This is a really beautiful text. And what I think is, it's really the theology of the kingdom. And it's really the doctrines of God's grace just laid right out. Abraham Booth was the author here. He was a pastor, a Baptist pastor, kind of a contemporary of that you know, those predecessors to Charles Haddon Spurgeon in that particular group. So thank you for getting those moving. And what we trust, of course, is that as you read good books, it takes you into the Word of God, it builds you up and helps to edify. It's a bit of a discipleship ministry, so I do recommend these two. and I will put them underneath here so that we can spread out. So why don't you take your Bibles with me, if you would, and turn to 3 John, and we'll look at three, four verses today, five through eight. 3 John, we could say chapter one, but there's only one chapter, right? 3 John, verses five through eight. If you would follow as I read from the New King James Translation of the Scriptures, listening carefully. Beloved, you do faithfully whatever you do for the brethren and for strangers who have borne witness of your love before the church. If you send them forward on their journey in a manner worthy of God, you will do well. Because they went forth for his namesake, taking nothing from the Gentiles. We therefore ought to receive such that we may become fellow workers for the truth. Let's briefly pray and then we'll look into the word. Thank you, Father, again for the timeless truths that we have and we can take hold of. We pray that they would anchor into our soul. That's your words, Lord, that they would anchor into our soul. That even when times are hard, which they are, often and when we struggle, that we have an anchor that keeps the soul steadfast and sure. We need that, Lord. Thank you for your holy word. We give you the praise in the name of Jesus, amen. So a little bit of context today. We won't spend much time there, but we've been working through a series that's been bouncing back between 2 John and 3 John. These two books are quite similar. If you start out in 2 John, and you read the prologue, the first four verses, and then you jump over to 3 John, you might think you're in the same book. In fact, they both begin by focusing on a phrase called the truth over and over again. Now we went through verse by verse, second John, because there was a little more of the truth within it. But the same thing, the word's the truth, the same thing in third John, as you read those first four verses, you see that ultimately we find this individual who's being addressed, his name's Gaius, And John is thankful that he's walking in the truth. That's verse four. And we saw all this and we kind of elaborated on it. Now the other week we talked about how 2 John addresses an individual that if you were just looking at the text without kind of going into the language behind it, you'd say this person's name was Lady. That would be the logical choice. And I don't think I went back and revisited this the other week. and I think I need to, but when you see, you know, John is addressing in 2 John, the elect lady, it's very likely he's talking to a person, a lady whose name was Curia. It's just taking the Greek letters and spelling it out. The Kappa, the Upsilon, the Rho, the Iota, and the Alpha, right? Curia, K-U-R-I-A. That's a name of a person that most commentators think that's what John was doing. When he says to the elect lady, John was probably talking to a person. Now there are some who dispute that, but the overall content is the same regardless of who we think it is. If he was generally talking to a lady, an unidentified lady, or if he was talking to an individual named Curia, which is where I've landed, obviously, or some have even kind of made it metaphorical and said he's talking about the church. Not as many. You know, I tend to look at the similarities between the two books. He's talking to a guy named Gaius, and he uses the same type of phraseology. So, that's where we landed. Okay, but this lady, she was bringing in people, and probably out of love, right? Operating out of love. But John kind of confronts and says, listen, it's important that you not, Help out those who are helping out in the spirit of Antichrist. Don't be pushing along somebody, supporting them, encouraging them in the teaching of false doctrine. And so her love, though certainly powerful and it compelled her to do and to serve, needed to be coupled with the things that were true. The discerning faculties are always present. Love and truth, they work together. Truth and love work together. Last week we talked about it. You don't separate truth from love. And we gave many illustrations to that end. Now we come into this book of 3rd John and we see he's no longer rebuking, but he's encouraging. He's saying, hey, listen, truth affects how we serve God. The truth affects how you live and practice your faith. Did you know that? Did you know that? The methods that we employ, they come out of our deep-rooted belief system. Somebody once said, your theology dictates your methods. The things that we do in our practice should come out of the deep-rooted beliefs that we have. We're not just tossed around by whatever works. Are you a pragmatist? Are you a pragmatist? Is it just whatever works, that's what we do? Did you know that the church is filled with that? Did you know that? That isn't right. We are not pragmatic. We operate out of what we believe is the bedrock of God's truth. It dictates our methods, it dictates our practice. You know, this is a problem. This is a problem in our society today. Pragmatism. Now