Please turn with me to 1 John chapter 3 as we continue our series in 1 John and our passage today is verses 11 through 18. For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother's righteous. Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you. We know that we have passed out of death into life because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Dear children, let us not love in word or talk, but in deed and in truth. And Father, I pray indeed that this message would be in truth, Lord, not because of me and my strength, but because of your spirit, and that that would be what resonates in us and through me today. In Jesus' name, amen. I've mentioned many times in this series in 1 John that the apostle alludes much more to his own gospel account than he does to the Old Testament. But in this passage, we actually have John's one and only explicit reference to the Old Testament in this entire letter. And you have heard that passage just a few minutes ago. We've also spoken many times about John's three tests of Christianity, proper belief, consistent obedience, and true love for God and other Christians. In this passage, John is specifically addressing the content of biblical love. But the first immediate example he gives is actually a negative example, and it picks up from the context of the end of our passage from last week. Last week, we spoke about the fact that some people are children of the devil because it is their nature to sin, just like the devil has always been and always will be a sinner. So John's first example of loving one another is what it's not like. It's not like Cain, who murdered his brother. But we get more information about Cain than just that he murdered Abel. We end up finding out from John, the apostle and inspired author of scripture, we end up finding out the motivation behind Cain's murder of Abel, and it's this, because his own deeds were evil and his brother's deeds were righteous. So Cain's motivation was jealousy or envy. He was envious of his brother's righteousness. As humans, our hate can often come out of a heart attitude of jealousy and resentment. John is concerned here with the attitudes of our heart, not just our external behavior. But there's no dichotomy there. It's not that Christ or the Apostle was never concerned with our external behavior. because ultimately, our heart attitudes are displayed in our behavior. We see this in verse 15. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer. And you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. Well, this is similar, of course, to the words found in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5. Beginning at verse 21, just those two verses. You have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not murder, and whoever murders will be liable to the judgment. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. Whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council, and whoever says you fool will be liable to the hell of fire. In fact, some commentators say it's likely Jesus was actually alluding to the story of Cain and Abel in this account, especially when he refers to offering your gift at the altar in the next few verses. This is exactly what Cain didn't do, what he should have done. He made his own offering while he was filled with jealous hatred of his brother, when he should have gone to his brother and been reconciled before making his offering to God. As a brief aside, the second statement in verse 15, that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him, that doesn't mean that murder is the unforgivable sin. It's possible to be forgiven of the sin of murder, as we saw in the biblical example of David, for instance. If someone truly repents of a sin, even as grievous as murder, forgiveness is available. But the normal Christian life is not one that is lived in jealous hatred and murderous attitudes. In verse 16, John presents us then with our positive example. Just as Cain was the prototypical example of hating, murder, Christ is the prototypical example of love. How exactly do we love our brothers and sisters in Christ? We do what Christ did for us, self-sacrifice, even to the point of giving up your own life for your brother or sister. Well, some clarification is in order here, because most of us know it's relatively rare for anyone to be called upon to literally sacrifice one's life for someone else. It happens, and perhaps in our current culture, martyrdom for the sake of one's Christian brothers and sisters may become more common, but it's still relatively rare at this point. But John expands on the notion of self-sacrifice and gives us an illustration in verse 17. If anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Well, there's a couple of interesting verses, a couple of interesting words, excuse me, in verse 17. The word here that is used for the goods of the world, bios, in Greek, it's discussed also in chapter 2, verse 16, when he talked about the lust of the eyes and the lust of flesh and the boastful pride in one's possessions, those possessions, the stuff of life, the worldly possessions of life. Resources might actually be one of the best one-word translations for this. I think resources captures the idea a little better here, because it could involve not only material goods, but also time, connections to opportunities, and so forth. Also, the word heart in verse 17 is not the word kardia, but rather splachna. It's the strongest Greek word for emotion in Greek and Aramaic thought. This is what the King James Version calls the bowels of compassion, the innermost seed of emotions. But we don't really speak that way in English anymore. We mostly don't think that way, that our compassion comes from out of our bowels. Even though that's often where we feel our deepest feelings in some times. So it's most often translated heart in this verse. And truth be told, it's not all that dissimilar from what's