When we surrender our lives to Jesus, when we belong to Him, it's expected that we will. Yeah. Today, on Truth for Life, we'll learn how the Apostle John's social test of genuine love reveals something about our relationship with God. Alastair Begg is teaching from 1 John chapter 2. Here's how you'll know that you're in Christ if you keep His commands.
Now you see You'd come to me afterwards, you'd say, You know what? I didn't like that because I do have a card in my Bible, and I did do this and I did do that. Hey, I've got cards in my Bible, I've walked aisles, I've prayed prayers, I've done the whole nine yards along with you. But I'm reading one John as well, and this is what I'm discovering. The word of God says to me, you want to know, Alistair Begg, that you are in me tonight, here's how you will know, that you live the obedient life.
That's it. Whether you're a pastor, a priest, a prophet, an elder, a deacon, a singer, a testifier, a speaker at women's clubs, I don't care who you are, here's the test. The moral of the radical claims of Jesus Christ. And I say again, we've soft soaked the gospel to such a degree that every Tom, Dick, Harry and Mary that is found trundling along somewhere in a vast cavernous gap somewhere behind Jesus Christ is swept into his life.
Well, we made a new gospel. Certainly, not the Gospel of Jesus, nor the Gospel of John, nor what he is driving home here. The relevance or the irrelevance of what happened in the past. Needs to be assessed in light of what is going on in the present. This is how we know we are in Him.
Whoever claims to live in him Must walk. As Jesus did. There's a great challenge in that as well, isn't there? Doesn't so much talk as Jesus talked. For most of us, talk is cheat.
We can talk it up good. We can talk it good enough to to uh Pass the inspection of blame guides. He says, it's not the talk, it's the walk. Whoever claims to live in Him must walk the way that Jesus walked. He walked in obedience to His Father.
He walked in such obedience to his father that he didn't care what anyone else thought. He knew what it was to say, Father, I wish there was some other way, but not my will, your will. And he walked steadfastly towards the cross, bearing shame and scoffing rude. In my place, condemned, he stood, sealed my pardon with his blood. Hallelujah, what a savior.
C.T. Studd, the great missionary spokesman and leader and founder, had that dawn upon his life. And then he said: If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice that I can ever make for him will ever be too much. And tonight The evidence is in the conduct of our lives. not simply in the content of our lips.
The second test moves from the moral realm of true obedience to the social realm of genuine love. And notice how striking come these two words Ah there is actually one word in Greek in verse 7. Dear friends, you'll find all the way through one, John. I'm sure you've noticed this already, that there's a real genuine warmth about what John is saying. Time and again he says, dear children, time and again he says beloved, dearly beloved, and so on.
And we ought not to miss the loving tone of the Apostle, even when he is driving home some very hard sayings. Dear friends, verse 7: I'm not writing you a new command, but an old one. Verse eight, I am writing you a new command.
Well, let's sort it out. Is he writing an old command or a new command? Which is it?
Now, again, we need to see this in context.
Some were suggesting newfangled ideas. And it may be that some were suggesting that John was coming up with newfangled ideas. And they may have been suggesting that John's notions as he was writing them in this letter were actually a kind of whole New Age movement, as it were. And so John wants them to realize, no, no. That's not the case.
What I am writing to you is an old command. In point of fact, if anyone was coming up with newfangled ideas, it was these heretical teachers. And it's not unusual. Take every cult or sect you've ever read about, and there's a whole bunch of new stuff in it, isn't there? You take your Bible and take what they say, and there's all a bunch of newfangled nonsense that attaches to it.
Go to the Christian Science Reading Room, and what do you see? You see your Bible and a bunch of newfangled stuff. Go and see the Mormons, and what do you got? You got the Bible, but it won't do on its own. It's got to have Joseph Smith hanging on the back of it.
And is it happening still today? You bet your life it is.
