Two weeks ago, we completed our study of the First Letter of John. When we began this study last summer, a lifelong church member said to me, “I don’t think I have ever heard a sermon series on 1 John.” If that is true, and I have no reason to doubt it, then it is probably quite likely that this same person, and perhaps many of you, have never heard a sermon series on 2 John, 3 John, and Jude. That’s why I am calling this series, “Little Lost Letters”.
Many years ago, a doting groom penned a love letter to his bride. Stationed at a California military base thousands of miles away from his wife, James Bracy’s link to the lovely woman waiting for him to come home were their love letters.
But this letter didn’t get delivered. Somehow it was lost, lodged between two walls in Fort Ord’s mailroom in San Francisco. The letter was lost in the shadows, with its romantic affections of a youthful marriage, sealed with a kiss.
A half century later, James and Sallie Bracy had just finished celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary and were relaxing in the living room when “Once in a While,” their song, began to play on the radio. Sallie remembered affectionately the 1950s song and how she used to get calls and letters from the man who owned her heart. They joked together knowing there would be no letter or phone call this time because James was at her side.
Meanwhile, a construction crew was dismantling the old post office at Fort Ord, and they discovered a long-forgotten letter from a young army corporal. The crew turned the letter over to Bob Spadoni, the postmaster in nearby Monterey. Spadoni began the process of delivering that letter, tracking down the Bracys through post office records and phone books.
Just a few days after hearing their song, the letter, dated January 28, 1955, was delivered to Sallie Bracy. The letter sent her heart aflutter, tears welled, and she again became a love-struck 22-year-old. “It meant a lot to me then,” said Sallie. “It means even more now.”[1]
The New Testament letter we are about to read right now may not be quite like that human love letter. But it is, nonetheless, a divine love-letter from God to us. And it is one that is, for many of God’s children, lost, because they seldom if ever, have read it or thought about it. So, let us correct that deficiency and reclaim this love letter by reading it now. Listen for God’s word to you from 2 John 1-6…
The elder,
To the lady chosen by God and to her children, whom I love in the truth—and not I only, but also all who know the truth—because of the truth, which lives in us and will be with us forever:
Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son, will be with us in truth and love.
It has given me great joy to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as the Father commanded us. And now, dear lady, I am not writing you a new command but one we have had from the beginning. I ask that we love one another. And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love.
Author
“This work, which was known already in the mid-second century, began to be treated as canonical Scripture toward the end of the second century when it was accepted as a writing of John, son of Zebedee.” (Raymond Brown) However, 2 John does not claim to be written by John, the disciple of Jesus. Rather, the author simply calls himself “the Presbyter” which many English versions translate as “the elder”. As far as we know, this letter did not receive the title “The Second Letter of John” until the fourth century.
The word “presbyter” could simply mean an old man. People in the first century thought of old age as beginning at about 40. “Presbyter” was also an official office in the early church. From this Greek word we get our more modern word “Presbyterian” which refers to a type of church ruled by elders. However, the author of this letter is not just “an elder” of a local church. He writes with authority from one church to another. He is “the elder”.
Many if not most New Testament scholars today believe there was a community that gathered around John the disciple of Jesus in the late first century and that this community was responsible for collecting, editing, and even writing the works we know as the Gospel of John, the Letters of John, and Revelation.
“The elder” may have been a title that the early church gave to the aging apostle John, or this title may refer to someone else in the early church. We do not know for certain.
Recipient
We may not know much about the author of this letter, but we know even less about the recipient. The elder addresses this letter “to the lady chosen by God and to her children”. This could be a letter addressed, quite literally, to a Christian woman in the early church and to her physical children. However, it is more likely that by “chosen lady” the elder is referring to a church. And the children of this chosen lady are members of the church. At the end of the letter, the elder refers to the church where he is based as “the chosen sister”.
We have no idea where these churches were, presumably in the Roman Empire. One may have been in Ephesus (along the coast of Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey). And the other church may have been in a city either close to Ephesus or at a distance. The author of this letter and the recipients may have been part of two churches within the same large city. The population of Ephesus at this time was in the tens of thousands, or maybe even larger.
Why does the author of this letter refer to the recipients so cryptically? We do not know. But it could be that the author was writing during a time of danger for the early Christians, when the powers that be were threatening persecution to anyone who identified themselves as a follower of Jesus. It could be that the more the author of this letter made it look like a normal letter between family members, the safer they all would be.
Vital Signs
While the author and the recipients of this letter may not be clearly known to us, the subject of this letter could not be clearer. The first part of this letter is all about vital signs, specifically, the vital signs of the church.
N. T. Wright tells the following story…
When I was doing research on life after death, and on what people believed about it, I came across some disturbing material from the nineteenth century. People had realized that sometimes the doctors made a mistake, supposing someone to be dead when they were only in fact in some kind of a coma. Breath and pulse can be so faint that you wrongly suppose they’ve gone altogether. Sometimes coffins were discovered in which the supposedly dead inhabitants had been trying to claw their way out, to scratch the lid with their fingernails, until inevitably dying of suffocation. Being naturally afraid of this possibility, some people gave orders that their coffins should be fitted with either a speaking tube or a bell-rope or some other means through which the could, if necessary, indicate that they were still alive.
