Oh man, if you’ll turn within your Bibles please to First John chapter 3, beginning at verse 11. John writes, ‘For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous. Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you. We know that we have passed out of death into life because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth. By this we know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him. For whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything. Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God, and whatever we ask we receive from him because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his son Jesus Christ and love one another just as he has commanded us. Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God and God in him. And by this we know that he abides in us by the Spirit whom he has given us.’ This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Lord, you have given us your word, and it is good and great and useful for teaching us, for raising us up in godliness, for training and correction and reproof. There are things that are difficult to understand, and yet you have given us more word. You have given us your Spirit to guide us and help us to understand what you teach. Open our hearts and our minds to hear you speak, to receive your word, and to live by your word. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
You know, it never ceases to amaze me how many people recommend the Gospel of John or the other writings of John to new believers or to people whom they wish to see converted as the first things for them to read in the Bible. It baffles my mind. Mark is a far better choice in my opinion because it was written to convince, you know, godless pagans who are entirely unfamiliar with the specifics of the Jewish religion, and it was also written to be understood by common ordinary people. People’s reasoning and their argument for suggesting John first is their insistence that John wrote all about love, as if all that John wrote about was love. They think that love is the attractive thing which will make people choose faith in Jesus, as if the promise of love alone is enough to make a person forsake their sinful ways and choose Jesus Christ. They are right in part because love is enough, and it should be enough except for the simple truth that the average person encountering the Bible and John for the first time begins by possessing the wrong understanding about what love is.
They begin to read while they know, accept, and believe the world’s definition of love, not God’s definition. The world says a lot about love. The world loves to talk about love. Love is being promoted everywhere in the world around us. Rarely is it ever God’s love, agape love. This problem is now made a thousand times worse because of the English language, and this is a problem that the church hardly had to deal with back during the first few centuries when people were still using Greek as a primary language, as their first language or as the language of trade.
I know I’ve covered this before, but ancient Greek has five significant and different terms which are translated into English as love: agape, which is unconditional and self-sacrificing love; philia, brotherly love; eros, sexual love; storge, a natural familial love as for one’s parents or a cousin; and phallacia, self-love, which is kind of like self-esteem but a little bit more negative. All five of those words are translated as love, and in our language, we are entirely dependent upon the clarity of the context to understand what kind of love is actually being meant, especially when the words are exactly the same.
Consider the intended meaning of a child saying, ‘I love you,’ to their mother. That would be storge. Then consider that child saying, ‘I love you,’ to their brother or sister. That would be philia. Lastly, consider their mother saying, ‘I love you,’ to her husband. That would be agape or eros or even storge.
That is why the popular expression ‘love is love’ is linguistic nonsense and entirely unhelpful in any debate or to facilitate any kind of understanding because it doesn’t actually mean anything at all. Now, the things which John writes about are very challenging for us to read and hear largely because he uses his vocabulary so differently from everyone else in the world, redefining certain words like cosmos, oida, and gnosis. But he was not alone among the New Testament writers doing this. Paul did this much the same thing with words like sarks or flesh or nomos and anomia—law and lawlessness.
See, these writers took commonly used words and phrases from out of their popular culture and redefined them through and for a Christian worldview and perspective. Although John is only responsible for five of the 27 books of the New Testament, much of our Christian lingo, many of our church words, and the way we use them originate in John’s writings. I expect that’s because John takes the time to clearly define what those words should now mean to us as Christians.
And truly, John wrote about love a lot because it was an important concept for him. It could be said that agape summarized his whole understanding of Jesus’s ministry, purpose, and work. Therefore, John teaches us that as Christians, as followers of Jesus Christ, agape should be the focus, emphasis, and purpose of each of our ministries and all of our works of life.
As he reminds us, ‘For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.’ John wrote this because Jesus said it. Therefore, I’m saying it again with them once more: love one another. But since we live now in a fallen world, how can we know or understand what love is unless we understand also what love is not?
To teach us what love is not, John recalls and then interprets a story for us from Genesis—the story of Cain and Abel. That story is very difficult, troublesome, or problematic when it’s only considered in its historical written context and not according to its place within the whole context of God’s story of redemption.
Immediately after reminding us to love one another, John tells us that we should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. See, he gives us a do and then places a do not in opposition to it. So, please take a look with me back in Genesis chapter 4, because we all need to take a look at that story again so that we don’t rely entirely on what we think we know about it or what we think we remember about it to try and help us understand what John means by making such an absolute declaration.
Looking at verse 2, now Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain a worker of the ground. In the course of time, Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering, he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his face fell. The Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry, and why is your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it.’ Cain spoke to Abel his brother, and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him.
Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is Abel your brother?’ He said, ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’
So, truly the biggest question and challenge we find here with the Cain and Abel story is: why did God have no regard for Cain’s offering when he had regard for Abel’s? The story there in Genesis never plainly tells us, which causes several problematic concerns that we must wrestle with. Was God being arbitrary and capricious? You know, although scripture does elsewhere affirm that God will have mercy on whom he will have mercy, this was not an occasion requiring either mercy or judgment; this was an occasion of worship.
God is not arbitrary, and he does not ever change his mind. Our problem is that we tend to think that God must accept or approve of our worship. We forget that he is under no obligation to us to accept it or not. Therefore, it is his sovereign choice according to his own good will and good pleasure. What did Cain actually do wrong? He did not worship God the way that he wanted to be worshiped. However, the way in how Cain and Abel’s worship in this case was less important than their why for worship and the who is being worshiped.
I mean, how could God be justifiably upset with Cain if God never told them how he wanted to be worshiped? Although God does not command Adam and his family to worship him, nor does God command how he is to be worshiped by them, they still felt the desire to worship God. Because even though they had been exiled from koinonia with God in the garden, they still knew and understood who God is—the Sovereign Creator—and who they were in relation to him— subordinate creations. They knew, not only by firsthand personal experience and observation, but they also knew it within their hearts, within their moral center—that God should be must be worshiped and glorified.
See, Abel offered true, loving worship that was pleasing to God, while Cain’s act of worship was performed out of animosity and hatred for the one being worshiped and was therefore not pleasing to God. The way in which John interprets this story shows us that it’s the attitude of the heart towards God which demonstrates whether we belong to Jesus Christ or if we belong to the devil.
So we can now clearly see the differing attitudes of those two brothers in the story. Cain brought God an offering of the fruit of the ground— the result of Cain’s hard work and effort—because he knew that he must give something to God out of obligation for gratitude. So he brought some of whatever he had. But Abel brought God the firstborn of his flock and their fat portions. He brought the first and the best of the herd that he tended out of his earnest gratitude for the fact that God had given him something at all. Abel was intentional about what he offered to God because he understood who God is and because he loved God. Abel wanted God to have the best of what he had received because God was worthy of it and deserved it. Abel was willing to be satisfied with whatever was left over. Abel was satisfied with receiving his reward after God received his due because he loved God more than he loved himself.
Abel remained humble before God because he did not elevate himself above God in his own self-estimation. But Cain haphazardly brought something of what he had grown because he knew that God is sovereign and therefore must receive what he is due. However, while Abel gave the first and the best, Cain made sure that he took care of himself first.
He made sure that he had enough of what he wanted before he gave God his portion. Cain did not care about God at best, or at worst, Cain hated God outright—a grasp for what he thought God had done to him and his family by exiling them from the garden. See, Cain cared more for himself than he cared for God because in his arrogance, by keeping the first and best for himself, he elevated himself above God in his own self-estimation.
So it is very easy to see whose they were according to their actions and intentions. Abel walked in love like Jesus, while Cain walked in hate like an antichrist. Abel belonged to Christ, and Cain belonged to the devil. When God corrected Cain after he did not regard his offering favorably, God warned Cain that his sinfulness was contrary to his nature and that he must rule over it, meaning he must overcome his sin and practice righteousness.
See, if there was any positive spiritual strength within the hearts of men, then God’s warning should have been disciplined enough to cause Cain to repent, to change his ways, and stop his practice of sinning. But instead, he allowed his sinfulness to rule over him. Cain allowed hate for his brother to grow within his heart from the seed of envy because he saw the Lord exalt Abel for his humility and reverence while he was humbled because of his arrogance. Therefore, because of his hatred, Cain murdered Abel. John explains that Cain murdered Abel because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous.
Cain elevated himself above God and was knocked down for it, so then, because he felt God had elevated Abel over him, Cain tried to elevate himself over his brother by murdering him. Nobody, nobody ever hates someone that they believe to be above them, that they believe is superior to them. People only hate those they consider are beneath them, for then they will work against them to make themselves feel superior. If a person hates someone who is actually above them, that person will then work to tear them down so that their victim might experience the truth that the hater was above them all along.
Hierarchy in life is important; chains of authority are helpful and good for just living. People are elevated over others because it is a good and helpful thing. Where it goes wrong and evil is when a person elevates themselves over others instead of letting themselves be elevated and given authority and responsibility. Hatred causes a person to raise themselves over another because of their hatred for it, when a person who loves will raise someone else over them because of their love for them.
