According to the Scriptures

Damian Kyle: Let me ask you, do you find someone in your life difficult to love or be around? Give this one a try. This loving our fellow brothers in this way and sisters is something that doesn't mark our lives. Or we find it difficult because we're trying to do it on our own strength. Just say to the Lord, "Lord, give me your love for this person because this is all how I view this person and feel about this person that is coming out. And yet you say you love this person for all their flaws, all their spots, all their wrinkles. And if I'm going to love them in the way that you've commanded me to, you're going to have to give me that love from your throne for this person."

Now, in verse 6, the person who says that they abide in God, John says ought to walk as He, that is Jesus, walked. And how did Jesus walk? He walked in obedience to the Father's commands. John chapter 8, verse 28, Jesus said to them, "When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and that I do nothing of myself; but as my Father taught me, I speak these things. And He who sent me is with me. The Father has not left me alone, for I always do those things that please Him."

John chapter 6, verse 38, Jesus says, "For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of Him who sent me." John chapter 4, verse 34, Jesus said to them, "My food, my meat, my sustenance is to do the will of Him who sent me and to finish His work." In verse 6, that word "abide" that John uses there, this speaks of a healthy obedient relationship with God. Jesus is our supreme example of what the Christian life is intended to be and how different His example was and is of the Christian life from what Gnostics, both then and now, were endeavoring to say that Christianity is and what they were advocating. Very, very different.

Jesus's life had no compartmentalization between believing and living, what a person is on the inside as opposed to the outside. Everything is to glorify God. And so John tells us, if you've got all these goofy things that are being said and people are telling you all kinds of different things about what the Christian life is and what it isn't, always take it back to Christ. Take it back to Jesus and see if the teaching holds up.

Guest (Male): Hey, welcome to According to the Scriptures. Pastor Damian Kyle is in our study of 1 John and we're in chapter 2 today. I got to ask you, how do you really know that you know God? How can you be absolutely sure? God doesn't want to leave us in the dark. Today we're learning that a true Christian will have a pattern of obedience to God's commandments and a genuine love for other Christians, too. So let's see together what authentic fellowship with God looks like according to the scriptures.

Damian Kyle: He's the only true Christian that's ever lived. We're working at it. I mean, we're Christians, but I mean in terms of complete obedience. And so He is the example in all of this, and not the example of anyone who contends for anything other than exactly the life that He lived in example to us. Then in verses 7 through 11, John moves on to give us an example of a commandment that we are called to obey. And depending on Christian by Christian, one that people can find very hard to obey even as a Christian, but it's a commandment that Jesus exemplified in His own life, and that is to love our brothers, to love our fellow Christians.

So an authentic relationship with God will be marked by a love for our fellow Christians. John says that this is not a new commandment, and it's a commandment that we've had from the beginning. So John, as I said, takes a little while to get to the commandment or the fact that it's a commandment to love one another as Christians. He gets to it in verse 10 and that's the point that he's making. Jesus, of course, taught us to love one another. He taught this continually in His ministry. The Christians that John writes this letter to, most of them second-generation Christians, they would have been very familiar with Jesus's teaching on the issue that we are to love one another as Christians.

Jesus on the night before His crucifixion, He declared to the disciples and to us in John chapter 13, "A new commandment I give you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another." So Jesus not only taught that we're to love one another, but He practiced it. John chapter 13, verse 1: "Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come that He should depart from this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end." You might remember that the disciples were a handful.

In this, Jesus commands us to love one another in this way. This love for each other, He doesn't ask us to do anything that He didn't do Himself and that He doesn't presently do in each one of our lives. So He doesn't ask us to do something He didn't do. He doesn't ask us to do anything He isn't actively doing in the life of every one of our lives as Christians. Jesus didn't merely teach that we're to love one another, but He gave us the degree and He gave us the motivation. Again in John chapter 13, "as I have loved you."

That ought to provide any Christian, including myself, with all of the motivation that we need to love our fellow Christians, no matter how unworthy they are of that love or how unpleasant they are or immature they are or how proud they are or how foolish they are and so forth. Because Jesus never stops actively loving us, even though we have been all of those things and worse in our relationship with Him. We have, I have no doubt, the vast majority of us sinned against Him in a way that no other Christian has sinned against us.