We are perhaps a little better at detecting the signs of life, and the clear signs of death, these days, though the fears persist. But the question of how you can tell whether someone is really alive or not persists in other spheres, too. What are the signs—the moral and spiritual equivalents of breath and pulse—which enable you to tell whether someone is truly alive in the spirit, that they are a true Christian?
The spiritual vital signs that the elder mentions are two in number. The first vital sign is truth. The word “truth” is used no less than five times in four verses.
1. The elder says that he loves the children of the chosen lady in the truth.
2. But it is not only he who loves the people of the church he is addressing, all those who know the truth love them.
3. Why? “Because of the truth, which lives in us and will be with us forever.”
4. Finally, the elder wishes to the recipients of this letter “Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son.” And he says that this grace, mercy and peace “will be with us in truthand love.” He is so certain of God’s grace, mercy and peace reaching out to touch the lives of his recipients that he says these dynamic qualities will be with them in truth and love.
5. Then in the next verse, the elder says, “It has given me great joy to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as the Father commanded us.”
Pilate famously asked Jesus, “What is truth?” People are still asking that question today.
According to John, the question should not be, “What is truth?” but rather “Who is truth?” I say that because Jesus says in John 14:6, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”
The truth is a person, Jesus Christ. We find the truth in a personal relationship with Christ. The elder says the truth will be in us and will be with us forever.
The second vital sign of the church that the elder talks about here is love. The word “love” appears four times in the first six verses of this letter:
1. The elder says he loves the members of this church in the truth.
2. He says, “Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son, will be with us in truth and love.”
3. The elder tells the recipients of this letter he is not writing them a new command but one they have had from the beginning, that they should love one another.
4. And finally, he spells out what love looks like. He says, “this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands.”
New Testament scholar, N. T. Wright, says,
Love is not, then, the optional extra to be added when everything else is sorted out. It is the thing that goes on round and round, like blood circulating in a healthy living body, or to and fro, like good strong breathing. That’s actually how John’s writing works, here and elsewhere. Breathe out: the commandment is that we should love one another (verse 5); breathe in: love means keeping the commandments (verse 6a). And, underneath this, there is the further commandment—that you should keep on living in accordance with it (verse 6b)! He can’t say it enough. And we can’t hear it enough. These little letters may be small, and may not attract much attention in comparison with their better-known neighbours. But they carry the same explosive charge.
The story is told of a pastor who preached on one of these “love one another” passages in the New Testament. It was a sermon both eloquent and moving. The pastor received many compliments from his parishioners after the service.
The curious thing was that the very next Sunday, the pastor preached the exact same sermon, word for word. When he was asked about this he said, “Once this church starts living it, I’ll stop preaching it.”
Wow!
Truth and love. The elder tells us these are the two vital signs of the church. And they are meant to go hand in hand. As John Stott once said, “Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth hard if it is not softened by love.”
Now, here is one reason why 2 John might be connected in some way to the Church at Ephesus. In Ephesians 4:11-13 Paul talks about Christ giving apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers, to equip God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.
Paul goes on to talk about the result of this in Ephesians 4:14-16. He says the result of Christ giving apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers to equip God’s people is that “we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.”
So, the Church at Ephesus was told, by Paul, to speak the truth in love. The elder who writes 2 John tells us that the two vital signs of the Church are truth and love. And then in Revelation 2, Jesus says to the Church at Ephesus,
These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands. I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not and have found them false. You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name and have not grown weary.
Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.
Wow! The Church at Ephesus was told by Paul to speak the truth in love. They were told by the elder that truth and love were vital signs of the church. But then when Jesus speaks to them in the book of Revelation, we find that the Church at Ephesus has held on to truth but let go of love. How tragic!
As a pastor for over thirty years I have found this to be true. Churches and individuals in churches tend to move to one of two extremes. There are “truth” churches and “love” churches. There are “truth” Christians and there are “love” Christians. You can recognize these two extremes easily. The truth churches emphasize the teaching of Scripture. And sometimes, if you don’t hold to their understanding of Scripture, you find yourself out of fellowship. The truth churches emphasize truth, but they lack love. Then there are the love churches. They tend to focus on works of service. They are oriented to social action. They do a lot of good. But they tend to fall short when it comes to teaching the Scriptures.
Personally, I don’t think Jesus sides with either the truth churches or the love churches. I think Jesus wants us to be a “truth and love” Church; he wants us to be “truth and love” Christians. Let us pray for the help of the Holy Spirit to be just that…
[1] Drew Zahn, assistant editor, Leadership Journal; source: "After 46 years lost in post office, love letter finally arrives," Jefferson City News Tribune (4-25-01)
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