That is how we can know what hate and love are. Hate, therefore, is the way of death and condemnation because hate always leads to murder and harm to others, while love is the way of life, the way of eternal life and blessing, because love always leads to the preservation of life and help. This is plain, simple, and obvious to recognize when you see the story through the lens of Christ that John has given us. To know whether someone is of Christ or antichrist, we can know whether they love or hate.
Then, just like Jesus warned him, John warns us: ‘Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you.’ The cosmos hated Christ and killed him because of it. The cosmos and Satan tried to prove their superiority over God the Son and God’s plan for creation by killing him, but God raised Jesus up from the grave and triumphed over Satan and the cosmos.
Jesus did not exalt himself; God exalted him because God the Father loves God the Son. Satan was cast down from heaven because he tried to exalt himself over God, because Satan hates God. And for the cosmos, first hated Jesus Christ, the cosmos now also hates Christians. The world hates us, and anyone with eyes that are open can see that easily. We expect it, and we should take comfort in that expectation because of what the cosmos’s hate implies about us. It implies that we know that we have passed out of death into life because we love the brothers.
Whoever does not love, in death, the world’s hatred and animosity of us, because we know where we stand on the side of Christ and all of his holy ones. And we know this because of the agape we feel and show for our brothers and sisters, our friends and neighbors, and even our enemies. If the world hates us because we do not belong to its dark domain of death, we know that we have been brought to now abide in the light of life instead of the darkness of death where we all once dwelled.
Rounding out his explanation of what it truly means for someone to hate another, John explains plainly, ‘Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in it.’ Now, before you begin to think that John is being extreme or too harsh, please understand he was only using the same definition and explanation that Jesus taught when he was describing the kingdom ethic.
‘You’ve heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder,’ and whoever murders will be liable to judgment. But I, Jesus, say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. Whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council, and whoever says ‘You fool’ will be liable to the hell of fire.’
So, holding on to sinful anger against someone through hatred is a violation of the sixth commandment: ‘You shall not murder.’ Even if you never ever take tangible action against them, according to your sinful anger and hatred, you have murdered them in your heart, and you have removed your love from them. Such people who hate others prove that eternal life, that the life of Christ, does not abide in them.
So if hatred is the exaltation of one’s own self over others, if it is the tearing down and belittling of another, if it is having a lower regard for them than you do for yourself or having no regard for them at all, and if this always leads to murder—whether physically or in one’s heart—what then is love? What is agape really?
‘By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.’ See, love is the humbling of one’s own self through the elevation of others. It is raising them up and building them up. It is having a higher regard for them than you do for yourself, even if it means you gladly and willingly make sacrifices for their benefit. The Apostle Paul wrote, ‘But God shows his love for us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’ And John quotes Jesus saying, ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.’
John tells us that love, Christian love, agape, is typified by self-sacrifice—loving others. The Christian is commanded to be sacrificial, even up to the point of sacrificing their lives to save or rescue others. Hatred is to be selfish; love is to be selfless.
So how selfless and sacrificial are we? Are you? We’re also blessed—so very blessed by God—that few of us ever realize precisely how blessed we are. Perhaps we might gain some understanding by watching videos from Richland Pregnancy Services or educations or Operation Christmas Child and seeing the terrible examples and consequences of the poverty that many people live in. Perhaps we’ve gone on mission trips or work-related trips to other countries or other less-than-savory parts of American cities, and we’ve seen it for ourselves. Perhaps we’ve even experienced it firsthand ourselves.
We have no excuse to not admit how blessed and how much better we are now than so many others. We know the great need which the world has. There is need for Jesus Christ and the love of Christ. Both needs are ones which every Christian is commanded to go out and meet if we truly are what we believe we are. All of us are called to evangelize by preaching the gospel and making disciples.
We are called and commanded to share Jesus with everyone—to introduce Jesus. Our first responsibility is to make the introduction to him. Then our second is to love them as he loves us, as he loves them, because Jesus will love them through us and our actions so that hopefully one day they too will come to believe in and trust him.
How are you doing with either of those responsibilities? How are we supposed to do this? I mean, what does it look like? The first responsibility of evangelism is very easy to do, but what is hard is getting most of us to do it. We have to first know Jesus, and then we have to talk to other people about Jesus and what he has done for us. However, we don’t do it because of our fear; because we fear the world. We fear the wrath of the cosmos more than we fear the judgment and wrath of the Almighty. To us, any lasting damage or harm.
Then John tells us exactly what that second responsibility looks like, and it’s just as easy to do as the first. ‘But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk, but in deed and in truth. By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him. For whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything.’
See, we must walk the walk and not just talk the talk. We must do things because of our faith. We must agape others sacrificially when we see a need; we need to fill that need. Last week, we put a note in the bulletin about some things that RPS is needing, and somebody brought them into the office today and sometime during the week. Thank you! Whenever we see somebody hungry, we feed them. Our congregation supports a local food bank that operates out of Grace Episcopal Church.
