2 John

¹ 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, ² because of the truth that abides in us and will be with us forever: ³ Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us, from God the Father and from Jesus Christ the Father’s Son, in truth and love. ⁴ I rejoiced greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as we were commanded by the Father. ⁵ And 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. ⁶ 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.

Some years back, I read a Los Angeles Times article entitled, “Church Welcomes an Atheist as Teacher.” It was about a church in Simi Valley, California, who had a popular Sunday School teacher. He was popular but also controversial. Why? Because he does not believe in God.

Stuart Bechman-Besamo hasn’t believed in God for years. Yet here he is, spending most Sundays at the Simi Valley United Church of Christ, teaching the parish’s young people about religion.

An atheist at Sunday school may seem like a wolf in sheep’s clothing or the setup to a bad joke. But Bechman-Besamo is not here to persuade his teenage charges to abandon their church. He is here to challenge them, to encourage tolerance and perhaps, church leaders hope, to bolster the faith of others.

Only an open-minded church would attract a couple like Bechman-Besamo, who left the Methodist church in high school, and his wife, Jeanie Mortensen-Besamo, an ex-Mormon. The 100-member congregation, formed in a 1994 merger of two churches, proclaims in its mission statement: “For us the Bible is a record of faith journeys to be taken seriously, but not always literally…Our church seeks to be multicultural, respecting and learning from traditions which differ from our own.”…

Church leaders decided that to take this declaration seriously, they needed to introduce the youth group to an atheist. They thought of Stuart.

“Stuart,” said the church’s pastor, the Rev. Bill Greene, “is a caring, bright, perceptive, inclusive kind of person who has a strong sense of justice…We are not starting an agnostic club. It’s just that here is this incredibly fine man, with honesty and passion for justice, who is in our church. And that’s a blessing for us, and for all of our kids.”

Which is why the atheist can be found Sundays in the church’s “clubhouse”–a converted garage whose closet still holds a lawn mower–less than 100 yards from the church’s cozy sanctuary.

Stuart, 41, said he began calling himself an atheist 15 years ago. More recent readings and discussions “have served only to bolster my stance of nonreligious belief,” he said.

He agreed to participate in Sunday school in part because he wanted to “teach tolerance for people like me.”…

Said Jeanie: “We have a church here with differing viewpoints, and we want the kids to know that there are organizations and churches that don’t insist you conform to a certain way.”[1]

The pastor’s defense of having an atheist teach is fascinating. Stuart, he tells us, is:

• Caring
• Bright
• Perceptive
• Inclusive
• Has a strong sense of justice
• An incredibly fine man
• Honest
• Has a passion for justice
• A blessing for the church
• A blessing for the kids he teaches

In other words, Stuart is welcome to teach at that church because Stuart fits, because Stuart is nice, because Stuart is a good person. He is part of the family. People like him.

It does, however, raise a very important question: is niceness, inclusiveness, and being friendly enough if a person does not believe God exists, does not believe that Jesus is the Son of God, does not believe the Bible is God’s word, does not believe Jesus died on the cross to pay the price for our sins, does not believe that Jesus rose from the dead, does not believe that Jesus is in Heaven making intercession for the saints, and does not believe Jesus is coming again?

Is niceness and belonging enough to make of a church a family? Or is a church more than that? Does being a church also mean having convictions, actual beliefs in common as well? Is the Church a group or is it a family around something?

I will argue that this is precisely the case: if the church is to be a family, it must be a family around the truth, that is, around the gospel.

Love is truly love only when it grows out of truth.

Let us begin with a general operating principle: love is truly love only when it grows out of truth. John expressed this principle powerfully in the book of 2 John when he wrote against false teachers who were harassing the church. As you read the first six verses, look at how John relates “love” to “truth.”

¹ 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, ² because of the truth that abides in us and will be with us forever: ³ Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us, from God the Father and from Jesus Christ the Father’s Son, in truth and love. ⁴ I rejoiced greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as we were commanded by the Father. ⁵ And 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. ⁶ 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.

John “loves” “the lady and her children” “in truth.” Also, all who “know the truth” love them as well. And this is because the truth is having its way among them “and will be with us forever.” More than that, because of Jesus, “grace, mercy, and peace will be with us…in truth and love.” John was also joyous because “some of” the lady’s children were “walking in the truth,” a walk, John adds, that was “commanded by the Father.” On the basis of the truth, John asked the “dear lady…that we love one another.” And what is this love? “That we walk according to his commandments,” that is, according to the truth.

Love and truth. Truth and love. John presents the two as necessarily walking hand-in-hand. If love is to be truly love it must grow out of truth. If the truth is to be truly truth it must lead to love.