let's look at the text here, because now he's talking to Gaius and he's commending him, he's saying, hey, listen, the truth affects the way that we live. Now there's four points I want to make today. Hopefully this will be pretty brief. The truth affects our virtue. The truth affects, let me get to the second one here. It affects our virtue. It upholds a standard. So it has a virtue, a standard. The truth shines light on who the servants of the Lord are. And finally, the truth promises a shared reward. So four things, okay? Four things. We have virtue, we have a standard, we have the servants, we have a reward. This is what the truth is gonna shed light on. So the first thing we read here is, it says in verse five of third John, it says, beloved, you do faithfully whatever you do for the brethren and strangers. Verse six, who have borne witness of your love before the church, we'll stop there. All right, so here there's a commendation, here's Gaius. Now, definitely this is within the context of hospitality. Okay, we think in terms of, you know, my mind only goes back to what? the early telephone, I used to have the rotary dial, anybody ever work with one of those? You click it on, didn't your kids, do you even know what a rotary phone is? You know, you have to dial it and it goes all the way back. Okay, I think, Carrie, didn't you guys have like a phone that was hooked to several households at one time, what do they call that? A party line, okay, so that goes back, but you know there's a point when we go back and back and back further, These guys did not have any type of communication that we have today. So whenever somebody traveled, and they were traveling all over the place, how did you? Okay, so the brother from the church in another country is coming by. How do you know that? When are they coming? Well, probably you don't know exactly when they're gonna get there. Maybe they sent a messenger. They didn't have the US postal system, right? There were couriers, maybe, who they employed. This is a messy thing, right? We're blessed with communication. Oh, I'm not gonna be there. Text your buddy at work. Sorry, I'm feeling ill today. I don't have to call hardly anybody. We just communicate. We have text chains going like you wouldn't believe in this church. I can't keep track of them all. And then I have teams at work, and I have, you know, it's like, how many technical interfaces do we need in this world? We have so many of them, but whatever. We talk, we know, we know what's going on. Not back then. Back then, it was totally different, you know? If your car broke down on the side of the road, which they didn't have a car. Do you remember the days where you had to walk? I remember walking like 12, 13 miles one time. You know, just now it's like, oh yeah, call the tow truck. Okay, so this was a different age. Hospitality was different. Now we can practice hospitality in different ways within the modern era. The spirit is there. There's a spirit of serving the Lord, serving the brethren, and serving other people. And there's two groups mentioned. Right in that verse, it says you do faithfully for whatever you do for the brethren and for strangers. The strangers are individuals who we don't really totally know, but these particular folks profess to be believers, and they exhibited some of those qualities of the fruit of righteousness. And so, this is how Gaius was working. And John says, do faithfully what you do. Do what you do, and do it faithfully. Do what you do. A lot of times when it comes to practice, I've noticed churches pound on certain things to kind of get everybody moving almost inorganically, right? You know, y'all gotta be doing this, you gotta go on a visitation program every Thursday at 7 p.m. This is what we do to practice faith. Okay, wait, stop, right? That is very inorganic. I think that what we have as far as the Christian virtues of faithfulness comes out of God's work within us. Warren Weersbe had this whole book of, he called it the Bee Books. God calls you to be faithful in doing what you do for him. Do what you do, do it well, do it for him, do it for his glory. He calls you to be you. He didn't call you to be me, he didn't call me to be you, He called you to be you and to serve him for his glory. Do what you do. He changes verb tenses there, it's beautiful. He says, it's the present active indicative, which means present with continuous action. You're doing it all the time. Now keep doing what you've been doing, is kind of what he says, and you're doing it faithfully. When we take up something for the Lord, we do it faithfully. Even if it's little, we do it faithfully. Not a push to be something that we're not. There's faithful service to the brethren and to strangers that was being acted on by Gaius here. There was a testimony of this love to the people. You don't have to do great things, just, it's really simple. Love the Lord's people. Sometimes that's just the simplest thing that we can do, just love his people. and we don't do it so that the church will testify of us, we do it because we love His people, and then the Lord's people do see that. You know, if you're a grumpy curmudgeon, I doubt that people are gonna say, hey, boy, I've heard testimony of your love for the people. Just love God's people, right? Love them. Not to be seen, we don't serve him faithfully just to be seen of men, we're not men pleasers. If you look in our library, there's a book. by, it might be two volumes, some of you might know this better than I, by Arnold Dallimore. He's spoken here, right? So Arnold Dallimore was a church historian, and I