things to us, perhaps under different circumstances. He says to this elect lady, I rejoiced greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth. just as we were commanded by the Father. That is, he found people who were receiving the commandments of the Father in Jesus Christ and were walking in them, and he rejoiced greatly. Now, some people have read something in this that perhaps that means he has found other children who are not walking in the truth. In other words, he's saying, dear lady, look, some of your children at least are walking in the truth. I am very sorry about those other children. We're not gonna talk about them, but I rejoice that I have found at least some of your children walking in the tree. I don't believe it's necessary to take it that way, except that finding people in the ancient world was perhaps not a very common thing when you lived in different towns. And when some people from this other church showed up, some church members, showed up and he found them, that they were steadfast and continuing on in the gospel faith. He rejoiced. He rejoiced and wanted to express that and share that with them. But maybe he did find some also not walking in the truth. Maybe he was aware of that through a report. Whatever the case, we do well to take heed to this, don't we? He was not surprised to find them walking in the truth, but he rejoiced greatly to find them walking in the truth. You see, we don't always find people walking in the truth. And when we do find people whom we've lost touch with, many years later, still walking in the truth, this is the right way to respond, to respond with joy, because sadly, that's often not the case. I know in my own experience, I've known many people who once walked in the truth and now are no longer walking in the Lord. Sadly. We'll continue, we'll look more at that theme as we go on. What this letter is, is a very typical Greco-Roman letter. It follows a very common form of a letter. You have an introduction, who it is that is writing the letter, the person that the letter is being addressed to. Often there is a word that is said that is charitable, some recollection of a fond memory of that person. There's a well-wishing word. There's a unique well-wishing word here. You probably noticed that, or maybe you did, maybe you didn't, in that often that well-wishing, it comes in the form of grace and peace be unto you. It's form of a prayer, but here it's a form of a prophecy. Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us. And that's a little bit unusual. Then in the letter you have the body of the letter. What are the main concerns? What are the main concerns that the the letter writer is concerned with, and finally, this is often the case, there's some expression of a desire to see the person face-to-face. This way of stating it, I do not want to write anymore in paper and ink, but to see you face-to-face is a very common way of ending letters in the Greco-Roman world. And to end with other greetings of other people around. But I want to look more closely at the body of this short letter. I want to look at this. There are three directions that he gives to this elect lady and her children. The first one is that he tells her to continue in love, to continue in love. Verse five and six. Now I ask you, dear lady, Not as though we're writing you a new commandment. Nothing new here. You've heard this many times before. The one that we've had from the beginning. The beginning of the Christian faith. That we love one another. We love one another. I've been preaching with Bo through the Gospel of John. Then through 1 John. Now we're in 2 John. We will see this theme raised briefly again in 3 John. But we're not stretching ourselves to say that this author is an apostle of love and sees it as of the utmost importance to remind his audience always to love. It is striking. It's just a small letter. In a small letter, he goes back through much of the same kind of love, language that he had throughout 1 John. This is something that he likely said over and over and over again to his audiences. It is something that he believed to be of the first importance. He puts it front and center for good reason. Jesus taught that love is the greatest commandment. Love for God being the greatest commandment. Love for our neighbor being the second great commandment. But then in the upper room, as recorded in John on that night before he was betrayed, as he was establishing this community of people and he was speaking directly to the leadership in that little room, he said, a new commandment I give to you. A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another. And the Apostle John grabbed hold of that and realized that in that there is a charter for the whole church for all time to be front and center, to love one another. He puts himself into the exhortation He doesn't simply say, I exhort you among yourselves to love one another, but for us to love one another. There is no, in this earliest stage and still to this day, there is no such thing as an independent Christian church. We are bound together in love and in truth. But I am struck by the fact that in such a short space, he sees that it is necessary to remind them of these things. We can assume, perhaps, that they've already received the Gospel of John, and probably 1 John, and here again, the moment he's gonna write this community another letter, he reminds them of the same things. To love one another, as they have already been taught. It appears to me that love is a product. The maintenance of love is a product of reminding. It's a product of reminding our hearts are fickle, distractible, sinful, prone to error, prone to wandering, forgetful. And so it is necessary for the apostles and pastors and prophets to continually remind these churches to love one another, to love one another, to keep it front and center. We know that it was possible, the very same place where the Apostle John had been ministering in Ephesus, just a few years later perhaps, that the Lord Jesus himself was going to speak to a church, to the church in Ephesus, and remind them that while they maintain strict standards of truth and discipline, they had left their first love. They had left their first love. It's possible to do. It's possible to do. Sometimes as a parent, I am frustrated. I am frustrated by just the activity of reminding, reminding, reminding. How many