Category: Faith

The Christian church is supposed to be a community of kindness, and one of the results of that kindness is that people who are not accepted in other places because of their behaviour are welcomed in churches. However, this means that churches face problems in dealing with people who exhibit anti-social behaviour. In his letter, Jude refers to difficult people and the troubles they can cause for the church:

Dear friends, I really wanted to write to you about the salvation which we share, but I find it necessary to write to encourage you to fight for the faith which was given once for all to the believers. Some people have secretly infiltrated you. Their condemnation was written about long ago, and they are ungodly, turning the grace of our God into a pretext for immorality, and denying our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

There is a difference between showing an accepting attitude to people who have been rejected by others  and tolerating conduct which is damaging to the integrity of the church. When someone is derailing the mission of the church and leading others astray, firm action is required. Without ever giving up on loving the unloved, the church needs to fight for the faith.

The church is supposed to be a place where people are welcomed and loved, where people act with humility to put others first, and where everyone seeks to do what pleases Jesus, rather than what pleases themselves. Unfortunately, churches often seem to attract people who want to put themselves first, and who fail to show love and welcome to others. In his third letter, John describes an example:

I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to put himself first, does not accept what we say. If I come, I will call attention to what he is doing, saying unhelpful things about us. Not stopping with this, he refuses to welcome fellow believers, and prevents people who want to do so and throws them out of the church. Dear friend, follow good examples, not bad ones. Someone who does good things belongs to God. Someone who does evil has not seen God.

People like Diotrephes ruin a church. The problem is, however, that we all act a bit like Diotrephes from time to time, doing things which scare away the people we are supposed to love, and trying our best to take the glory for ourselves, rather than focusing the glory on Jesus. Often we do not even notice that we are excluding others and pandering to our own egos.

For most people, love is something that gives you pleasant feelings. It is about following where your desires lead. It does not require discipline or rules, because you do not need anything to motivate you to follow where your heart leads. However, the follow-your-heart type of love tends to be something that wears off after a while. In the first chapter of his second letter, John writes about a different type of love.

I am delighted to have found some of your children living in the truth, just as we have been commanded by the Father. Now, dear lady, I ask that we love each other. This is not a new commandment which I am writing for you, but one which we have had since the beginning. Love means that we should live according to his commandments. This is the commandment which you have heard since the beginning, and you should obey it.

It seems odd that John refers to “love” as meaning that we should live according to God’s commandments. Most people would not think that obeying the traffic laws is the same sort of thing as love. But then again, love does mean doing things to please the person that you love, and what better way is there to show your love for God than to live in accordance with his will?

Life is a series of battles against the world. Left to our own devices, we usually end up losing the battles: against the temptation to eat too much, against the temptation to be lazy, against the temptation to make the easy choice instead of the right one, against the temptation to be cowardly rather than courageous. But we can win instead of losing if we draw on a power that is greater than ourselves. In chapter 5 of his first letter, John says:

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God. Everyone who loves the parent also loves the child. We know that we love the children of God when we love God and obey his commandments. Loving God means obeying his commandments, and his commandments are not oppressive. Anyone who is a child of God defeats the world. Our faith is the victory that has defeated the world. Who is it that defeats the world? It is someone who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.

The person who has faith in Jesus enlists Jesus to fight the battles on his or her behalf. Jesus has already overcome the world through his victory over death and sin on the cross, so that when we enlist Jesus to fight on our behalf we cannot lose. We make be weak, fragile, cowardly, lazy and susceptible to temptation without Jesus, but when Jesus is in control victory over the world is guaranteed.

For some people, love is partly about emotional attraction and partly about a social exchange. It starts when two people are attracted to each other. I say nice thing about you, and you say nice things about me. This type of love thrives in fair weather, but it falls apart when the emotional attraction starts to fade or when one of the parties stops reciprocating. The Bible has a completely different take on love, as exemplified by the fourth chapter of John’s first letter:

Dear friends, we must love each other, because love comes from God, and everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God. Someone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. God demonstrated his love for us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we can live through him. Real love is not about us loving God, but him loving us. He sent his Son as the sacrifice by which our sins are forgiven. Dear friends, if God loved us so much, we must also love each other. No one has ever seen God, but if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love becomes complete in us.

This is an extraordinary kind of love, owned by a community of people for whom love is not something that you try to earn or steal, or something that you barter for with other people. It is something that you give away for nothing. The goal is not for you to get other people to love you; it is for you to love other people, particularly people whom nobody else loves.