written in Mark's gospel, love the Lord your God with all your heart, where the word is cardia. At any rate, the expression to close up your heart against someone is more literally to close up the bowels of compassion against your brother in need, to actively turn off all feeling for your brother or sister in need. Some have said it's actually a much harder thing to live for others than it is to die for them. And a pastor friend of mine says, this is similar to the kind of sacrificial love a husband and a wife are called to biblically. The wife ought to live for her husband. She is to be his helper, not the other way around. But as we see in Ephesians 5, the husband is called to die for his wife. And like this example John gives us in verse 17, there are all kinds of little deaths we die every day, and that we are called to die. Paul talks about husbands doing this for their wives, but John is talking about Christians doing this for other Christians. And this seems especially about dying to the love of things more than loving people. There could be many examples of this. If we spend our resources on accumulating things rather than on relationships, that can be an example of loving things more than people. If we care about whether a material item gets broken, and care more about that than we do about whether a person is broken by our words and actions. That can be another example. This is especially challenging for parents. Why? Because children tend to break things. So do we care more about shepherding their hearts than we do about whatever thing was broken? This is even more challenging if that material item was expensive or has extreme sentimental value for us. Now, hear me, I am not saying that we should not care how things are treated. We are to be stewards of everything God puts in our dominion. But it's only to say that we are already tending to care more about how things are treated than we do about how people are treated. Absolutely, we must train our children to be careful and respectful with what they have available to them, but the danger here is for us to be careless about how we treat other people's hearts, especially the hearts of those people under our care and under our authority. Most material items can be replaced, if they even truly need to be replaced, but people's hearts are not replaceable, and they are not easily mended either. In verse 18, in the end of today's passage, John provides a little more detail about what our love should look like. I already read it earlier, but I might paraphrase it this way. Let us not only love through verbal pronouncements, but let us love truly and in genuine fashion, not hypocritically. Now the truth, or truly here, it's not about communicating biblical truth. We do see that scripture concept elsewhere in the Bible. But here, he's talking about communicating the manner in which we love, with genuineness and sincerity, not in hypocrisy. And this has been a theme throughout John's letter. Verbal claims are cheap. Talk is cheap. We don't base our decisions only on what someone says, but also on what they do. So let us then truly love people, not put on a false face. When someone puts on a false face, we often describe such a person as a hypocrite. And that English word, hypocrite, is taken from, virtually a transliteration from, the Greek word for a stage actor. Someone who pretends to be someone else besides who they are. Someone who is play acting. And in the process of play acting, these hypocrites, these actors, often wore masks. At the beginning of this passage, John gave the example of Cain. You might even say about Cain, as at least one commentator has, that hypocrisy was one of Cain's primary issues. His offering to God had not been given out of a willing mind and heart, but out of an evil and hypocritical heart, going through the motions of the commands of God without actually placing his faith in the God behind the command. without trusting that God truly deserved an offering of his first fruits, but rather that he, Cain, deserved to keep them. This is exactly the type of hypocrisy that Jesus accuses the Pharisees of. Not just saying one thing and doing another, but trying to obey God only with outward actions in a way that didn't reflect their true inner nature, and that didn't even worry about what their true inner nature was like. So John is calling Christians to not be pretending to love, not loving only in what we say or in token outward acts, but actually loving in self-sacrificial ways, especially when it means putting people ahead of things. Well, let me give you just a few scriptural examples of this. James, in his letter, speaks about this very thing in chapter 2, and I'll just read for you verses 15 and 16. If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, go in peace, be warmed and filled, without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? Now notice here that one of the perhaps very earliest New Testament letters, James, agrees with perhaps one of the very latest New Testament letters, 1 John, and both of them reflect heavily the content that was included in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. This is an example of why John says in verse 11 of today's passage that this is the message they've heard from the beginning. From the beginning of the church, the message has been the same. And from the beginning of their own walk, the message has been the same. Love one another in self-sacrificial actions. As an extended illustration of this charge in James chapter 2, I want to go back again to the example of the ancient actor in Greek and Roman society during the period of the early church. In our church subculture today, We tend to exalt and honor actors who either become Christians or at least openly profess Christianity. In the church in the third century, now this is the time period before Christianity had become legal and definitely before it became predominant