We've been dealing the last few weeks with the book of 1 John, the letter of 1 John. So I'll get you to flick to that if you can. And we're gonna be in the third chapter this morning of 1 John, chapter 3, beginning from verse 11. If you don't know, we've been dealing with this letter that has at its heart the concept of love. It is a love letter in the fullness of that term.
The word love occurs so many times in it. It is so throughout this letter and so it's no surprise that today we talk about love, but the love that a church has for one another. Brotherly love. Love for a fellow believer. And so we're going to read that from 1 John 3:11-24.
The apostle John says, this is the message you have heard from the beginning. We should love one another. Do not be like Cain who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother and why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brothers were righteous. Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you.
We know that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him. This is how we know what love is. Jesus Christ laid down His life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.
If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue, but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in His presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts and He knows everything. Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from Him anything we ask because we obey His commands and do what pleases Him.
And this is His command, to believe in the name of His Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as He commanded us. Those who obey His commands live in Him and He in them and this is how we know that He lives in us. We know it by the spirit He gave us. So far our reading. We again come to this point where we see that John insists that love is the supreme form of action.
Love is the supreme state of reality. Verse 11 begins by saying that it lies at the very heart of the Christian message. This is the message you have heard from when? From the beginning. It has always been like this.
We should love one another. It is a love for your brother and that includes the sister as well, obviously. It is written to a patriarchal society. So when we speak here of brother, it definitely does not exclude sister. The men were representatives of the head of the family.
I feel that I have to say this because in our society it is often claimed that Christianity was just written for men. That's not the case here. And then John goes on and he says, look at what the opposite of this love is. Look at what the opposite of this love does. Verse 12, Cain who belonged to the evil one murdered his brother.
And so John starts with the opposite here. He says, what the refusal to love looks like and it comes down to hatred. It comes down to resentment. Remember the story in Genesis 4. One of the first consequences of the fall was Abel and Cain, the two brothers.
One, Abel, a righteous man who did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, who loved God with all his heart, soul and mind. And Cain who scraped by. Cain who gave God the second best when it came to sacrifices. And this one son murders the other. Cain murders his brother Abel.
And John's answer to the question, why would Cain murder his brother, is a penetrating critique of our fallen human nature. And it comes down to this, that Abel did nothing wrong but be righteous. And Cain hated him for that. He served and honoured God faithfully but he did it in the face of Cain's bad life and that drove Cain mad with jealousy and hatred. And the point that John is making here is that evil people do not love blameless lifestyles when they see it.
Evil people do not love the Christian lifestyle when they see it. They hate it. It accuses them and they will go as far as crucifying those who hold to it. Therefore John goes on to say in verse 13, don't be surprised if the world hates you. So often we find ourselves really hurt, really confused that someone would rob a church.
We can't deal with it somehow. But the truth is at best, the world endures Christianity. At best, the world ignores Christianity, but at worst, it hates it. The natural result of this hate is inflicting damage even to the ultimate end which is murder and John makes this emphatic and jarring statement in verse 15, anyone who hates his brother is a murderer. And I'm reminded of what Jesus says in Matthew 5 when He said that the lustful look is equivalent to adultery.
A hateful heart breaks the command do not murder. In other words, the roots of our actions lies in the state of our heart. And remember, this is all being said in the command to love your brother and your sister in the faith. Verse 15 concludes, no murderer has eternal life in him. Hatred is the essence of that murder.
Now, of course, we understand in the majesty of grace that God will and can forgive the murderer. God can forgive those that have done a tremendous crime like this. It does mean however that no one in whom is the ongoing state of the heart that produces so much hatred as a result, resulting in murder, is the possessor of eternal life. The eternal life in the soul of a Christian produces, in other words, love not hate. What God has done in the Christian will always result in love and not ongoing hate.
And so we are commanded not to be like Cain who hated his brother and led to murder. We are commanded to love our brother. Now who is our brother? Well, verse 11 says that we are to love one another. So we conclude that John is writing to those fellow believers.
