When I was in high school my friends always told me that I was born twenty years too late. You see, in high school I idealized the countercultural movement of the 1960s, when the youth culture was demonstrating against everything from the Viet Nam War to Civil Rights. But I was in high school in the late 1970s, so there was little left to demonstrate about. You might say I was a rebel without a cause. Finally I did get involved in the “No Nukes” movement, but to be honest I really went to those political demonstrations to meet girls. I didn’t know much about what I was demonstrating against, but hey if Jackson Browne and Crosby, Stills, and Nash said it was bad it must be...right?
People demonstrate against things so the world will know what they believe and why they believe it. In the face of a culture that’s sometimes indifferent to things that many people are passionate about most of us have a need to make our views known, to demonstrate. When we vote we demonstrate our beliefs by the way we vote. Some people demonstrate by joining political organizations, others by writing letters to government leaders or editorial pages for the local newspaper. Some people demonstrate by picketing, whether it’s an abortion clinic or a casino. Some people get violent and extreme in the way they demonstrate. Consider some of the tactics of the organization PETA--People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals--to actually storm laboratories and release the lab rats or to douse a person wearing a fur coat with a bucket full of red paint. People demonstrate so the world will know what they stand for, what’s truly important to them, what they’re passionate about.
Jesus Christ gave his followers very specific instructions on how to demonstrate their Christian faith. On the night of his betrayal, Jesus Christ took on the role of a servant and washed his followers’ feet, something that was countercultural, something that Peter nearly refused to have done because it went so against the grain of their culture. Then Jesus said these words: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this will all people know that you are my followers, if you love one another” (John 13:34-36).
According to Jesus Christ the primary way to demonstrate our Christian faith to the world is to love other followers of Jesus Christ. This is not to say that writing letters, voting, or picketing are not ways to demonstrate our beliefs, but it is to say that the primary way Jesus wants us to demonstrate is through loving relationships with other Christians.
This is also not to say Christians are off the hook from loving those who don’t follow Jesus Christ--as if this command was saying to love other Christians but it’s okay to hate those who are against the Christian faith--but this command is saying that love starts where we are, that we begin by loving each other--and if we can’t love each other we’re not going to be able to branch out from that. This is the main thing when it comes to demonstrating to the world that we follow Jesus Christ--our capacity to love each other.
Today we’re going to talk about walking with others in this journey. You see, the spiritual journey is not a solitary walk, it’s a personal relationship with Jesus Christ lived out in community with other Christians, lived out through Jesus Christ’s Church. The idea that spirituality is private is not found anywhere in the Bible. The Bible says that in the spiritual journey of the Christian life we walk together, usually in the context of being part of the local church...the only real question is how we walk together. Do we walk together in love, forgiving each other when we blow it, lifting each other up when one of us falls? Or do we walk together in anger, lashing out when a companion on the journey disagrees with us, blaming our others when we stumble and fall? Today we’re going to see how our capacity to develop loving relationships with each other in the spiritual journey is the primary way to demonstrate our faith to the world. We’re going to see three ways our relationships with each other demonstrate our faith.
I. Demonstration to the World (3:11-15).
John begins his call to walk with others in love by going back to basics in vv. 11-15. These are strong words...so John goes back to the beginning, back to his readers’ very first teaching about the Christian life: to love each other. Most likely John is thinking of the words of Jesus I just quoted from John 13, that all people would know that we are Jesus’ followers by our capacity to love each other as we walk the spiritual journey together.
