Let's turn to 2 John, the second letter of John. 2 John is just one chapter. We're going to take for our reading today the first six verses only. Without anything by way of introduction, we just want to read the scripture. I ask the Lord to bless his word in our hearts and minds as we've gathered here to hear it and to hear from him. The Apostle John writes, and he says, to the elder, to the elect lady and her children, whom I love in truth, not only I, but also all who know the truth, because of the truth that abides in us and will be with us forever. Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Father's Son, in truth and love. I rejoiced greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as we were commanded by the Father. And now I ask you, dear lady, not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but the one we have had from the beginning, that we love one another. And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments. This is the commandment, just as you have heard from the beginning, so that you should walk in it. The Apostle John writing to a local church whom he identifies only as the elect lady, writing almost 2,000 years ago, and yet I think he sheds a bright light on our own time. The Bible is unique in that way. We can read things that have been written thousands of years ago, and they apply to us and are as true to us and are as obvious and certain to us as they were the day that they were written. I believe this is one of those passages of scripture that sheds a lot of light on our own time. I think with surgical precision, John diagnoses one of the greatest ailments in our world today. He pinpoints and touches upon what is, I think, one of the greatest problems that we face today. 2,000 years, just a little shy of that, after he wrote it. That ailment, that sickness, that disease that we want to present to you today and talk to you about today is the separation of love and truth. If there's a title today, it would simply be love and truth. John speaks here with great clarity. And he says to us, and you cannot read 2 John, you cannot read 1 John, without coming away with a very clear understanding that John was highly interested in connecting these two ideas, truth and love. He writes here in 2 John saying in many ways much of what he said in 1 John, but he speaks with great clarity that truth and love must be combined. Truth and love must be together. In order for one to be fully what it ought to be, you must have the other. To remove one is to remove the other. To remove truth is to remove love. You cannot love without truth and you cannot be true without love. John is telling us this. He is saying that in essence to abandon truth is to abandon any hope true love we've heard that before right it's true love well you can't have true love without truth and you can't have love really at all without it to speak and to understand either of these two things truth and love both must be understood and kept in view I think we'll see how this is a problem for our world today. Shortly, the Lord will help us to do that. But not only did John write of this, Jesus spoke of it as well. This connection between this idea of truthfulness and love, that they must abide together. In Matthew 24, verse 12, Jesus wrote, And because lawlessness will be increased, because lawlessness will be increased, and he's speaking of the end times, because lawlessness will be increased, he says, the love of many will grow cold. Lawlessness in its sense is really a disregard of truth in one respect. And so Jesus says, as truth, as righteousness, as a recognition of truth decreases, so too does love. In fact, we can say it this way, too, I think. Lawlessness is one result of a disregard of truth and leads to a lack of love. Some have wondered or questioned, asked the question, which is more important? Is it more important to love someone or to have the truth and be truthful? Is it more important? Which is more important, love or truth? Some even today misconstrue and misunderstand the greatest commandment itself. When Jesus was asked, what is the greatest commandment in all of the scripture, in all of the Old Testament, in all of the law? What is the greatest? Jesus was asked that question, and perhaps in some sense trying to trip him up, and he said to them, the greatest repeating what had been said in Deuteronomy and other places in the Old Testament, the greatest commandment is to love God and to love one another. The second one is likened to it, to love one another. But some will say, even in misunderstanding of that, that we love someone or we're a loving church or we're a loving people and aren't concerned overly much with doctrine or truth or right or wrong. They'll hang it under a banner that they are a loving people and offer no judgment whatsoever. But what's happening actually in these situations many times is we're separating truth and love. John said we can't do that and so did Jesus. To have one you must have the other. We found this in one of the readings as I was studying and I want to read it to you and quote it to you. It says, truth and love are noble and natural companions. They must not be severed on earth any more than in heaven. In the Godhead, the two are essentially united. God is light and God is love. In human society, they ought to be united. And this is what I want you to hear. Truth without love becomes cold, stern, and even cruel. Love without truth becomes unstable and capricious, or just fickle. It's just passing. There's no depth to it. I think in the greater society of men today in the world that we live in, it seems to me that the scale has been tipped toward love without truth in our society. We like to think, we