During the years we lived in the mountains of Virginia, in a very remote, small community, I found that the hardest months for me to handle were January and February because of the cold and the snow. But even harder to handle were the dark, grey days, especially for a boy who grew up in Southern California.
Even for those who have not grown up in a sunny climate, overcast days are hard to handle. Why is that? It’s because we all need sunshine. Sunlight gives us the Vitamin D we need that lifts our spirits.
What is true in the physical realm is also true in the spiritual. We need the light of God. The question is: where do we find it? John tells us where in this next section of his letter. Listen for God’s word to you from 1 John 2:7-14….
Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining.
Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness; he does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded him.
I write to you, dear children,
because your sins have been forgiven on account of his name.
I write to you, fathers,
because you have known him who is from the beginning.
I write to you, young men,
because you have overcome the evil one.
I write to you, dear children,
because you have known the Father.
I write to you, fathers,
because you have known him who is from the beginning.
I write to you, young men,
because you are strong,
and the word of God lives in you,
and you have overcome the evil one.
The First Letter of John is like a spiral staircase. As the reader ascends the staircase, he or she revisits earlier themes, but the reader gets to see these themes from a new angle each time. Thus, John returns in chapter two to a theme he introduced in chapter one: light and darkness. In chapter two, John tells us about three places where the light of God shines.
First, the light shines in God’s commands.
It is common for some people to think of God’s commands as something handed down from on high by a cruel taskmaster. However, such is not the case. John introduces this next section of his letter by addressing his readers as “Beloved”. That is who you are. That is who I am. That is who every person who has ever lived or ever will live is. We are all “beloved” in God’s eyes.
Furthermore, in his love, God gives to us certain guidelines for living. Like a loving parent who guides a young child away from the things that will harm him or her and toward those things that will nurture his or her life. God’s commands are not arbitrary, but rather God speaks his commands for our benefit.
John says that he is writing to remind his readers of a command that is both old and new. What command is John talking about?
If we go back to the Gospel of John, which our author almost certainly has in mind, we read about a new commandment that Jesus gave to his disciples. In John 13:34, Jesus said, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”
This is really an old command in that God revealed it long ago in the Hebrew Scriptures. In Leviticus 19:18 we read: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
However, this commandment is new in the sense that it has reached a completely new standard in the life of Jesus. In the same way that Jesus loved us, God calls us to love one another, and Jesus loved us by laying down his life for us.
Love is also a completely new thing in Jesus in terms of the extent to which it reaches. In Jesus, love reaches out to sinners. According to William Barclay, the orthodox Jewish rabbis used to say: “There is joy in heaven when one sinner is obliterated from the earth.” By contrast, Jesus said: “There will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.” (Luke 15:7) Jesus also said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son…”
The love of Jesus is also something new in terms of the length to which he goes to show his love to us. No human action, no lack of response on our part, did ever, or will ever, turn Jesus’ love to hate. If he could pray from the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing,” then obviously nothing will ever stop the love of Jesus for you or me or anyone.
John’s message is clear: Jesus takes loving to an entirely new level. It is kind of like this…
Swimming is one thing when you watch me do it. I love swimming. I enjoy swimming in a pool or in the ocean. However, I have never been on a swim team. I do not know how to swim fast. I have never received advanced training in swimming.
It is another thing to watch Michael Phelps swim. He is the most decorated Olympian of all time, with twenty-two medals. Phelps has taken swimming to an entirely new level.
For another example, think of cooking. I loved the movie, “Julie and Julia”, all about the life and cooking of famous chef, Julia Child, and this woman, Julie, who tries to emulate her. I finished watching that movie and immediately wanted to cook some BÅ“uf Bourguignon for my family. I did it. I can be a decent chef when I try. However, Julia Child took cooking to a new level. The whole world knows about her prowess in the kitchen.
Another example is singing. I think I am a good singer. I enjoy singing. I have even had some vocal training. However, Luciano Pavarotti was one of the greatest tenors this world has ever seen. He took singing to a completely new level.
It is the same thing with Jesus, only bigger. Michael Phelps took swimming to a new level. Julia Child took cooking to a new level. Pavarotti took singing to a new level, but Jesus took loving to an entirely new level. Jesus shows us what real love is. He showed us on the cross.
God’s light shines in his command to love, a command most perfectly fulfilled in Jesus.
The fact that God’s light shines in his commands is inextricably tied to John’s second point, that the light shines in Christian love.
God’s light shines not only in God’s command to love, fulfilled in Jesus’ love, but his light shines in our love for one another, in and through us. How amazing is that?
But John issues a warning here. The warning is this… If we claim to be walking in God’s light, yet we still hate our brothers and sisters, our fellow human beings, and especially our fellow Christians, then we are, actually, still living in darkness.
On the other hand, if we love our brothers and sisters, our fellow Christians and fellow human beings in general, then we are walking in the light. Love equals daytime.
If we are walking in the light, then we will see where we are going, and we will not stumble around. Literally, John says, “Offense in him is not”. The word John uses that may be translated as “offense” or “cause of stumbling” is σκανδαλον. This is the Greek word from which we get our English word “scandal”. In other words, if we are walking in the light by loving our brothers and sisters then there will be no scandal in us. That does not mean that others may not see scandal where there is none. Human beings have an amazing knack for stirring up scandal where it does not even exist. There is something about love, in particular, in which some people will always find something scandalous. However, if we walk in love, then we can be sure that God sees no scandal in our lives, nothing that gives him offense.
Thus, we must make a decision, will we walk in love and sometimes have others wonder what we are up to, or even question our motives, or will we live bland, insipid, apathetic lives that never attempt the dangerous, scandalous experiment of love?
Once again, we see here how John thinks in terms of black and white. There is no grey area when it comes to love. Either we love our brothers and sisters, or we hate them.