But then John reminds us of a story from the book of beginnings, the book of Genesis, he calls us back to the story of Cain and Abel. Cain, he says, belonged to the devil, that’s why he murdered his brother Abel. The original Greek word translated “murder” here is a Greek word that always carries violent overtones, it means to “butcher” to “slaughter.” Maybe you remember the story, how the two brothers each brought offerings to God: As a farmer, Cain brought some of his crops and as a rancher Abel brought an animal from his flock. Genesis says that God looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but that on Cain and his offering the Lord was not pleased...and that infuriated Cain. After this God warned Cain that his anger at God was eating away at him, that his anger was opening the door for sin to pounce on him, but Cain refused to listen. So as his anger festered into resentment, Cain took his brother out in the field and murdered him...brother against brother...the very first homicide in the Bible, the first murder in human history. Cain’s murder of Abel is a story of anger fueled by religion, that because Cain failed in the realm of spirituality he lashed out in hatred against his brother. It was because of God’s rejection of Cain’s offering--presumably because Cain’s heart wasn’t right--that God didn’t receive Cain’s offering. And it was Cain’s religious experience that led him to seek to destroy his brother.
The church John is writing this letter to is a battle zone. It’s being been torn apart by division. Many of those who’d once been part of the congregation had left in protest, rejecting the Bible’s teaching about Jesus Christ in the process. Like many church splits, this split turned ugly, full of hateful words, perhaps even some violence, which unfortunately isn’t unheard of even in church splits today.
John equates Cain with the world, that followers of Jesus shouldn’t be surprised when the world hates them like Cain hated his brother Abel. But followers of Jesus Christ no longer dwell in that same realm, they’ve passed out of spiritual death and entered into spiritual life through faith in Jesus Christ, and the evidence of this change is...how we love each other.
Our capacity to love each other reveals the fact that we’ve truly come out of the spiritual darkness and hatred of the world, the hatred of Cain, and that we’ve truly come to faith in Jesus Christ, the life evidenced by Abel, a life of obedience and love. John knows that hatred is simply murder in its embryonic form. John remembers hearing Jesus say in the sermon on the mount that murder starts with hatred that’s nurtured and fed instead of eliminated through love and forgiveness. The same hatred that leads murderers to butcher people resides in every human heart--in mine and in yours--making each of us potential murderers...at least that’s the Bible’s diagnosis of us.Here we find our first way loving each other demonstrates our faith. When we develop loving relationships with other Christians we demonstrate to our world how we are different.
Cain and Abel represent two fundamentally different journeys in life. Cain represents the realm of spiritual death, of a veneer of religion covering a heart filled with hatred. This realm of spiritual death is the realm of Satan himself, because Satan has been a murderer from the beginning. This realm death characterized by a lack of love, a refusal to love to others. Cain represents a world system that doesn’t know Jesus Christ, a culture that refuses to come to faith in him and be transformed. And of course this spirit of Cain easily slips into the church--just as it did for the people John’s writing to--and when the spirit of Cain permeates a congregation of Christians the end result is hatred, resentment, and a refusal to love.Abel represents the realm of spiritual life. It was because Abel was different that Cain hated him, not because Abel stole Cain’s girlfriend or because Abel cheated him on a business deal or because he badmouthed Cain behind his back. No...it was purely because Abel was walking with God that Cain hated him.
It was because Abel was on a spiritual journey that Cain refused that fueled Cain’s hatred for his brother. Friends our world lives in the same realm Cain lived in.
We live in a world of hatred and violence, a world where relatives refuse to speak to each other for decades, a world where parents abuse their children, a world where children tote assault rifles. We live in a world of terrorism, where to make a statement people bomb the Oklahoma City Federal building, we live in a world where people demonstrate what they believe by trampling on other people all the time. Don’t be surprised...this is life.
But the spiritual journey of following Jesus Christ calls us to be different, to not give in to the spirit of Cain, even when we’re outraged by something. Our calling is to love, to give forgiveness when it’s not deserved, to show gentleness when we’re verbally attacked, to show grace when we want to blow our tops. John’s afraid that his church has become a mirror image of the world--just like many churches today. He’s afraid that the spirit of Cain has so permeated the church that their hearts are filled with hatred. When we demonstrate our love by nurturing loving relationships within the context of our church, we demonstrate to our world how much we are different. When we give in to the spirit of Cain and demonstrate what we believe with hatred and anger, we demonstrate to our world how much we’re really the same.Which do you want to demonstrate?