times do I have to tell you to just simply move your dish over to the dishwasher? Whose socks are these? But that is our human condition. That is fundamental to parenting. As we read through the book of Proverbs, we see a dad who is continually saying, my son, my son, my son. And I take from that, that that's fundamental to good parenting because that is fundamental to the human condition. We need to be reminded. Do you need to be reminded? Dear lady, have circumstances so changed with all of your Bibles on your phones and your many Bibles on your shelves that you no longer need to be reminded? I don't believe that's true. And so I am again reminding you, let us love one another as you have done, so continue to do. Double down on your love to one another in this little community. Certainly the times are coming where we will more than ever need one another. We will need to rely on one another. We will need the encouragement from one another. We might need resources. People might lose their jobs. I think it's almost a certainty that in the next 10 years, some of you will lose your jobs simply for taking what we have known to be normal, Christian, ethical stands. What we believe to be right and wrong. we will need to love one another, support one another during those times. And then we are reminded again, it sounds so much like 1 John where he says here in verse six, the absolute close relationship between loving and walking in obedience to God. They are not separate. And this is love, he says, 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. To love, to love one another, to love God, is to keep his commandments. To keep his commandments is to love him. You cannot separate them. You dare not separate them. They're not contrary to one another, as some people falsely teach. And so, dear lady, let us love one another and keep God's commandments. But let us also look at this next exhortation in verses seven through nine. He begins by talking, this is undoubtedly the reason. I don't believe that the elder picked up a piece of paper and a pen and sat down to write again about love. He might have. He might have. He might have done that more times than this, than we know of. But he was aware of a danger that was approaching. He says, many deceivers have gone out into the world. They are a community of truth and love, but there are people who are coming to destroy that. They will destroy the truth through their lies, and then they will also destroy the love that is found among them. Many deceivers have gone out into the world who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is a deceiver and the antichrist. This is the very same community of separatists, apparently, that the apostle was dealing with in 1 John. And he knows that they're on their way to the elect lady. And so he gives them this second warning. He says, watch yourselves. Watch yourselves. Let love continue, but watch yourselves. Watch yourselves. It's not just a matter of watching for the false teachers. They are to do that. They're on their way. They're coming. He's going to talk about that toward the end of the letter, more about what they need to do when they get there. But he says, watch yourselves. And I think that's interesting. He doesn't just simply say, Watch out, look out, look who's coming, look who's on the way. Deceivers are coming, watch out. But he directs their attention inwardly upon themselves because the question of whether or not they are going to pass the test of false teachers has everything to do with how they are guarding their own hearts in relationship to Jesus Christ. Watch yourselves. The threat is within, not just without. When we see someone who has apostatized from the from the faith, we can be sure that there were problems within. They wander off after some false teaching. Undoubtedly, there was some problem in their heart. And just like love, of course, apostasy is real. This is he speaking to a chosen lady, the elect lady. The chosen ones, and yet he knows from experience. That many Christians who once walked with Christ, who once confessed righteousness, who once put their faith in the true Jesus Christ. at some point, later point in time, wandered off, wandered off. And so just like love, this is something that requires repeated warnings, repeated warnings. Almost every single letter in the New Testament has a warning against false teachers, a warning against falling away. It is a real and present danger. And he says, it's not just that you will, You'll run into trouble if this happens, but rather you will lose everything. Because he says, verse nine, whoever does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God. And if you do not have God, you do not have anything. Because what he means by that, of course, is that you do not have fellowship with God. You do not have forgiveness from God. You do not have eternal life. with God, will not have God. So watch yourselves. So what should we watch for in ourselves? Well, many things. I mean, the whole New Testament is filled with things that we should be watching for. But here, what he's referring to is a wandering away from the teaching of Jesus. Wandering away from the doctrines of Christ. He says, beware going on ahead of the teaching of Christ. Going on ahead of the teaching of Christ. What does this mean? What does it mean to go beyond the teaching of Christ here? Well, for one thing, it means, in this case, these antichrists are denying that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. This is an early form of false Christology, separating the divinity of Christ from the humanity of Christ, something that the church would work on for hundreds of years to get right, to get straight. Okay, but it could be any number of things that I would submit to you that it is anything, anything that takes your attention, takes your faith, takes your focus off of the Lord Jesus Christ and his salvation and his teachings to go beyond. You could be standing in squarely in an Orthodox church, but if your mind is filled with all other kinds of teaching, that would be the same thing to go beyond the teachings of Christ. I would encourage you, this doesn't mean that we just simply take just these doctrines and we just go over them and over them and over them again. I think we should at least do that. It's what we're doing today. It's what we continually do here as our practice. But I do also