Now we need to go out and tell people because they ask us all the time: what is the chapel, for goodness sake? The chapel? What's that about? Is it unity? Is it this?
Is it that? And all the time I'm disclaiming and disclaiming, no, we're not these, we're not them, we're not, we're not, we're not, well, what in the world are you?
Well, this is what we are here. We don't have any new commands. We don't have any newfangled ideas. We're in the main line of historic Christianity. We're glad to say the Nicene Creed.
We might have to change a little bit here and there to keep some people happy, but we are right in the main line of historic Protestantism. We are out of the Reformation. We believe in sola scriptura, sola fide, sola grassa, that a man or a woman may only be saved solely by grace, solely by faith, and solely grounded in the scriptures as the holy word of God. And actually, we were discovering just on Sunday night, as our little Scottish pastor tried to make it clear to us with a multitude of words that, in point of fact, what we were involved with was not some newfangled notion, but we were involved with an old command which was there from the beginning: the old command, the message we have heard. And that's what he was actually saying.
Leviticus chapter 19 and verse 18. Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. And so John says, I'm writing to you. Not a new command, but an old command.
You've had it from the beginning. It was old insofar as it was in the Old Testament. It was old insofar as it was there at the outset of their Christian lives. The 24th verse of 1 John 2 here: see that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you. And in his second letter in the sixth verse, And this is love that we walk in obedience to his commands, as you have heard from the beginning.
His command is that you walk in love. And so he says, verse 7: I'm not here to lay on you a bunch of newfangled nonsense. I am here to expound the old command that you would love one another just as God in Christ has loved you. But then in verse eight he says, But you know, come to think of it. There is a sense in which I am writing to you a new command.
I am writing to you a new command in the sense that Jesus Christ took the command of Leviticus 19 and elevated it to a vastly different status. Jesus took it and embodied it in such a way that it came with vital relevancy to his day and to everyone who meets Christ. In the same way as an old piece of music that has been around for years may strike you as new when you play it on your stereo. It comes to you with a freshness. It's not a new piece of music.
In fact, it's very old. But your experience of it is like brand new. Or when you were a kid, you know, and you put your bicycle away for the winter and you got it out sometime around the end of March and you rode it, felt like a new bike again. But it's just your old bike. But the experience of having it in your hands and riding it down the street had a newness about it.
And John is saying. I am writing you a new command in the sense that its truth is seen in Jesus Christ. John Stott put it in this way. He said, It is new in terms of its emphasis, its quality, and its extent. And so Jesus comes, born of a Jewish lineage, comes out of Judaism and speaks the truth in a whole different dimension.
He takes Leviticus 19, it's an old command, and he makes it brand new. He said to them, Hey, I want you to love your neighbor. They thought they were being smart, and they said, Who's my neighbor? And he said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves. And they stripped him of his raiment and departed, leaving him half dead.
And by chance A Levite who was going past that way came and looked on him and buzzed off, and then a priest came and walked by on the other side. And at but he said, a Samaritan, as he journeyed, Came where he was. bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow, when he departed, he took out his wallet and he said, There's enough for the next few days, and if we overspend, when I come again, I will repay you. And Jesus laid down that as the dimension for genuine love in the believer's life.
So we don't have any right not to love anybody at all. When we've covered the fact that we can't even love people who name the name of Jesus Christ. We've still got a whole world that doesn't name the name of Jesus Christ we're supposed to love. To love the ugly people according to us. To love the people that don't speak the way we want them to speak, who don't believe what we want them to believe.
Alas, the priests and the Levites still walk by on the other side. And the Samaritans come. and do what Jesus said. must be done. As I read this, and I'm thinking of verse eight now.
And the second half of their seat. I thought that. I had a little bit of an inn here for talking with people about the New Age movement, you know. Because I get asked a lot, and I'm sure you do. about this New Age thing.
And there's a sense, and you have to don't misunderstand me when I say this, but I think I could tell people that. That I was into a whole new age thing myself. Just as a conversation starter. Because here it is. The whole of the Bible is between two ages, right?