If Jesus made His love for us individually as conditional as we can sometimes make our love for other Christians, we would all be in trouble. We could never be confident in His love. So we can't represent Him in the body of Christ or in the world without loving in this way. I do think it's very important to understand that the Greek word that John uses for love in verse 10 is the word "agape." And the word "agape" speaks of a love that comes from God. And so it's not a love that we are to work up on our own. It is a love that the Holy Spirit brings into our lives when we are born again.

When He comes into our lives, He brings this love into our lives that we might be able to obey a command that would otherwise be impossible to obey apart from Him, such as this commandment. Galatians chapter 5, verse 22: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love." He comes into our life and He brings God's love into our life. And so to praise something in terms of obeying this commandment and loving other Christians, the Bible says that we as Christians have spots and we have wrinkles. We're very blemished.

Peter calls us a peculiar people. We are a handful, every one of us. When God saved us, He didn't get a gem, He got a project. He loves projects. Any kind of self-awareness in our life will recognize that we test the boundaries of His love in loving us as He does. So if this loving our fellow brothers in this way and sisters is something that doesn't mark our lives, or we find it difficult because we're trying to do it on our own strength, just say to the Lord, "Lord, give me your love for this person because this is all how I view this person and feel about this person that is coming out."

"And yet you say you love this person for all their flaws, all their spots, all their wrinkles. And if I'm going to love them in the way that you've commanded me to, you're going to have to give me that love from your throne for this person." And He will do that within our life. It will be the death of us, but He'll do it. It's a wonderful death. It's also important to realize that this agape love is different from kind of the sappy emotional kind of weak way that love is used within our culture.

Agape love always does what is best for the other person, which means loving another Christian isn't always saying yes to them. It isn't always enduring their abuse or their carnality. This love is equally expressed in saying no and equally expressed in gently but firmly confronting sin or carnality in them. Now in verse 8, this command, John says, is true in God and in you. And so this command is true in Jesus. We see it continually in His public ministry and as He's in the Bible and as He's writing to these Christians in the first century.

He said, "I'm not challenging the fact that you aren't loving one another; you are." Then he goes on in verse 8 and says, "Because the darkness is passing away and the true light is shining." Remember Jesus is the light of the world. In this, John speaks of the importance of obeying this command to love. The darkness refers to the moral darkness of our present age and the world that we live in, including how readily it gravitates to hate as opposed to love, including how selfish and how conditional it is with its love.

But John said that all of that is passing away. It's old news, it's on its way out, there's no future in it. Don't invest in it. One day that will be done away with. He says the future lies in love and in God's agape love. At the end of the age when all of this gives way to a new heaven and a new earth, there will be no hate, there will only be love. So we are to manifest this love toward one another as an evidence to the world around us of a new eternal kingdom that was birthed into human history by Jesus Christ Himself.

So they can see something different than how the world manifests love, how conditional it is, how weak it is, how failing it is, and see it in our relationships with one another and then to be drawn into that kingdom themselves. Notice in verse 9 the Apostle John's clear rebuke of the self-deception of thinking that I'm in the light as a Christian while hating my brother. Apparently some were teaching this was okay and they were teaching this as an enlightened way to live.

Maybe you've had people say, you get a commandment to love one another, whatever, and somebody else will say, "Let's be realistic. You can't expect us to do any more than hate somebody." This was the kind of thing that was floating around and Jesus declared that there's nothing enlightened about it. It's a sure sign that a person is in darkness and not walking in the light with God. And then in verse 10 you have John's affirmation of Christians who love their brother and the blessings that become ours. Again, the letter's intended to encourage the blessings of one who loves his brother.

He says he abides in the light. So if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. John chapter 1. So he is in fellowship with God the Father, he's in fellowship with Jesus in this regard related to love. And then he says there's no cause for stumbling in him. In other words, it's only walking in love that allows us to see life clearly and to navigate our path through this world safely. Conversely in verse 11, John comes back around to the one who claims to love God while hating his brother.