Followers of Jesus claim that they get to experience an extraordinary kind of love. It is not the sort of chemical attraction associated with romantic love, and it does not necessarily involve high levels of emotion, but it is the sort of love which penetrates to the core of a person’s being and gives a sense of certainty and permanence in relationship. John talks about this type of love in the third chapter of his first letter:

We have known love, because he laid down his life for us. We should lay down our lives for our fellow believers. How can the love of God be inside people who have plenty, but close their hearts against a fellow believer whom they can see is in need? My children, let us not just love in words, or with our tongues, but with our actions and in truth. By doing this we know that we are genuine, and can be confident in the presence of God, even if we feel guilty, because God is greater than our emotions, and knows everything.

This is a type of love which is defined more by action than emotion. Jesus laid down his life for us, and that makes us want to sacrifice our own interests for the sake of serving others, particularly those who are in need. The full experience of the Christian life is only available to those who enter into the deep kind of love which flows from laying down your life in service to others.

The world is full of many good things that God has made – the magnificence of the universe, the beauty of nature, the warmth of community with other living beings, the adventure of discovering and creating new things. These are good things, they come from God, and they are meant to be enjoyed by us. It comes as a surprise, then, when John tells us not to love the world or the things in it, in the second chapter of his first letter:

Do not love the world, or things in the world. The Father’s love is not in anyone who loves the world. Everything that is in the world, sinful cravings, the desires of the eyes, and pride over life’s achievements, belongs not to the Father, but to the world. The world is disappearing with its desires, but someone who obeys God’s will remains forever.

People whose understanding of reality is limited to material things come to love those things. For those of us who believe in Jesus, our primary citizenship is in heaven. The things that we love are things which endure forever, not things which have no lasting value or consequence. All of our earthly achievements and belongings, no matter how great, count for nothing in the face of eternity. That is why we need to remember that we are temporary strangers in the world, and nothing that we earn or accumulate really belongs to us.

There is something comfortably deceptive about the way most of us live our lives. 90% of drivers think that they are better than 50% of other drivers. 97% of senior executives think that they are in the top 10% of senior executives. In some cases, it seems, the smarter we are the more likely we are to be deluded about ourselves. We want popularity, and we are not happy when someone else threatens to shed the light of truth on our fantasies. However, God is only interested in the truth, not in our make-believe. As John says in the first chapter of his first letter:

This is the message which we have heard from him and announce to you: God is light; there is no darkness at all in him. If we claim that we have fellowship with him while living in the darkness, we are lying, and not telling the truth. But if we live in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of his Son Jesus Christ washes us clean from all sin.

Living in the light involves shedding the delusions that we use to make us feel better or more important than we really are. The lies which we tell to ourselves and to others build up invisible barriers between us, isolating us from each other. If we want to have true fellowship with each other, then we have to let the light into our dark corners and embrace truth and reality. Only then can we have right relationships with each other and with God.

We live in an era of “define-your-own” morality. If something is “wrong”, but you want to do it, then just redefine it as “right”, and away you go. The problem is that actions have consequences, and people who engage in selfish behaviour that feels “right” to them usually leave behind a trail of destruction in other people’s lives. Peter had this to say about it in the third chapter of his second letter:

Dear friends, this is the second letter that I have written to you, to provoke you to think seriously by reminding you to think about the messages spoken by the holy prophets in times past, and the instructions of our Lord and Saviour communicated through the apostles. Most importantly, understand that in the last days cynics will come, doing whatever pleases themselves, and saying, “Where is the second coming that he promised? Since the time when our ancestors died, everything has continued as it has from the beginning of creation.” They deliberately ignore the fact that the heavens were created long ago by the voice of God, and the earth was made from the water and surrounded by water.

In one sense the cynics may be right. If there really is no God, then individuals might as well do whatever pleases themselves without concern as to the consequences, because small meaningless pleasures are all that life has to offer. On the other hand, if what Jesus said was true, then the cynics are wasting their lives pursuing things of no value, whereas those who follow Jesus are pursuing an eternal relationship with God, the only thing that has real and lasting value.

False prophets are often easy to spot: they predict that something will happen, and their prediction fails to eventuate. False teachers are more difficult to detect, because what they say often seems plausible, and is often difficult to disprove. False teaching has been and will always be one of the pitfalls of the Christian church. In the second chapter of his second letter, Peter has this to say about false teachers:

There were false prophets amongst the people, just as there will be false teachers amongst you, secretly introducing destructive opinions, denying even the Master who bought them, bringing on themselves swift destruction. A lot of people will follow their degeneracy, and as a result, the way of the truth will be abused. They will greedily exploit you with misleading words. Their condemnation from long ago will wait no longer, and their destruction will sleep no more.

Like get-rich-quick investment schemes that are too good to be true, leading on to inevitable financial ruin, false teaching about Jesus and the Christian faith often offers short-term allure but carries with it long-term pain. False teachers might tell you that it is OK to hate your enemy, or to take what does not belong to you, or to give in to greed and selfish desires, but there is a price to be paid for the harm caused by those sins.