You read the Bible, and there is the present age and the age to come, all the way through. The age to come to which the Old Testament looked was inaugurated when? When Jesus was born in Nazareth, when he walked the streets.
So that in many and various ways God spoke of old in the past through his prophets, but now in these last days he has spoken to us in his son.
So that now Christ has ushered in a whole new age. The darkness, look at verse 8b. The darkness is passing, and the true light is already shining. The new age has dawned. In Christ it has come.
And the teaching of Jesus is new teaching. For a new age. And the lights. I don't ready. Bright.
Now finally in verses 9 to 11 John provides an example of what he's been referring to, and he says, Let me illustrate it. Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness.
So genuine faith And living in the light are equated, and then they are demonstrated. in being in a right relationship first of all with God and then with my fellow man. For example, consider the twentieth verse of the fourth chapter here of 1 John. If anyone says I love God Yet hates his brother. He is a liar, for anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.
So in other words, here in verse 9, there is another spurious claim. The claim to live in the light and hate my brother. And then, conversely, in verse 10, loving and living in the light go hand in hand. And John says the guy who loves his brother. Walks around in a blaze of light, and there's nothing in him to make him stumble and fall all over the place.
In other words, love sees straight. Love thinks clearly. Love frees us. From stumbling into unbalanced judgments and conduct.
However, verse 11. Hatred. Blinds a man or a woman. Hatred obscures our judgment. Hatred makes it impossible to see issues.
Clearly. And the man or the woman whose life is filled with hate, they don't know where they're going. Because the darkness has blinded them. And John is writing and he's saying, Some of these people whose lives are filled with hate claim to walk in the light. But it's obvious that they don't walk in the light, not because of an absence of verbal profession, but because of an absence of loving.
Reality. And I must confess that I find these verses to be supremely challenging, and I hope you do also. You'll notice that there's no twilight zone here. There's no in-between. It's love and heat.
This brings me back to the point with which I began and which I'm now about to conclude. We said that a love for God was not some kind of intellectual awareness, nor merely an emotional experience. And love for each other is neither of the two. Love, you see, is so difficult to speak about because it is such a devalued word. Christian love does not mean the absence of different perspectives.
Christian love does not mean the absence of disagreement. Christian love is not obliterated by a downright drag out Knock down Punch your nose, brawl. The difference is That Christian love is able to stand up to admit wrong. To embrace righteousness, to say sorry, and to begin to go on.
Now, do you hear what I'm saying? I'm talking about the love that exists in human terms between a brother and his sister or a brother and his brother, which at the apex of human love does not mean that those kids are always going, Oh, I love you, Johnny. You're my brother. Oh, Mary, let me see you. No, no, there's a lot of stuff going on.
Like, Johnny, you take my stuff again. I am going to come in, and I am going to. And John's over here saying, You know, some days I just can't stand you. But do they love one another? Of course they.
do love one another. Let anybody come from the outside and say one word about Mary, and John will be out there. Don't you say a thing about Mary? Mary's my sister. You know how much I love Mary.
Now, listen, loved ones, nothing has disappointed me more in my experience of Christian living. than this fact. That people who talk about Christian love and want to hug And want to kiss, and want to smooth it over, and want to make out that everything is great. Do not understand. That love weathers storms.
That love comes through the conflicts. That love does not mean never having to say you're sorry. That love does not mean avoidance is the answer. You see, love within a home fights all those battles, closes the door, sorts it out, and then goes out to the world again. But what does the Christian church do?
packs its Bibles in its bright brown leather zippers, zips them up and heads for the hills. That's not love. Loved ones. Love faces the fights. Love deals with the disagreements.