in the Roman Empire. In the church in the third century, if an actor converted to Christianity, he was expected by the church to give up his profession because it was considered immoral in more than one way. First, the very idea of acting was considered immoral in the context of pretending to be something or someone you weren't. Second, most such acting took place in the context of extremely idolatrous subjects, the Greek and Roman gods. And third, actors were often expected to act out vulgar and vile scenes on the stage. Well, so for all these reasons, the profession was considered by the church to be an immoral profession. And honestly, if you think about it, It doesn't sound that much different from the profession of acting in today's society, which may say something about how much the church tends to be caught up in the vulgar and idolatrous entertainments of our culture, rather than filling our minds with the things of God. But this is not a sermon on the evils of how we entertain ourselves, although that is a worthy topic as well. But back to my example, in the church of the early third century, in the time of Cyprian of Carthage, which was a city in North Africa, Carthage, where the nation of Tunisia is today, a specific actor is written about who converted to Christianity and was thus expected to give up his profession. The result was that the church was expected to provide for his needs until he could find another means of supporting himself. Can you imagine that today? How many professions in our culture would be considered by the church to be so immoral that you'd have to give them up and the church would support you until you could begin to support yourself in a worthy manner? I can't think of very many. Maybe a bank robber or a hitman or a prostitute. But acting? In our day, we tend to immediately want this actor to remain in their line of work and start doing the following two or three things. First, we normally want them to start talking openly about God in public. Second, we typically want them, perhaps, to start acting in Christian-themed movies, or at the very least, family-friendly movies. And third, we would likely want them to start using their massive wealth to fund ministry. In the early church, it was the other way around. The actor was expected to give up that profession, and the church was expected to provide for their needs as they left that profession until they could meet their needs in a more worthy manner. Now, the church might not have provided for the same level of lifestyle he was accustomed to, but still, can you imagine that happening today? Could you imagine it for any profession? Now, we only know so much about this situation because of what happened next. The actor did convert, he did leave his profession, and the church did supply his needs for a while. But one of the ways he sought to try to make a living after that was to open an acting school. And he asked his pastor, is this acceptable? And his pastor, at a loss for how to answer that question, wrote to Cyprian, who was the bishop of that area at the time. And Cyprian wrote back that it would be reprehensible to teach a profession that he already knew was immoral to take part in. But what Cyprian did next was even more impressive, which was to tell this actor's pastor that if their church could not afford to meet this man's need, they should send him to Cyprian's church, since they were larger and had more resources in order to meet this man's needs. Those are truly self-sacrificial actions on the part of Cyprian and his church. And here's what their actions spoke to that recent convert. We want you to be holy. And if your church does not have the resources to help you take these steps, we'll take care of your physical needs until you can support yourself worthily. Now this is the idea behind a statement of the Apostle Paul in our other scripture reading from earlier in 2 Corinthians 9. We have been enriched in every way so that we can be generous in every way. Now the context there is that Paul was taking up the collection for the Christians in Jerusalem who were suffering through an extreme famine. And Paul, speaking to the Corinthian church, uses the example of the Macedonian churches who were far poorer than the Corinthians, but who had pled for the opportunity to give to the brothers and sisters in Jerusalem who were experiencing this famine. He explains in chapter 9, verse 11, the reason we have been given so much is so that we might be generous in every way. Abundance is not given to us to hoard, but that we might liberally distribute it to the brothers and sisters who have needs. And while the economic situation of everyone here is not uniform, there's a somewhat broad range of economic wealth even in our small congregation. Even still, all of us here are wealthy compared to many of our brothers and sisters around the world. Now, again, the main point here in today's passage isn't what you can do to take care of the poorest Christians around the world, but that's one way we can be showing our love for our brothers and sisters. The main focus is that what we are to be doing in our own backyard. What we are to do for the Christians we come in personal contact with that we see in need. How are we responding to them? Do we see our abundance as ours? Or do we see our abundance as given to us to steward for those other Christians who have less? That itself might be the one concept you need to take away and mull over and meditate on. Why has God actually provided you with abundance? Is it for you to spend on yourself, or is it for channeling to other Christians in need? Now, I've skipped over a verse, so it's time to go back and touch on it. Verse 13. The world will hate us as it hated Christ. I touched on this topic a little bit in chapter two, but we see the statement in plain language here in chapter three, verse 13. If our deep-seated underlying desire is most to be