II. Demonstration To the Church (3:16-17).
Now all this talking about loving each other can sound pretty abstract. After all, we might say, “Sure, I love all of God’s creatures.” Maybe you remember Linus’ famous line: “I love humanity...It’s people I can’t stand.”
What does this love look like? Does it mean being a doormat? Does it mean never being able to disagree? John tells us in vv. 16-18. Instead of appealing to some philosophical ideal of love or giving us an abstract definition of love, John directs our attention back to Jesus Christ and what he did. If you want to know what this kind of love looks like, don’t look it up in a dictionary, but look at Jesus. Jesus Christ died for our sins...that’s love.
The word translated “laid down” carries the picture of someone taking off a garment and laying down, that Christ took off his life willingly, and laid it down. And this act of love wasn’t just a good example, but it was “for us” or literally “on our behalf”. This act of love was done to bring the love of God into our lives, to rescue us from the awful effects of sin, to bring us from death into life.
If you were standing on the edge of a pier at the beach, and some guy came running up to you and said, “This is how much I love you” and then dove into the water and drowned you’d think he was nuts. Maybe you’d think it was a nice gesture, but it was a waste of a perfectly good life. He couldn’t just told you much he loved you. But if you fell off that pier and were drowning and that same guy dove in to rescue you, dragged you to safety but died in the process and his dying words were, “This is how much I love you” then you’d truly understand this kind of love. That’s what Jesus did when he went to the cross, he didn’t just show us love, but he brought God’s love to us by rescuing us from our sin. John looks at Jesus Christ’s death on the cross as a picture of how God wants us to love.
Of course, it’s one thing to say, “Yeah...If you ever need someone to die for you just let me know, but don’t bug me until that happens.” So John gets very practical, that laying down our lives for other followers of Jesus Christ means helping them in very practical ways. If we have “material possessions”--and all of us here today do--and we see a Christian with legitimate need and we close our hearts to that person instead of helping him or her, then we’ve extinguished God’s love in our lives. A hardened heart to someone who’s genuinely needy betrays the spirit of Cain...as Cain hardened his heart to his brother.Here we find the next way our loving relationships demonstrate our faith. When we develop loving relationships with other Christians we demonstrate to Christians how much we care.
Now, once again this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t express God’s love to unchurched people --that would miss the point--but it does mean that love begins where we are, in our church family, with the people we’re sitting next to right now, and then it spreads out from there to our world. Love is expressed, not so much in the heroic sacrifice of our lives, but in the ordinary circumstances of everyday life as we come across needs that God has given us the capacity to meet and as we demonstrate God’s love by meeting those needs. This is probably one of those passages Mark Twain was referring to when he said, “It’s not the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts I do understand.” You don’t need me to stand here and explain what this means, most of us do need help in actually doing it.
Let me give you some ways you’re already doing this, and then suggest a few ways we can grow at it. Whenever you give money to the general fund here at LBF Church you’re doing this because 7% of everything that comes in goes to help the needy within our church. This is called our Christian Concern fund, and we seek to help people who are in financial crisis to demonstrate God’s love by meeting tangible financial needs. So if you’re involved in monthly or weekly financial support of the ministry here, you’ve already started what this passage is talking about. When you participate in Operation Christmas Child, or when our youth group prepares a thanksgiving dinner for the Pomona Boys and Girls Club we’re responding to this call.