want to think, that we can love someone and yet not hold or be accountable or have a standard of truth associated with that love. A greater part of society today wants to just talk about love. It's a love that dismisses almost truth even when that truth is staring you right in the eyes. And we see many examples of that today. just an abdication and an ignoring of right and wrong and truth under the banner of love. We just want to love people. And I know that it is important, of course, and we'll talk about this more, but it is very important, and I think John writes about it so often in his letters, because it is important for us to never separate truth and love. You can't love someone without a recognition and an honoring of truth. It cannot be true without holding in your heart a love for God and a love for the world. You remove one, you've removed the other. I think in some ways there's a reason that the world seems so empty of love today. And I think it's because we are so empty of truth today. Because we're so empty of the Word of God as a culture, as a nation, and the world at large, it seems that we no longer know how to love because we no longer hold to an observation and to a recognition and an honoring of the idea of truth. Love that dismisses truth is not love at all. Love that isn't based on truth is passing. It's a love that will not abide the storms that are going to come against it. So as you think about your life and our world today, as I did, as I was directed toward this scripture, I think the world is starving for true love. For love that is deep, that is true. But in dismissing truth, We've dismissed love as well. We might call some things that we do love, and yet, according to the Scripture, it's not honoring of the truth. It is not love at all. And yet, so we must not consider, we must not separate truth from love. And yet at the same time, we must be ever watchful against an over-correction. Care must be taken against an over-correction that leads to a coldness and cruelty of its own. To be so obsessed with truth that we forget. that that truth is supposed to be lived out and spoken and shared with the world from a heart that is full of compassion and love for God first and for the whole world. I think sometimes there can be a classic overcorrection here of being so concerned about being right even doctrinally, theologically, Denomination whatever word you want to use it's very easy for us sometimes to be so concerned about being Right that we forget that being right is to be combined with truth And just like you can't separate truth from love you cannot separate love from truth They are inseparable in this sense A dedication to truth that is not aimed in the direction of showing love to God and to our fellow man is absent of the most fundamental truth of them all, which is we are to love God and love one another. So we have to constantly guard against one overcorrection to another. One group of people overcorrecting from maybe an environment that they grew up in that was obsessed with being right, right down the line and being able to check all the boxes theologically and being able to walk the way you're supposed to walk and dress the way you're supposed to dress and speak the way you're supposed to speak. and go so far on that side of things, and yet there's a coldness to it, there's an absence of love to it, and you walk away, ironically, from truth itself, because truth is to be combined with love. But overcorrecting from that environment, they go, I'm not going to be concerned about being right. I'm not going to be concerned about being consistent with the Word of God. And so there's an overcorrection. We're just going to love people and we're going to throw away all the doctrine and all the things that we're supposed to be and do. And that as well is a classic overcorrection. And I think sometimes we play ping pong, even in our own lives sometimes, from one season of life to another. And John is telling us, don't forget, These two things must be together. We've probably seen people who've struggled with this one way or the other, and we probably have ourselves struggled with it too. And so if there's one overriding thought that I want to present to you today that will go through all of our comments this morning, it is this. We cannot separate. You cannot separate, according to the Word of God, truth and love. They must come together. What is truth? He tells us what it is, but we have arrived at a day and have been here for some time now, I think, where it is needful for us to define what we mean when we say truth. The Greek, the word itself, literally means, what is real? What is actual? It's reality. What is true? What is true and what is not? It's a binary reality situation in most circumstances. Something is either true or it is not. There's a beautiful day outside today. The sun is shining and the sky is blue and there's a few clouds scattered in the sky and it's an absolutely beautiful day out there. If I were to say that it was raining and cloudy and stormy, that would be untrue. But truth is what is real. In essence, that's what it means for something to be true. But you see, and this is not news, I know, we though, much of society, many men and women across the world, we have fully swallowed the lie that what we think, what we feel, by itself is equivalent to truth. We've swallowed that lie. That what I think and what I feel is equivalent to truth. I hope it is, but just because I think it, just because I feel it, does not make it true. Because everyone thinks or feels then something different By the way, you see the progression. It began with this idea that what I think and what I feel is true because, well, I think it