He is writing to a church and he's saying you have to love one another. So how do I do this? How do I love my brother and my sister? These type of sermons can very easily become hypothetical and theoretical and we probably already, and our elder Jason just prayed for that, that we can have this feeling of weightiness, of obligation, of obedience, but not know what to do with that. So I want to just take a step out of this passage and give nine biblical imperatives or ways of practical love that the Bible gives us.
How do I love my brother? Firstly, to put your brother and your sister first. Philippians 2:3 says, do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit but in humility. Consider others better than yourself. This is the beginning of this love for the other.
This is the beginning of love for a brother or a sister in the faith. Self denial. Self denial, true love forgoes self interest and supports the other. It is the essence of humility, as C.S. Lewis put it, not in thinking less of yourself, but of thinking about yourself less. Not that woe is me, I am rubbish, I am a doormat, but of considering yourself and thinking about yourself less.
So putting your brother or your sister first. It is feeling warmly towards them, so warmly towards them that we are happy to lay aside our interests and our preferences so that the other may experience blessing. The second thing we find in 1 Thessalonians 5:15 is to seek their good. Always seek to do good to one another, Paul says. Love doesn't simply put someone else's desires first.
Nope. It doesn't stop there. Their desires may be destructive. They may be destroying themselves. So we don't stop there.
Love will also seek their good. Love will seek their betterment, their advancement. And so the question we must ask ourselves is how can I personally help my brother do well? How can I serve my sister so that she prospers in life? So it doesn't just simply stop with putting them first and considering them first and saying, well, whatever your life is, go for it.
I'm not gonna think about my values and impose them on you. You just do what you need to do. It is desiring and warmly desiring their health, their betterment, their advancement, their good. The third thing, and this is so critically important in what love is in a church and among brothers and sisters, is to ask for forgiveness and to give it. Colossians 3:13 says, forgive each other as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.
If you love your fellow believer, then you will ask for their forgiveness when you sin against them and you will freely forgive them when they sin against you. A true believer grieves when they have sinned against God, when they have hurt someone made in the image of God and recreated in the image of Jesus. And as people who have been forgiven for far worse crimes than we have committed or have had committed against us, we must also forgive those who sin against us. This destroys churches. This inhibits the activity of the church to serve faithfully.
We love by forgiving and asking for forgiveness. Third, James 1:19 is to be quick to hear. Quick to hear. Quick to listen. We have to listen before we speak.
Love listens. Just as God hears us when we call to Him, so we must listen to others. We listen in order to gain understanding either of truth or of the one speaking. Until we listen to one another, we are ill equipped to know their needs. If we don't listen, don't know what their needs are and we cannot seek their good if we don't know what that might be.
Fifth, we need to include. We need to open our lives. We need to be hospitable. This is a big one for someone like me, an introvert, to create a space for people in my life. Include people.
1 Peter 4:9, show hospitality to one another without grumbling. Hospitality is a welcoming of others into your life. Love includes. It draws near to others. It invites them in.
It goes further than a church worship service and a coffee afterwards. It will not dismiss people because they are different or because they are difficult, but love will pursue them and offer them a place at their table. Love looks around. Love sees the stranger here. Love sees the uninvolved and the unknown and extends a hand of welcome.
Love includes others. Six, be generous. 2 Corinthians 9:11, you will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way. God has given you what you have more than for your own personal enjoyment. God has blessed you to bless others.
You are called by God to steward what He has entrusted you with by sharing it. Love therefore seeks to give. Love seeks to give and love desires to give abundantly. John Calvin put it this way. He said, the legitimate use of all our gifts is a kind and a liberal communication of them with others.
The legitimate use of all our gifts, all that we have received from God, is a kind and a lavish communication of them with others. Love is generous. Love tells the truth. Ephesians 4:25, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbour for we are members of one another. Love doesn't lie, it speaks the truth.
This isn't about offering true opinions but truth itself and this will flow on to the next one. It is willing to offer hard words when it is needed. Love corrects. Love rebukes even but not from a mere love for truth. The truthful word in love comes from a sense of concern.