This means that love without truth is illegitimate and truth without love is cruel. Love without truth leads to sentimentality and permissiveness detached from reality. Truth without love leads to arrogant disinterest and haughtiness.

To return to Stuart, the atheist Sunday school teacher, we should say that we have no doubt whatsoever that he is a nice guy, but the unique family that is the Church, that is, the group of people who are the body of Christ, must be grounded in the truth. To call love love while letting it walk hand-in-hand with a lie is ultimately to deceive oneself.

To put it in terminology that might make more sense in our day, we might say that love without truth becomes liberalism and truth without love becomes fundamentalism or Pharisaicalism.

The biblical pattern all throughout scripture is truth and love not truth or love.

The gospel is the soil of truth out of which the Church’s love grows.

But what is the “truth” that John speaks so often of? In John’s gospel he reported Jesus as saying the following in John 8.

³¹ To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. ³² Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Truth, then, (a) is found in Jesus, (b) leads us to a relationship with Jesus, and (c) sets us free. What, then, was the teaching that Jesus taught? In Matthew 4 we read:

²³ And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people.

The “teaching” was “the gospel.” The “truth,” then, is the “gospel.”

And what is this gospel? According, to Jesus in Mark 8, it is all bound up with who Jesus is and what Jesus has come to do. In fact, it is a truth that we should be willing to die for!

³⁵ For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.

In that verse, Jesus essentially is making the gospel coterminous, in a sense, with Himself. He is the gospel! What He does is the gospel! How might we define, then, the gospel? Here is one definition:

The gospel is the eternal good news that through the person, death, resurrection, and promised return of Jesus Christ, sin, death, and hell have been defeated and all who come to Christ in repentance and faith receive salvation, eternal life, hope, the blessings of God, strength for right living, and a place in the body and ongoing mission of Christ on earth, the church, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

The gospel is good news! It is the good news about Jesus! And it is the truth around which the Church must orient its very life!

If we are to be an authentic family then the gospel must be the life-giving center of our existence.

The gospel is no mere static truth, however. It is life-giving. It is generative. It has power. Specifically, it has the power to move us to action and to equip us for life. Read the passage once again, but notice how alongside “love” and “truth,” John also uses “walk” in a repetitive way.

¹ 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, ² because of the truth that abides in us and will be with us forever: ³ Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us, from God the Father and from Jesus Christ the Father’s Son, in truth and love. ⁴ I rejoiced greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as we were commanded by the Father. ⁵ And 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. ⁶ 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.

In John’s development of this truth, he sees the truth that walks hand-in-hand with love as a living dynamic that leads to action, to walking.

• “I rejoiced greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth…”
• “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.”

What this means, then, is that the gospel rests at the heart of the church’s life not as a mere conviction and not as a consented-to-proposition but moreso as a burning fire, as dynamic power, as life-giving and transformative life itself! The gospel, when it is set free to be what it is, leads us to move, to act, to walk! To walk where? To walk in the direction that it inevitably leads: to the cross, to the world, and ever and always to God!

This is why those in the body of Christ who see Christ for who He is and see the gospel for what it is inevitably are inspired and moved and emboldened and empowered to live and to do and to be! Show me a perpetually unhappy and consistently miserable Christian and I will show you a person for whom the gospel is simply an idea that should be agreed upon and not a life that should be lived. Show me a person who is unhappy in the body of Christ and I will show a person who is not walking in the truth and love of the gospel, who has not allowed the living truth of Jesus Christ to penetrate to the actual core of who he or she is.

When we say that we should be an authentic family around the whole gospel we are saying nothing less than that the gospel should orient, direct, steer, and compel are lives forward! Remove the gospel from our experience as believers and all we are left with is one another without the mediating power of the cross and the grace of God…which is just to say that all we are left with is our complaint, our grievance, and our irritations.

But let the gospel take root – really take root – and suddenly we are working and serving and loving alongside one another and then we are working and serving and loving one another! It is an amazing thing!

“Some of your children walking in the truth,” writes John. Some. Why only some? Because many profess Christ who do not walk with Christ. Many claim to believe but their belief does not translate into a life. They observe the gospel. They agree with the gospel. But they are not centered on the gospel!

But that is not the way of an authentic family around the whole gospel! In an authentic family around the whole gospel the Church is radically committed to the truth of the gospel and to theOne who stands at the center of it: Jesus Christ. The gospel is a living fire that illuminates, that enlivens, and that shows us the way forward. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel,” wrote Paul in Romans 1:16, “for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”

 

[1] https://articles.latimes.com/2001/dec/16/local/me-15381