know he had ties with Toronto Baptists years past, but he's written several tremendous biographies. One of them was on George Whitefield. One, the one I've been reading intermittently at home is on Spurgeon. He did one on a guy named Edward Irving, who was a forerunner to the charismatic movement, very good. Dallimore honed in on a part of Whitfield's life that was a bit embarrassing. Now, true biography does this. True biography doesn't just exalt somebody and say, hey, they lived a perfect life. It goes in and it shows the things that they didn't quite do right. Now, Whitfield, at one point, when he was a young man, he served as a chaplain for a lady who was the Countess of Huntington. Her name was Selina Hastings. She was a member of the British aristocracy. And if you ever get a chance to, again, read D'Alamore's biography, you'll see that D'Alamore really hones in and says this was a big mistake. He signed in for this rich, wealthy lady as her personal chaplain. Here's a man who's supposed to be preaching the word of God, okay? But in order to get a perch, You know what I'm talking about? You know what a perch is? Do you need a perch to serve God? You know what I'm talking about? If you seek a perch, know this, it comes with a cage, okay? Comes with a cage. Whitfield became her personal chaplain. This is the great preacher who's reduced to serving elite aristocrats. It's not gonna work. Realize that the one thing you can do to a bird like Whitfield is constrain him in preaching the gospel. If you're gonna preach the word, you gotta preach the word, right? That's the one thing you can't have. Been there before. It's one thing that's the deal killer for me is if I can't preach the word, I don't want the perch. Does that make sense? We don't need a perch. Don't, by the way, pursue those things. I see a lot of folks do that. I have a story, but I won't tell it because I don't have time to dig into it. Maybe some other time about settling for a perch. The thing is, when we serve the Lord, we do not want to be constrained in our service. We don't want to do it out of a lack of love. When John was noting how Gaius was serving the Lord, he says, do what you do. The church is testifying because you're doing it because you love. If you and I ever get into a situation where we're just, where we know we're compromising, stop. Stop it. It's gonna fail. I've been, like I said, I've been there. Maybe I'll share that sometime, but for brevity today, we wanna, we want to keep moving. A purchase not to be our pursuit, you don't need that. If God brings you into some position in the church and you believe that you can do some good and you can do it in the grace of love, pursue that. If you take on something and you know it's gonna lead to some compromise, don't. Now I'm talking other ministries too. The prison ministry, Kerry and I are involved in, the pastoral team, we have sermons that we preach, and there's some detailed notes that we construct our own sermon off of. If I couldn't agree with the theology of those notes, I wouldn't do it. And that's where we have to operate. The truth, the truth that we know, It builds this virtue of faithfulness and a desire to serve Him, and it's not predicated on our position, a title. It's predicated on just this desire to serve Him. Now the truth upholds a standard. Take a look here as we look through the verse, and we read verse six, it says, these people have borne witness of your love for the church if you send them forward on their journey. in a manner worthy of God, you will do well." Okay? So here's the standard. When we serve the Lord, and we serve others, we send them forth in a manner worthy of God. What does that mean? What does it mean to give your best to the Lord? When you serve your brethren, I'm talking true, genuine brothers and sisters, right? You give your best. There's a story in Matthew's gospel, beautiful. And some of us, I think, forget this. Jesus actually sent out the 12 all through, you know, Galilee, Judea. He sent them out to the lost sheep of Israel on a mission trip. Matthew chapter 10's all about it. He also sent out the 70 as well. That's another story. very similar stories, but he sent out 12. They were the apostles, by the way. And they go and they're traveling, and he gave them a bunch of instructions. But at the very tail end of Mark, chapter 10, he talks about these folks who would receive them in their hospitality. Okay, does this ring a bell? Let me read what he says about the folks who received him and how that Their standard of doing what was best, worthy of God, might be just a very little thing. You'll see. Jesus says, he who receives you receives me. And he who receives me receives him who sent me. He who receives a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward. And he who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man's reward. and whoever gives one of these little ones only a cup of cold water in my name. In the name of the disciple, assuredly I say to you, he shall by no means lose his reward. When we think about what it means to give of our best to the master, your best may be just a cup of cold water. Did you know that that's okay? Did you know, just give of what you have unto him. We have these standards. People write books all the time on what it means to serve in a certain way. This is how you do it. There's a checklist. This is what it means. Probably there's books on hospitality. This is what it means to be hospitable. Again, I want to say it. Stop. Just stop. It means to just serve him out of a pure heart, a pure conscience. if it's even a cup of cold