Sheldon Vanauken once said,
The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians—when they are somber and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths.
The choice is ours: we can be excellent advertisements for Jesus or not. It all depends on love.
Thus, John has told us about two places where the light of God shines. The light shines in God’s commands and it shines in Christian love. Thirdly, the light shines in words of encouragement.
John speaks words of encouragement here, seemingly, to three different groups in the church: children, young men, and fathers. If we take these terms to refer to spiritual maturity, rather than chronological age, then John is speaking to new Christians, those who are still young in the faith, and to those who are mature in the faith.
In addition to addressing three groups, John reminds these three groups of three gifts God has given them: forgiveness, knowledge, and strength. However, there is an overlap. God gives knowledge of himself both to the children and to the fathers, to new Christians and to the mature. This suggests that, in actuality, all three gifts are for all three groups.
First, there is forgiveness. “I write to you, dear children, because your sins have been forgiven on account of his name.” Forgiveness of sins comes through the name of Jesus.
To the Jews, a name was not something which one simply called another person; a name represented the character of that person. The psalmist says, “Those who know your name put their trust in you.” (Psalm 9:10) This does not mean that those who know the name of God automatically trust in him. It means that those who have come to know God’s character in an intimate, relational way will put their trust in him, for they know by experience that he is trustworthy.
Therefore, when John says that our “sins have been forgiven on account of his name” he means that when we know the character of Jesus, when we have experienced him, then we are assured of forgiveness because forgiveness and love are essential aspects of the character of Jesus.
The second gift John reminds us about is knowledge. “I write to you, fathers, because you have known him who is from the beginning…. I write to you, dear children, because you have known the Father.”
If John the disciple of Jesus was the author of this letter, then he may have been thinking about his own experience of growing knowledge of the Lord. He met Jesus for the first time as a very young man, maybe even a teenager. He was captivated by this Jesus, his healing, his teaching, his interaction with individual people, his love for everyone he met. Then, even after Jesus left his disciples, John thought about him over the years. How could he not when he was caring for Jesus’ mother Mary? John meditated on all the words and deeds of Jesus, and over the years, he began to see many layers of deeper meaning in it all. Now John was an old man, perhaps in his eighties or even older, and his knowledge of Jesus was still growing through the indwelling Holy Spirit. The same thing will be true for every follower of Jesus Christ. Our knowledge of him grows over the years.
Furthermore, it is not simply an intellectual knowledge of Jesus that grows in our minds, it is our personal acquaintance with Jesus and his ways that grows in our hearts, in our souls. William Barclay wrote about this:
For the Jew knowledge was not merely an intellectual thing. To know God was not merely to know him as the philosopher knows him, it was to know him as a friend knows him. In Hebrew to know is used of the relationship between husband and wife and especially of the sexual act, the most intimate of all relationships…. When John spoke of the increasing knowledge of God, he did not mean that the Christian would become an ever more learned theologian; he meant that throughout the years he would become more and more intimately friendly with God.
The third gift John reminds us about is strength. “I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God lives in you, and you have overcome the evil one.”
God gives strength to every Christian through his word living in us. When we think of God’s word living in us, we may think of Jesus whom John calls the Word in the prologue to his Gospel. Jesus, the Word, lives in us through his Holy Spirit. This process of Jesus living and growing in us is also aided by our reading, our hearing and our application of God’s word in Scripture. That was how Jesus himself conquered the evil one. Jesus met every temptation in the wilderness by saying to Satan, “It is written….” We can meet and conquer Satan in the same way.
These are three great words of encouragement John gives to us: you are forgiven, you know the Lord, you are strong and can overcome the evil one by the power of God’s indwelling word.
I wonder what words of encouragement the Lord may want you and me to speak to others this day? Charles Swindoll tells this story…
On May 24, 1965, a thirteen-and-a-half-foot boat quietly slipped out of the marina at Falmouth, Massachusetts. Its destination? England. It would be the smallest craft ever to make the voyage. Its name? Tinkerbelle. Its pilot? Robert Manry, a copy editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who felt ten years at the desk was enough boredom for a while, so he took a leave of absence to fulfill his secret dream.
Manry was afraid, not of the ocean, but of all those people who would try to talk him out of the trip. So he didn’t share it with many, just some relatives and especially his wife, Virginia. She was his greatest source of support.
The trip? Anything but pleasant. He spent sleepless nights trying to cross shipping lanes without getting run down and sunk. Weeks at sea caused his food to become tasteless. Loneliness, that age-old monster of the deep, led to terrifying hallucinations. His rudder broke three times. Storms swept him overboard, and had it not been for the rope he had knotted around his waist, he would never have been able to pull himself back on board. Finally, after seventy-eight days alone at sea, he sailed into Falmouth, England.
During those nights at the tiller, he had fantasized about what he would do once he arrived. He expected simply to check into a hotel, eat dinner alone, then the next morning see if, perhaps, the Associated Press might be interested in his story. Was he in for a surprise!
Word of his approach had spread far and wide. To his amazement, three hundred vessels, with horns blasting, escorted Tinkerbelle into port. Forty thousand people stood screaming and cheering him to shore. Robert Manry, copy editor turned dreamer, became an overnight hero.
His story has been told around the world. But Robert couldn’t have done it alone. Standing on the dock was an even greater hero: Virginia. Refusing to be rigid when Robert’s dream was taking shape, she allowed him freedom to pursue his dream.[1]
God’s light is seen in God’s commands. God’s greatest command is love. Thus, God’s light is seen when Christians live out a life of love. One of the greatest ways we live out a life of love is through speaking words of encouragement, as Virginia did to her husband. Who is there in your life to whom you might speak words of encouragement today?
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