It comes and says, brother, I need to have a coffee with you. I'm concerned about this aspect that is happening in your life. How can I pray for you? How can I help you? Can I ease the burden in some way?
The truthful word in love comes from a sense of concern and is communicated in a way of compassion, not self righteousness. And like I said, this leads to the next point, the second last point. Encourage them with the gospel. 1 Thessalonians 5:11. Therefore, encourage one another and build one another up just as you are doing.
Love doesn't flatter but it does encourage. And biblical encouragement is a kind of preaching. Biblical encouragement is a kind of teaching, a gospel word offered to those who need it. Love points people to Christ in whom we see love in its brightest display. Those around you, whether they're Christian or not, need to hear the good news.
And we need to hear it often, more often than we think sometimes. We need to remind our brothers and our sisters of the life of Jesus, His death, and His resurrection because it remains good news even today. It is not just for the lost, it is for the found as well. Because without the gospel, our lives will drift back into hopelessness. Without the gospel, we will fall into false hopes.
We will doubt. We will fear. And one of the most loving things you can do for your brother is to remind them of the wonderful reality of the gospel. Gospel. And then lastly, I told you it's gonna be practical, is to pray for them.
James 5:16, pray for one another. If you love your brother and your sister, you will pray for them. And it is so sad, and I catch myself doing this all the time, a quick, I'll pray for you. A quick text message out, praying for you. Am I really praying?
Have I really stopped in that moment to pray? Have I prayed for them later in that day? Even sadder is that those who need the prayer are happy enough with false promises of prayer. They appreciate the nice thought because it's better than nothing but it's not. It's just nothing.
Love prays. It seeks God's action in the lives of your friends and family. It pleads with God for greater grace on behalf of others. And it's to this that God responds to prayer. And there are so many other ways that this could have been double the length.
There's so many other ways we could be loving one another in church but here's a start. And this is where John then says in verse 18 and it's a challenge to me, let us not love in word, let us not love in talk but in deed and truth. We can do this because we have come to know the love of God through the death of Jesus Christ. And so if you were to go and you were to read up all these verses and scriptures that give you practical loving ways for your brother and sister, you will find that many of them are summed up or motivated by what John goes on now to say. We love because Christ first loved us.
Colossians 3, forgive each other is the command. Forgive each other as what? The Lord forgave you. Be generous, we find, an example of that in Mark 6. An example of Jesus being so generous with His time and His energy and His personal space.
We find Him being so overwhelmed with teaching and preaching day in, day out with these large crowds, Mark 6, that He says to His disciples, let's just go across the water for a little bit. I just need to go away and rest. And they hop in the boat and they go across. Do you remember this story? And they come to the other side and people have followed them.
They see that they're going and the whole crowd just runs after them. And when they get to the other side, lo and behold, even more people. And we find in Mark 6:34, the heart of Jesus that motivates us in love. When Jesus saw the large crowd, He had compassion on them. And He saw that they were like a sheep without a shepherd and He began teaching.
We see Jesus seeking their good. We see Jesus being generous with His time even when He could have asked for some space. Jesus is the ultimate example of how to love others. And so John makes the statement in verse 16, this is how we know what love is. Jesus Christ laid down His life for us.
But it doesn't simply end in a statement of fact, you know, Jesus was kind to us. Remember that He was kind to us. Now John adds, so we ought to lay our lives down for others. We have the command again to be generous, to encourage with the gospel, to seek their good above ours, to show hospitality and concern. And the challenge here is in verse 17.
If anyone has material possessions, sees his brother in need but has no pity in him. Here's a question, is the love of God in them? How can the love of God be in them? God's love inevitably will break our hearts. God's love and the gospel residing in us will break our hearts.
It will rock us out of our self centeredness and cause us to love. The word used here, pity, to have pity, is this image of guts, of entrails. And so it's referring to this centre of emotion in the Greek word where, you know, when you have something and it's really painful emotionally, it's that feeling in your stomach. It says, if you don't have this, is the love of God in them? And Christians, the truth is, will be moved by the needs of those around them.