and I feel it. So we then somehow put an equal sign between my thoughts and my feelings and we put an equal sign there. And on the other side of that equal sign we put the word truth. But then we run into people who don't think and don't feel like we do. And in their definition of truth, on the other side of the equal sign are their thoughts, and their opinions, and their personal convictions, and their feelings. And so, what has happened? We now have a modification that has been introduced almost every time as a society we talk about truth, and that is this edition. Your truth. your truth versus my truth. Because first, we put my thoughts, my opinions, my feelings equal truth, and then we run into others who don't feel the same way, don't think the same way, and yet we've both got equals truth, and so we had to introduce this variable and we call it your truth. There's no longer just truth. There's your truth. There's my truth. There's his truth. There's her truth. There's our truth and their truth. There's his story and my story. There's my view and his view. But just simple, straightforward, historical, observable truth? No, not anymore, it seems. It seems we've thrown that out. It seems we've done away with that. And what I believe, what I think, what I feel has trumped truth itself. But truth is truth. And God is truth. And we are told that His Word is truth. We are told that the Spirit of God will tell us nothing but the truth. And so what we read in Scripture, when rightly read and understood, and when the Spirit of God Himself helps us and shows us what truth is, that's beyond me. Him convincing and showing me what the truth is. And then when I proclaim the truth, as I'm trying to do here today, and have tried to do in many other places, many other times in my life, it isn't my truth that I'm trying to share. It is the truth of God, which is the definite article, the truth. But I'm telling you today that is, that's a foreign, it has become an entirely foreign idea to most people today. That there is objective truth. And the problem with that is that when we remove truth, there's a lot of problems with it, but it's also one reason why there's such a symptom of a lack of love in our world today. It only stands to reason, does it not? You remove truth? According to John, haven't you also removed love? And so relationships are built on what? Rather than love, true, abiding, true love built on truth. Love as we define it because, because we've redefined truth, we now have to redefine love. Do you see? We now have to redefine what that is because it's no longer solidly connected to the idea of truth. And so now love becomes this, what a person makes me feel like. What someone does for me, what someone allows me to feel and to think, whether they feed me, which is just completely 180 degrees different from what love is described in scripture. But you know again, this idea that truth has become relative, this is not any new phenomenon. I know that in 2023, this has been taking shape for decades. I know this is not new. This is not a headline. This is something we know. And again, we know it's been taking shape for decades in our nation. It is now, in my opinion, which is ironic to say, I know, in my view, what I observe, it seems to be the default way that most think about truth, that it's relative to the individual, rather than rock-solid based on what is real, which is what truth is. And you know what's real? You're a human being. You've been created in the image of God. You came forth from your mother's womb a sinner, and you proved it by the sin that you commit. This is true. It's real. You know it. We can try to deny it. We can put the attorneys in the courtroom. And an attorney can spin the words. And a teacher can spin the ideas. And a popular culture can turn us inside and out and make us think all kinds of silly, crazy, unrealistic things. But the bottom line is this. When you look into your heart, you are looking into the heart of a human being. God has created you. That's true. That's true. And God wants to show you His love, and He did so through His Son. We're going to talk more about that in a minute. But the default setting today is there is this concept of, well, it's all relative. And we believe that on the surface, and we don't allow ourselves to question it very deeply, because if we do, we go to a place that scares us. And so what happens? People shut down the debate. Let it never be said, by the way, that a true Christian is afraid of any idea, any book, any discussion, any conversation. In the appropriate place and in the appropriate way, all ideas are welcome. All people are welcome, but there is truth that we all must conform to. Because it's true. Not because it's ours, because it's God's. Truth and love and it's so important to establish this and again lay this foundation of truth because the reason we're all so starving for love is because we're starving for truth and yet we keep pushing that plate away when it's put in front of us to eat. We want the sugar, we want the love without the truth and that is not love. Now, before I set an overly negative tone on this point, because I know some... just because of the very nature of the world today, I do want to say a couple of things as I was preparing and thinking about this whole place. I think this check on these comments that sometimes I think goes unsaid, and I think it needs to be said. First, it is true that we all interpret truth from our own perspective. That is just true. It's impossible. It's the news anchor whose job it is, at least it used to be, whose job it was to be what? Unbiased. As best as they could be, and in a day that is long past and long gone, I believe there were