Whenever someone needs clothing, we help to clothe them. Winter clothes and cold-weather gear are always in high demand and very much needed at our fall rummage sale. Baby, do we have more opportunities to help people here in Mansfield to stay warm this winter than we have the ability. Perhaps we should do a blanket, scarf, hat, and mittens or glove drive to share those with people who need them.
When someone needs a ride to church or the doctor or to the store, we get them wherever they need to go and then bring them home again, because I know that many of you people give others rides to and from different places, including church. Thank you!
So, yes, we said that churches and Christians would give a hand-up, not handouts. But now, the American church by and large has abrogated our duty of loving service to others and has instead allowed or even encouraged the government to replace this.
And I don’t think we’ve allowed this to happen because Christians were tired of helping others or because it was too difficult. Because we fell for a lie from the cosmos, too many of us bought into the lie that government institutions can do all of these things better than individuals, churches, and whole denominations can. Because they have an economy of scale, they are bigger, have more resources, and therefore more broad access to people.
The plain truth is that only those people closest to the need can ever appreciate the severity of the need and then act with the urgency necessary to the particular need. Otherwise, in the view of government entities, every form of help is reduced to the lowest common denominator, which either doesn’t satisfy the need of any one individual or oversupplies those who are hardly in need to begin with.
Then they spread their help out across the widest population possible, making their help hardly a help at all. Whenever a Christian helps someone, they want them to eventually become more self-sufficient and self-reliant—to depend upon God and to begin using the gifts which he has given them in his providence to support themselves going forward and to pay it forward through helping others as they have been helped.
But whenever the government helps up, they want them to become more dependent upon the government and society and become less individualistic, more communal until they no longer have an option but to accept whatever they’re provided by that government. Socialism, communism, Marxism fails every time because they are anti-Christical worldviews and systems because they are ultimately established upon a foundation of hate, selfishness, and greed.
It is virtuous and righteous for a person to give to another, but it is wicked and sinful to take something from one person in order to give it to another. Redistribution by force goes against both the letter and spirit of God’s law—the eighth commandment: ‘You shall not steal.’ However, free-market capitalism, on the other hand, allows people to freely choose to give and receive help as they need. And whenever people are truly working for the good benefit of society as a whole, as Christians do the same good as prescribed in scripture, they end up working for their own benefit as well.
Just as we discussed last week concerning our good works of love for others and for God’s glory, because truly, a rising tide will raise all ships equally. Even the best, most self-serving, selfish rational individual knows that working for the betterment of society as a whole will benefit themselves to a greater degree. It’s few people who will complain if they get one while the person who puts forth the actual effort is decent. A selfish person will gain far more over time if they ensure that others get one to their two than a wicked selfish person who gets three or four to society’s zero or negative one—gaining more and more quickly at the expense of others—because that kind of exploitation is oppression and will not be tolerated for long.
That is not love—that is hate. So, when we walk the walk, we know that we belong to the truth and our heart is reassured. Or if all we do is talk, then our heart condemns us. When our heart condemns us, we begin to feel convicted until either we do whatever it is that God is calling us to do or we harden our hearts until no love remains within us. God alone knows the heart of a person. The hearts of fallen mankind, of those who belong to the race of Adam, of antichrists, are all stony, calcified, and dead hearts.
But the hearts of those elected into Christ, those who belong to the race and family of Jesus, of Christians, are all fleshy, beating, pumping, thumping, and living hearts. Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God. But really, whose heart does not condemn at least sometimes? Only the heart of an antichrist never condemns them because it knows of nothing to condemn. It sees nothing wrong with whatever it does or neglects to do.
However, that’s not what John is getting at here. If our heart condemns us, then there is an even greater sign that we are truly numbered among the elect and that we have reason to be confident before God. That if our heart does not continue to condemn us after we have repented, repaired, and restored whatever the Holy Spirit within us has led us to, then we know that we are able to stand confident before God when Christ will judge our good works and give us our eternal reward—not salvation, but our reward within his kingdom.
Now John concludes this portion of his missive: ‘And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his son Jesus Christ and love one another just as he has commanded us. Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God and God in him, and by this we know that he abides in us by the Spirit whom he has given us.’
Remember, we are commanded to believe and to love—to trust Jesus and to love others as he loves us because of our faith and trust in him. That is how we abide in God and how we know that he abides within us. Therefore, we must love. If we agape God and agape others, then we can know that we have confidence before God, and we can be assured of our status as the children of God.
So have confidence before God and love. Amen.