They will have that pity. They will have that gut sensation. Verse 18 goes on, let us not love then with words or tongue but with action and in truth. And so this morning I am challenged how much of what I do and what I say is words and wishing people well and thinking that well, God, You need to look out for them, instead of putting my words into action and walking the talk. Now this can be overwhelming and if you're like me, you've been challenged by these words again.
This can be overwhelming because there's so many people to love and there's so little time and I've got so many kids and I've got so much work, I just don't have the energy. Worse yet, I have to love people that may have hurt me. When I don't have any energy, I have to love those who have disappointed me. Today's message seems far more like a burden than a pleasure. Well, that's why we need verses 19 to 24 as well this morning.
And that is that we don't live before God with trembling anxiety knowing that we fail this, knowing that we don't do this perfectly but we live before God in calm confidence. Verse 20, God is greater than our hearts, John says, and He knows everything. If our hearts condemn us, John says, if our hearts bring us guilt that weighs upon us, remember that your heart is not the final voice. It is God's approval that matters and He knows everything. He knows our motives and He knows those deeds of love for which we never dare to take credit for.
The acts of love that because we are Christian, we just do instinctively without registering. And we feel guilty when these sermons come upon us and we're like, I could be doing more. We may be far more loving than we give ourselves credit for and yet your heart may be condemned this morning, feel condemned this morning. If we feel overwhelmed by the command to love and all the practical points we read through today, remember that there are only two commands that we really need to remember and do. Verse 23, to believe in the name of Jesus Christ and to love one another as He commanded us.
They're the only two that really matter. Faith in Jesus Christ has reunited us with God. We believe that as Christians and in God, we believe that we will find rest for our hearts, even hearts that may condemn us because friend, the truth is that you have been washed clean. You have been purified. Although, as the Bible says, your sins were as red as scarlet, your heart has been washed as white as snow.
The good news of the Bible says that you have been absorbed into the nature of Christ and all that is selfish and all that is hateful, all that loves the self over the other is being dissolved bit by bit like an acid and you are being overhauled into the nature that is Jesus Christ. The Jesus Christ who saw the crowds and had compassion. The Jesus Christ who did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but humbled Himself becoming human like us to die for us on the cross. Humility because of His love. And so friends, there's work for us to do.
There may be things for us that we need to reflect on and think through but this is the final word. God is in you confirming you as His child of His love. Verse 24 says, the Holy Spirit has been given to you. You won't find true rest from a convicted heart. You won't truly love your brother.
You won't truly love and trust God without the Holy Spirit living in you. So maybe I shouldn't say there's work for us to do. There is work for the Spirit to do. Notice that John says in verse 24 that the Spirit is given to us. It is not earned.
It is not earned, it is received rather. And friend, if you have not received the Holy Spirit, if you have not accepted by faith the gospel of Jesus Christ, the one who ransomed your souls with His life, who bled so that you might be healed, then the reminder is today, do so. Pray that the Holy Spirit will come into your life. And then let us love with great patience, with great concern, with great sacrifice, with a deep desire for the good of our brother. The one who is stumbling perhaps.
The one who is wavering in their faith, the one who is wandering away from that faith, the one who needs your love. Let's pray. Heavenly father, we thank You for Your word, the plain and direct teaching of it to our hearts. Father, I pray that we may be comforted ultimately by these words that the Holy Spirit is at work in us. I pray, Lord, that we may all see and recognise the work that You have done.
Since that moment, we put our trust in You. Since that moment, we accepted the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross to wash us clean and the changing nature that You have created in us. But father, I also pray that I may love my brother more. Continue that work of refining in me. Create in me a heart that desires the good of my neighbour.
Help me to speak truth in love. Help me to remind my brothers and my sisters of the gospel, of Jesus' love for them. Father, let us be a church that loves one another, that welcomes one another, that includes one another, that looks out for one another. We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.