believe that it means we can go deep into those doctrines and plumb their depths. We can go wide. We can look at all the different ways in which those doctrines apply to the world, to different spheres of knowledge and understanding. The Lord Jesus Christ is Lord of all. He's Lord of economics. He's Lord of mathematics. He's Lord of science. He is Lord of all, and we should press the gospel into all of those things. But what sometimes happens in our fickle hearts is that we experience slow growth. We stumble, we get bored, we get tired, we get frustrated, and we say to ourselves, there must be something more. There must be something more, there must be more to this. There's gotta be a deeper understanding of this. Or we look at things that are pure mystery, the Trinity, the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ. And we say, there must be some kind of a rational explanation for these things. And so we begin to submit those things to pure reason, and to dissect them and inevitably pollute them. This is what it means to go beyond these things. We are to abide there. Go deep, yes. Go wide, yes, we must. But do not go beyond. You will never grow up beyond the teaching of Christ. You will never grow up beyond the teaching of Christ. In the teaching of Christ, you have your permanent home. You have found your philosophy. You have found the key to life. You have found everything. As Paul says in Colossians, in him, you have been made complete. You have been made complete. You do not need to go beyond him, but go deep with him. We come in the third place. Once these false teachers are coming in, the dear elect lady has done this necessary hard work of watching herself. What are they supposed to do then when these people show up? It's very simple. Do not receive them. Do not receive them. Verse 10 and 11. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, This teaching that is the teaching of Christ, the Orthodox teaching of Christ. Do not receive him into your house or give him any greeting for whoever greets him takes part in his wicked works. This is probably the occasion for the letter, they were probably on their way down there. And he speeds this letter along to prepare them for these deceptive villains that are headed down there to cause mayhem. The watchfulness that we see here is not purely rational, internal matter, a private matter of my own thinking and philosophy and study and understanding. No, we abide in the teachings of Christ by abiding with the teachers of Christ and only with the true teachers of Christ. I'm gonna say that again. We abide in the teachings of Christ by abiding with the teachers of Christ. That is where we find our home. That is how we abide. That is how we keep watch. One of the most important ways in which you keep watch is by fixing yourself with Orthodox Christian men to teach you continually. And then by looking out at the world and identifying those people that are not teaching the Orthodox Christian faith and avoiding them and separating yourselves from them. We cannot even separate, we can't separate our loyalty to Christ from our behavior toward other people. There are of course many people in the world who would like to believe that this is because of the incipient privatization of our religious practices. Everything is internal. And we think to ourselves, you know, I've got this all handled. I've got this all handled. I have all these relationships out there, but my Christian faith is right here. And it doesn't have much to do with whom I'm associating with, who I'm eating with and who I let in my house. So, for instance, The scripture is really clear. We cannot say that we love God if we do not love our brethren. Going back to that first point, do you love God? Do you walk in the truth? Well, we will see it socially by how you treat one another out there in the world with this community that he's placed you, not with the ideal Christian community that's in your head, but with this Christian community that he's placed you in. It is the matrix of your discipleship, these social relationships. And on the other hand, we cannot abide in the teachings of Christ if we also abide in the teachings of the Antichrist. We tolerate them. If we say, you know, I like to be the kind of person who is broad minded and gives everybody a hearing. We don't follow the simple directions of the apostle. Now some have taken this command to mean only that they should accept the person, they should rather not accept the person into their house church setting on an official capacity. And of course, I believe that it does mean that. But how they conduct their personal affairs is not in view here. I actually read a commentary that made this argument that went into, sometimes these guys are just too smart for their own good. And he made this long first century argument about how this is clearly talking about a house church setting. We need to recognize that because when we see that, we realize that in the modern day and age, If you receive false teachers into your house, well, that has no implication. That is going beyond this text. The Apostle Paul in discussing the treatment, well, first of all, let me just say, I disagree with that. I believe that it is one of the same substance to associate privately and in the church. Whom you deal with privately, whom you receive as a teacher privately, He's also in view here. The Apostle Paul in discussing the treatment of the excommunicant says not to eat with them as much as is possible. He's not merely talking about the Lord's table, but any table. What you communicate when you sit with the excommunicant is fellowship. which is exactly why they are excommunicated, because this is a table of fellowship. Likewise, if you have private hearings of false teachers in your home, regardless of whether or not you receive them in an official capacity in your church, you are doing the same thing. The difference between church and home is incidental. This will, of course, lead to sin. The Antichrist's teaching is always associated with sin. There's no distinction in the apostolic mind between heretical doctrine and behavior. All true doctrine is fundamentally repentant, law-abiding. loving. It necessarily follows that corruption of that doctrine is to make an allowance for sin. True doctrine is the only buttress against our sinful nature. When the apostles saw people messing around with