loved and respected by other people, we will compromise with the way of Christ, because the way of Christ leads the world to hate you, and inevitably to persecute you, at least to some degree. Now, I want to make clear, there is a difference between true persecution and just dealing with the consequences of our own sin. We all have to deal with the consequences of our own sins, whether it be immediate consequences or long-term consequences. We must not think of those situations as persecution. But indeed, as the Apostle Paul writes, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. So persecution will come toward Christians from the world unless you are craving the respect and admiration of the world enough to compromise your testimony and your life. Well, how does this relate to what comes before and after? In one sense, it's just an example of the difference between hating your brother and loving your brother. It's about, again, the love test of Christianity, distinguishing between true Christians and pretenders. It's given to us so that we can assure ourselves of our place in Christ. Verse 14, we can know that we have passed out of death into life because we love the brothers, because we are willing to live sacrificially on behalf of fellow believers in need, rather than just look down on them in criticism and even hatred. But this verse is also clearly about the world hating believers. And I believe one of the major ways people of the world cannot relate to the church is the Christian pattern, or what should be the Christian pattern, of giving away our resources and possessions. If you sat down with an unbelieving friend or a coworker and showed them how much you give to the proclamation of the gospel in the world and to the meeting of the needs of fellow believers, they ought to be shocked. And persecution could even arise from this simply because of what John has said about Cain, because of jealousy and resentment. Now, some unbelievers will believe that giving away so much of what you have is just simply foolishness. But others might indeed be convicted by it, though not convicted enough to repent. So instead of repenting themselves, they'll take out that conviction and that jealousy and resentment on you. God gives to his children peace. One of the greatest gifts God can give is contentment in our circumstances, no matter what they are. As Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 6 verse 6, godliness with contentment is great gain. And remember what Paul then suggested we ought to be content with. Just a couple verses after that, if we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content. We all here have food and clothing. And so the flat truth is that we all, myself included, ought to be a lot more content than we typically may be. To bring it back to 1 John 3, remember that John is writing about loving other believers in need by sharing the resources God has graciously given to you. It's difficult to do that if we lack that spirit of contentment. Just by the nature of the culture we live in, this should speak to all of us. And before closing, I want to offer here a word of warning. If you're not truly a child of God, if you don't have His Spirit dwelling inside you, you can still give away all your resources, all your worldly goods, you can still give away money to charity, you can give money to the church, you can give money to needy people, but that won't get you right with God. We addressed that last week, talking about Martin Luther comparing the theology of glory where deeds are elevated above the humiliation of the cross. We gave the example from the Pilgrim's Progress about Christian trying to get rid of the huge burden of sin he carried around on his back by climbing up the Mount Sinai of deeds. You will never be able to give away enough money, or enough resources, or enough time, or enough of yourself, no matter who you give it to and how worthy they are to receive it, to get yourself in right standing with God. Only when you have utterly fallen on your face before Christ in humility and repentance, knowing that you have nothing to offer God but that very sin you want so much to be rid of, and knowing only He can mercifully remove it from you, only then can you receive a new heart, a gift from the Holy Spirit, and only then will you be accepted by God. not because of you or any deeds you have done, but because of Christ, and the perfection with which he kept God's law, because of his perfect obedience credited to your account, and because of his perfect suffering in experiencing the wrath of God against sin on your behalf. Only then will your deeds come from a heart willing to love God and willing to be humiliated along with Christ. Because participation in that humiliation in this life is the only path to eventual glory with Him in the eternal kingdom. Let's pray. Father, I pray by Your Spirit that You would open our eyes to see the brothers and sisters around us in need. Maybe not so much in need of our money, but of our time, of our attention, and other resources we may have. And perhaps even those brothers and sisters in the church, in the world, who desperately do need provision that you have graciously provided us with an abundance of. I pray that you would convict each of us to be giving in self-sacrificial ways in our spheres of influence in our life, and that you would open our eyes to those opportunities every day. In Jesus' name I pray, amen. Now, it's easy for us, just as humans, and even in the church, to get into a rut with certain rituals. And that's why a lot of churches don't actually participate in communion every week. But the entire point of communion is that we are to do, and when we do, we are to remember. To remember what Christ has done for you. To remember the sacrifice he offered for you. To remember the temptations he completely and thoroughly endured for you. So what we do now, we do and we remember.