He said it is to live in darkness and it is to walk in darkness. Such a person will never be able to make any kind of significant progress in their Christian life that God has called us to. Certainly no one can become like Christ in being like this. He says that such a person doesn't know where he's going. In other words, he's lost perspective because the darkness has blinded his eyes. In contrast to love, hatred, John says, it blinds us. And we know that it does.

We have popular sayings within our culture that endure from one generation to another. We speak negatively about somebody being possessed of a blind hatred for someone else. We use that phrase for a reason. There are many reasons, but one of the reasons that we speak about blind hatred is that it causes a person to lose objectivity. All they can see or all we can see is what we hate in the other person and not the person as a whole. We lose sight of their virtues, we lose sight of the areas of their life that they're living that are superior to how we are living our lives.

And it is to ignore the nuances that make up every human life. No individual is entirely encapsulated in one act during their life or one wrong that they've committed against us. And so it is to miss the fullness of that individual and that's a mindset that has the possibility of doing great harm to another person. It will certainly do great harm to us and it'll do great harm to the reputation of God and Christianity in the world. As challenging, self-sacrificial loving one another as Christians can be at times, Jesus and the Apostle John know that when push comes to shove in this evil world that we live in, that we need each other.

Nobody else is going to have our backs when push comes to shove, when it begins to cost them something extraordinarily. So we need to look out for one another and we can't trust anyone else to stand with us or to have our backs except for other Christians. And so we need to love one another and we need to take care of one another in exactly the same way that we experience God's love for us and care for us on a daily basis despite all of our spots and all our wrinkles and all of our peculiarities.

I do not say that it is always easy. I know better from my own life. But that's why the prayer to God: "God, you know full well that the ability to love this person... Lord, I have so many people in my life who are so easy to love, but this person, would you give me your heart and your love for them so I can obey your commandment even in this relationship in my life?" So two further marks of an authentic relationship with God. First, an authentic relationship with God will be marked by obedience to His commandments.

And then second, it will be marked by a love for our brethren. This morning as we close here, just the response in our own heart, the privacy of our own heart. Are we casual in our attitude toward and our practice of sin as a Christian? Realize that is something that Jesus did not be born into the world, die on the cross, be buried, rise again on the third day. That is not the Christianity that He went through all of that to provide to us, to recognize that and repent of that self-defined Christianity and then recommit your life to the Lord and take the Christian life seriously.

In terms of being unloving this morning, the same thing. Repent and stop and think today, if not before you leave here this morning, stop and think about the greatness of God's love for us and then to put what He asks of us in terms of love for another Christian up against that and to realize there's really no comparison between the two. Lord, I want to be like you. I want to be like you are in my life. So give me this love and produce it in me for other Christians.

And then for those of you who look and say, "Well, my life is marked by generally by obedience to God's commandments, I take all of this seriously and obeying God's command to love one another," then this passage here this morning is an affirmation to you, to us, that you are living the Christian life authentically as God intends it to be. No matter how many other voices are claiming to speak for God and for Christianity in contrast to these things, you are tapped into the real thing. That's what He wants us to be encouraged in.

Guest (Male): Obedience and love, they should mark the Christian's life. Question is, do they mark your life? Today on According to the Scriptures, we've been in 1 John chapter 2. Pastor Damian Kyle is developing his series called Authentic Fellowship with God. For resource requests like today's message on CD, call 209-545-5530. That's 209-545-5530. Pastor Damian Kyle's studies can also be heard online at accordingtothescriptures.com, oneplace.com, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we also have a church app where you can listen to Damian. Search for Calvary Chapel Modesto in the App Store or Google Play. If you would like to partner with us through a financial gift, you're more than welcome to do that through our website, accordingtothescriptures.com. Let me also give you our mailing address, that would be According to the Scriptures, 4300 American Avenue, Modesto, California, the zip code is 95356. And don't miss our next study when Pastor Damian Kyle will again open the word, helping us to live our lives according to the scriptures. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Modesto.