water in the name of a disciple. It says there will be a reward, and we'll talk about that at the end. So we see that, first of all, the truth upholds a virtue of faithfulness. The truth upholds a standard for serving the Lord. It is serving Him in a manner that's worthy of God. And we see further that the truth shines a light on the servants of the Lord. It makes it clear who the servants are. If it wasn't clear to Korea back in 2 John, which it seemed like she struggled a little bit, right? John says, hey, wait, wait, wait, stop. This is the spirit of Antichrist. These are deceivers. It's false doctrine. It looks like John is pointing a light and saying, hey, this is what a servant looks like. And he does that in verse seven, we see this. It says, because they went forth for his name's sake, taking nothing from the Gentiles. There's a big difference between walking forward in the name of Jesus Christ, taking hold of all who Christ is and what he has done, what he stands for, what he believed, what he taught. The gospel, this was not a deceiver or an antichrist. This was one who embraced all that the Lord had taught. Someone who fully embraced the gospel. They went forth for his namesake, verse seven. And they took nothing in aid that would hinder them. It's a little bit of a question. What is he talking about here? They took nothing from the Gentiles. What does that mean? Is this a Jew-Gentile type thing? Probably not. This word is used twice, and it's not really used in that context. It's similar. This is more of taking from the world. This is being supported from the world, thinking that the world is gonna support the true things of Christ financially. If you wanna talk about some severe compromise, just start mixing the state and the church together. Historically, it's always been a problem. I hear people say, oh yeah, you know, wouldn't it be great if Christian schools could be government funded? I look at them and I'm thinking, I won't tell you quite what I think because I think, are you really serious? Do you understand what you're saying? Did you know that when somebody gives money, they have control in some way or another? Okay? Now, these individuals that were being supported were not being supported by some means that could shed, how do we say it? Doubt on the gospel. If you're bought and sold and paid for by somebody else, there's a problem. you know, your message is gonna change. Now, granted, there is, you know, there is some pay associated with various ministries, I get that, but you know, you wanna make sure that it's coming from the right people. You know, this is one thing I hate about it. So about 17 years of my life, I spent in what this thing is called full-time Christian service. I hate that word, by the way. I don't really believe in it. I think it's like a ruse. People pursue it. But I was, for 17 years, working for different Christian school. One of the things I hated was fundraising. Hated it with a passion. Endless fundraising. And sometimes I felt like the Christian school would take from maybe groups that had power, and they did. so much power that they could, at one point, basically say, hey, I wanna fire this headmaster who passed a 360 review. That's compromise, you realize that. And ministries can take that form. If they're paying the bills, there's power. There's a story of a guy named Bruce, or David Wilkerson, You may know him because he was the author. This dates some of us a little bit. He was the author of a book called The Cross and the Switchblade. Anybody ever hear of that? So he founded a ministry called Teen Ranch Ministries. Now the book was about how he went into New York City, he went to Bible college and was pastoring for a while, went into New York City and pursued the gang members. And the story I guess is about this particular gang member who came to the Lord powerfully. And it's a story basically of, you know, kind of the founding, how these guys, when they were young, were seeking to serve the Lord and minister to drug addicts and gang members. And ultimately, he founded these ministries called Teen Challenge. Of course, when government agencies offered financial support with conditions, such as removing the elements or ceasing to preach Christ, you have to decline that. You realize that, right? When you preach the name of Jesus, that's a divider. You know, they say that's a true story when, what's his name, Mr. Edgar Andrews. Mike Green's told me a story how he came and he was talking to the scientists in Midland community, and, you know, because he's preached here. He wrote one of the books back there on, what is it called? Oh, it's my favorite. What's that? Who Made God. Yeah, yeah, he wrote that book, Who Made God. Well, he was talking to the scientific community. Well, as long as you're a material scientist and you're engaging and you're talking science, that's great. But when he spoke the name of Jesus, everything changed, right? It turns, right? Listen, as Christians, we don't hide. We don't hide behind something. We don't take and we're not funded by something that's false. These individuals that were being supported were being supported, probably self-supported as well, which is something that most people don't always consider. The prison ministry that we're involved with, guess who funds it? The people doing it. Why? Because we want to serve the Lord, right? You know, it's not like, oh, give us a handout. It's like, okay, let's dig into our pocket and put money in and get this thing going. Right? Ministry is often self-funded. Woe is me, Paul would say, if he doesn't preach the