Love recognizes that Mary and John and Alistair and Fred and whoever else it is are sinners just like the rest of us. And love gets down on its knees and says, God, I have offended so much against you that I don't know why in the world I should elevate the offense of my brother against me to the degree that I no longer can sit and have communion with them, that I no longer can hold hands and sing the songs of praise. And I thank you, God, that you didn't do that with me. But you loved me with an everlasting love. In other words, the test of genuine love is loyalty.
It's not hugging. It's not language. It's not emotion, it's loyalty. It's saying, you know what? You get up my nose.
Do you understand that? Do you realize that you are in my face? Do you know what that means to me? Fine. Good.
Right, let's have that conversation. But don't tell me you love me then. And stick the knife in. Don't let me tell you that I love you and then badmouth you. Don't let's tell lies.
without lips made obvious our lives. Let's just get realistic. We're a bunch of ugly people. Speak for yourself. We are a bunch of ugly people.
We're ugly on the outside, we're ugly on the inside, and we've got so many things, promontories sticking out of us that annoy other people. that we're going to have to take a long time before we get to heaven, and finally, God will choke the whole rotten lot off on the way up, so we'll be fine when we get there. But until we get there, it's building a church is like trying to build your house with a bunch of bananas. Go down to the grocery store, get as many bananas as you can. Try and fit those suckers together and build a garage.
One's bruised, one's green, one's poking up, one's poking out, one's poking everywhere.
Now we're gonna build them up. That's what building the church is like. It's like building with bananas. It's not like building with perfect little bricks. Perfect little Christians.
Who never see anything wrong, who never offend, who never mess up.
So, the first thing you have to do, if you're ever going to get to grips with Christian love, is get downright realistic about things. And that is part of my problem. I don't want to be realistic about what a bad actor I can be. I don't want to be realistic about the sin in my life. I don't want to be realistic about the fact that I know what it is to be horribly jealous.
I don't want to be realistic about those things. And then I can be realistic. with anybody else.
So don't go home on a guilt trip. Because we've been feeling that somebody has been getting in our department Let's just make sure that we speak to that person, talk with them, share with them. We've got two alternatives. Either we love. And walk in the light.
But we hate and we stumble in the darkness. Christian love is ultimately not about feelings. It's not about saying the right things. Christian love. Weathers the storms remains loyal to the truth, lives in the light, And says, you know what?
You let me down. You know what? I let you down. And I'm sorry. But I'm still your brother.
Can we still play together? Can we still sing together? Can we still worship together? Can we still witness together? Or is the evangelical church in America destined?
To become smaller and smaller microcosmic units. conglomerations of people. licking their wounds, and rub in their misunderstandings.
Meanwhile talking. about a love. that is actually different. From what John describes for us here. The new commandment.
that we've known from the beginning. That's so hard to apply. And yet it's the key. to the world looking on. And say in my mind.
Because the world understands disagreement. The world understands aggravation. The world understands arguments that end in. disparity. What the world doesn't understand is reconciliation.
Perhaps God has things to say to each of us. concerning these things to night. You're listening to Truth for Life with Alastair Begg. In order to supplement our current series on the basics of the Christian life, we want to recommend to you a book on the foundational beliefs that frame our faith. The book is called The Christian Life.
It's written by Alistair's good friend Pastor Sinclair Ferguson. Sinclair surveys and unpacks Scripture to explore the essential doctrines of the Christian faith. He explains how key themes like grace and faith and repentance all play an important role in the everyday life of a Christian. Sinclair has a wonderful way of presenting profound Biblical truth, so it's easy to understand. This is a book you will find both challenging and encouraging, as it strengthens your understanding of core Christian beliefs.
It's also a helpful book to give to a friend who you are introducing to Jesus. You can request your copy of The Christian Life when you donate today to support the Ministry of Truth for Life online at truthforlife.org/slash donate. Or you can call us at 888-588-7884. Thanks for studying the Bible with us today. Tomorrow, we'll learn how we can look for the vital signs to tell if a church is spiritually alive.
The Bible teaching of Alastair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life. Where the Learning is for Living.