Our problem is that we often avoid seeing our brother or sister in need, we insulate ourselves from the needs. If we could grow in any way in this area, it would be to pay more attention to each other, to know each other well enough to know when someone is struggling and we have the ability to meet that need. In a church of our size that’s next to impossible on Sunday mornings, but in our small groups I see many of these needs met. One of our Share & Care Groups last year saw this happen when one of our group leaders had a piece of equipment stolen and a member in the group felt spontaneously moved to replace his stolen piece of equipment. If we just open our eyes and open our hearts we can begin letting the love of God truly flow through us instead of blocking it off with our busyness. How do we demonstrate that we care to other followers of Jesus Christ? By loving them. When we close our eyes and shut off our hearts to other Christians, we demonstrate how much the spirit of Cain has permeated our lives. Which do you want to demonstrate?
III. Demonstration To God (3:19-24).
Now at first vv. 19-24 seem to change topics entirely, but they do fit with what John is talking about.
The “this” in v. 19 looks back at demonstrating God’s love through loving actions. All of us go through times of doubt in the spiritual journey, seasons where it seems like we don’t really know God like we thought we did. It’s a normal part of the spiritual journey for us to struggle with doubts about our faith, doubts about whether we’re truly following Jesus Christ or not. If you’ve struggled with those kinds of doubts, that’s probably a pretty good indication that you are following Jesus, because people who don’t follow Jesus Christ really aren’t all that concerned about it.
These seasons of doubt cause our hearts to condemn us, our feelings accuse us of not being Christians, of being failures, of not measuring up, especially when we hear sermons like today’s call to walk with each other in love. God’s invitation to love so radically impacts us and we realize how far short we fall, and often our hearts become anxious and even condemning, and we wonder if we truly know Christ the way we thought we did. So John wants us to put that struggle in proper perspective, that it’s not whether our feelings are at rest or whether our feelings condemn us that determines whether or not we’re on this spiritual journey, but it’s whether God has received us through our faith in Jesus Christ.
You see, God is greater than our feelings, he is bigger than our emotions of doubt or assurance, and what God thinks carries more weight than what I’m feeling at the moment. So how do we set our hearts at ease? By remembering that our assurance doesn’t rely on our emotions but on God and then by pressing forward to obey God’s commands. John sums up God’s commands in the words “believe” and “love.” The order is vitally important, that we first trust our lives to Jesus Christ, we place our faith in him to forgive our sins and to bring us into a relationship with God built on grace. Then once we do that, we launch on a spiritual journey of loving other followers of Christ, to walk together on this journey we’re on. Believing comes first, then belonging. We first establish a personal relationship wtih God through belief in Jesus Christ, and then we find ourselves on this journey the bible calls church, of walking this journey together.
More and more people in our culture are trying to live the spiritual life alone--just by believing but not by belonging--yet John says that both are vitally important to live the spiritual journey of the Christian life.
So here we find another way our love for others demonstrates our faith. When we develop loving relationships with other Christians we demonstrate to God how much we obey.
God measures obedience not by the size of our Bible or by how often we’re at church but by our love for each other. Maybe you’re here today and your heart is anxious before God, you’re filled with doubts and struggles. First, make sure that you’ve truly come to faith in Jesus Christ, and then once you’ve made sure of that, then John would tell you to recognize that God is bigger than your feelings, God’s estimation of you counts more than how you feel. But then God would challenge you to start loving, to start demonstrating God’s love to other people in tangible, specific ways and this will set your heart at rest. As you do this you’ll learn to set your heart at rest in his presence.
If you’re here today and your heart is at rest before him, you’re filled with assurance and peace. God’s inviting you to an even greater level of boldness and confidence in loving others, that this will enable you to ask God for what you need to love with confidence, and then as you see needs you’ll want to meet those needs. God looks to our obedience to his commands to believe and to belong with each other as a demonstration of our faith.How do we demonstrate our Christian faith in a world that’s going crazy? The primary means is by our love for each other. When we love each other we demonstrate our difference to the world, we demonstrate our care to Christians, and we demonstrate our obedience to God. When we refuse to love each other we demonstrate our resemblance to the world, we demonstrate our callousness to Christians, and we demonstrate our rebellion to God. Which kind of statement do you want to make?