gospel. Remember that? Woe is me. All right, so finally, and we see as we're working through, the truth promises a shared reward. Let's just look at verse eight. It says the following, we therefore ought to receive such that we may become fellow workers of the truth, right? So we need to receive these individuals, this ministry that Gaius was doing. He was able to minister to brothers and strangers and serve them, and John says, We receive these individuals so that we partake in their work. This seems familiar to me. When we jumped back to 2 John, he warned Curia, he said, listen, if you support the deceivers, you're taking into their work. In fact, the verse says, Look to yourselves that we do not lose those things we worked for, but that we may receive a full reward. So back in 2 John, John warns this lady and says, you're opening the door to false teaching, and be careful that you don't lose your reward, okay? Probably both on this earth, we talked a little bit, and in heaven, right? the things that we do, the effect that we have. But what's being said here is we ought to receive these that they become fellow workers of the truth. We become partakers of the truth even when we serve others who might be serving in a way that we're not. When we take in a missionary or somebody who's on a mission that we're not able to do, we partake in that ministry by serving them. There's a blessing in that. There's a great blessing. It does joy to the soul, right? Doesn't that do your soul good when you're able to give to something or help with something and you know, you know they're doing a work that is working on God's people and calling people to himself? When you can see, oh, look at the good. Look what God's doing in that. Doesn't that do your soul good? It does mine. We share, maybe not in the physical things, but we share with them spiritually. There's a blessing in that. Are you blessed? There's a beautiful story, and we'll close with this, written by Leo Tolstoy. I don't know how many of you have read much of Tolstoy. is some of his spiritual things, I'm just gonna tell ya, are a little wonky, okay, I've read quite a bit. He wrote War and Peace, that's his big one, right, the magnum opus. But he wrote quite a bit on some other things. He has a beautiful short story, and it was called The Cobbler, or some have called it Where Love Is, God Is. There were some things he got right. It's just a beautiful little story that talks about this individual named Martin the Cobbler, or Martin Avdic is his name. The story unfolds and says this humble and devout cobbler struggled with grief and doubt after losing his wife and son. He was inspired by reading the Gospels. He began to pray for God's presence in everyday life, something probably many of us have done, right? Lord, I need you, I need you, I need you. You know, we pray those sorts of things. Again, Tolstoy is a short story, so don't take this to be concrete, but one night, Martin had a dream in which Jesus tells him, I will visit you tomorrow. Excited and eager, Martin spends the next day watching for Jesus while continuing his work. Throughout the day, Martin helps various people. And by the way, the context, if you read the story, he's in this little apartment that's, you know how a ground level apartment where you can see people's feet, right? So, you know, he's a cobbler, he's a shoe guy, right? So it kind of fits in with it. Throughout the day, he helped various people. There was a cold old man who he invited in for warmth and tea. There's a struggling young woman with a baby. He gave food and money, right? And two boys came in. One was about to steal an apple. He was able to see that, and he brought him in. He reconciled peacefully. He may have even paid for the apple. It's been a while since I've read that actual story. By the end of the day, and night came, and he was disappointed that he did not meet Jesus, or at least have that sense of his presence. However, as the story goes, again, in a dream, Jesus appeared to him and said, I was hungry, and you gave me food. I was thirsty, and you gave me meat. Now that is a passage that jumps into the end of Matthew's gospel, again, in chapter 25. This was prior to the kingdom. If you read Matthew 25, you realize that there's a judgment of the sheep and the goats. You've read this, right? The Lord has come, he's sitting on a throne, and he's judging. And there are those who say, he says, you have done all these things for me. And they say to him, Lord, we didn't do anything for you like that. The Lord says to them in a powerful way, he says this. He says, what you did for the least of these, my brethren, you've done it unto me. The power of that is this. We serve Christ. There is a reward for serving Him. When we serve the brethren, when we serve the stranger, we do it for Jesus. He takes it personal, by the way. He says, you did this for me. You did this for me. That's why the truth always causes us to want to serve Him. Right? Truth makes practice happen. God's truth, combined with love, makes the practice. Let's pray. We do thank You again for another day in Your Word. Lord, sometimes we are tired and we're weary. No doubt. We pray that this love that we have, based on truth, would be a love that endures faithfully, Lord. That we don't become weary in well-doing, but that we continue to do the things that we do for you. Help us to serve you and the gifts that you've given us. Help us not to be someone else, but serve you in truth and in love. Thank you for your holy word. We give you praise and the glory in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.