the doctrines of Christ, they knew and understood and always saw what follows that is bad behavior. Do not tamper with that doctrine. We will always make an allowance for our sinful natures. Now I'm speaking again to people who are living in 2020. So some of these practices aren't, they're not the same anymore. What is meant here by a greeting, the exercise of hospitality, I acknowledge that some of those things have changed. And it's not likely, perhaps, that a false teacher will show up necessarily at your door. I don't believe, by the way, that this means you can't have a conversation in the hopes of converting a Jehovah's Witness or something like that. But you ought to be careful not to communicate in some inadvertent way that you're approving of them and you receive them in some way. And you do not allow a false teacher to come into your house and sit at your dinner table and teach your children. I'm right in assuming that, right? That you wouldn't do that. You wouldn't say, come in, teach my children. Give them your doctrine that's unthinkable. God be praised, we belong to a congregation and a denomination. that is carefully and repeatedly warned against the dangers of sending your children to be taught six hours a day by secularists in government schools. But I want to ask you, and I want you all to listen to me very carefully. Do you allow your children to sit at the feet of false teachers on YouTube? Or Twitch? Or Facebook? I can say without hesitation, this is most certainly the means by which many conservative, Orthodox, Christian children are presently being led astray into false teaching. If you believe that you've protected your children because you filtered out pornography, you're probably wrong. That is good. You should do that. But there is no ideology filtering software. And if your children are simply left alone to watch those things, well, I wanna tell you, you should be aware, they are filled with false teachers that teach directly against the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. There's an interesting story. This happened just a year ago in April, 2019. A young man who was 19 entered a synagogue in California, killed a woman, injured three others before he fled. He was arrested and he's currently awaiting trial. This young man had no criminal background, never gotten into trouble with the law. In fact, he was a outstanding student, piano player, 4.29 GPA. Everybody in the community only knew him to be an excellent young man. He was a member of Escondido Orthodox Presbyterian Church. His father was an elder there. He had been homeschooled his whole life up to the point of high school. His parents said how our son was attracted to such darkness is a terrifying mystery to us. But I will tell you how he came to fall into such darkness. He became prey to conspiracy theorists online in chat rooms like 4chan and 8chan, YouTube. He trafficked. He found himself at one point a couple of years ago in anti-Semitic chat rooms, which had a quasi-Christian kind of flavor to them. They were citing Bible texts and they were trying to make biblical arguments. And so he was able, on the one hand, to continue at church as a Christian, and yet at the same time, his heart was turning dark, becoming more and more filled with hatred. He was radicalized right under his parents' watch. He was pulled right out into the kingdom of darkness, and his parents were watching the whole time. They had known a few months before that he was starting to say some strange things about Jewish people. But they had no idea. They had no idea how far he had fallen. Because when this starts to happen, it happens quickly. It happens quickly. I know this is an extreme example, and it's certainly not something that has been repeated everywhere all across the way, but it illustrates the danger of online heresy. It is real, and many people are not gonna grab a gun and go shoot up a synagogue. There are many people who are wandering away from the faith. They're wandering away, and their parents look at them. Maybe they were homeschooled. Maybe they were in a Christian school their entire lives, and they cannot understand where this comes from. They don't realize that there has been a false teacher sitting in their house this whole time. And not just for a short amount of time, for hours a day. The average amount of time a person, the average user spends on YouTube every single day is over an hour. Over an hour. That is a long time to be sitting and listening. I remember Watching a documentary about one, it's this thing, Twitch, and I've referred to this before in sermons. I'm gonna remind you again what it is because probably most of you have absolutely no idea what it is. I've gone on this site. It makes absolutely no sense to me. You watch people play video games. for hours on end. Often what people will do is they'll just have it on in the background and it's just kind of background noise. But you know what sometimes what those people are doing while they're playing video games? They're talking. And one of the most famous Twitch stars is a guy who promotes all of the stuff that we're reading about in the news, social justice, critical race theory, and he has hundreds of thousands of followers who listen to him spout this evil, false gospel for hours. The parents poke their heads in, it's like, okay, he's just playing video games. They don't realize he's being indoctrinated. He's being indoctrinated. Be aware of what comes into your house. Be aware of the false teacher that is present here. Have nothing to do with him. Do not greet him or take part in his wicked works. And we end this in the same manner that the elder does, joy. Joy in our face-to-face fellowship, which means something really special in 2020, doesn't it? I long to see you face-to-face. We get to see each other face-to-face, and I praise God that we do still have that. I'm so saddened by the fact that there are so many churches that do not see each other. They haven't seen each other's faces in months. This elder takes joy in this church because they are of the truth and because they love one another. And I know I speak for Bo and the other elders that our joy in your love Commitment to the truth is great, but keep up your guard. There are forces in the world that would steal what has been built up here. Amen? Sola Deo Gloria. May God be glorified in the preaching of his goodness.