men and women who tried to do that, and did to the very best of their ability, and it was their profession to be unbiased, and that was the struggle. to remove from themselves any bias about the story. That's a struggle. In fact, it's almost an impossible struggle, because we're all going to interpret things based on our own perspective. So I understand that. I don't want people to go away from these comments, or you to go away today and think that, well, we're just being a curmudgeon zero fashion or Stuck in our ways Proclaiming truth especially because the the adversary has kind of showered us with this idea Don't listen anybody who says there's one absolute truth, and it's the Word of God. They're silly people everything's relative look That's not true, but I also recognize that we experience truth and from our own individual life. I get that. And that is true, but that is not the same thing as calling truth relative. To say that truth is relative would be to say that your up is my down. Your red is my blue. Truth is truth. It's either up or it's down. That is observably, objectively, one way or the other. I would experience it differently. But from the focus point, from the perspective of God and life and our hearts and who we are, True North is God and Himself. And so everything is in relation to Him. and truth connected to Him is unchangeable, immutable truth. So I understand that while truth is objective, I want you to know that I do understand that we experience that and come to that from unique perspectives. But a perspective of truth doesn't change the truth. It's just a perspective on a second, There are some things about which we use the word truth. I think this is another stumbling block. There are some things about which we use the word truth when in fact what we're talking about are preferences, opinions, social norms, dress codes at church, a glass of wine with dinner. These are preferences, norms, Communities of people have decided for themselves and within their community what they are going to observe. And yet to say that it is true, that you must abstain from all alcohol, in my opinion, is not supportable by Scripture. But that becomes something beyond defining what is true and what is not. They're talking about They're talking about greater things that are involved. Again, this too does not mean that truth is relative. It means there are a great many things that human communities wrestle with and decide upon and agree about that are not matters of ultimate truth in the sense of how we're talking about it and how I think John is talking about it. And of course we know that John is referring to the truth of Christ. which is the truth. He is the embodiment, the human representation of truth about us, about this world, and about the world to come. And the truth about salvation is immutable, and it is absolute. It is unchangeable, and we must conform to it. It will never conform to us. because God does not change. So truth and love must be together. I won't take nearly as long as I intended to take with verse 3, but I do want you to look at what we have. And what we have, by the way, the last phrase of verse 3, we want to put that in your view as we look at the first phrase here. We have these things in truth and love. What does the combination of truth and love, specifically from God, give to us? What is it that we gain from an understanding of God and what we receive in truth and love from God? First, grace. We receive grace in truth and love. And I want to share this with you very briefly. I think sometimes the reason we miss out on grace, on mercy, and on peace is because we don't want to receive them. We have not yet received them or sought them with a heart that wants the truth as well as the love. Because you see, we have these things, grace, peace, and mercy, in truth and love. Grace, we know what grace is. It's a favorable attitude, as defined in some dictionaries, theological dictionaries. It's God's favorable attitude and view toward us. I think one of the best definitions in my view is it's God's unmerited favor toward us. It's His bestowing upon us gifts and love and things that we don't deserve and yet He gives to us. But let me ask you this question. Can you be a recipient of God's grace? while His love, in that sense, can you be a recipient of God's love, grace, by means of His love, if you have not come to terms with the truth of why you need it? Can you experience God's grace without first understanding why and how you need it? Especially in our culture today, in our world, we're told we're just all that and a bag of tricks. Too much of the time, I think. And again, I don't want to go too far down that path. I don't think we should be discouraging, but I want you to think about that for a minute. And this applies, I think, to saved and lost. Sometimes what distances us from God's grace is not our desire to feel it and to have it and to feel his love. It's we've distanced ourself from the truth of what it means to have grace, which is this is something I didn't merit and I'll never merit and I need it. We don't want to admit that, I think, at times. I know it can be a stumbling block to those lost. You need God's unmerited favor. You won't earn it. You won't climb the rope and ring the bell. You won't climb the mountain and find the answer. You won't earn salvation. You're going to have to find it seeking God's grace and the truth of what it means to need it. We have mercy in love and truth. Mercy is something of the opposite of grace. certainly benevolent and loving from God, and yet instead of giving and receiving that we do in grace, mercy is the withholding of the things that we deserve, the punishments. In 2023, in many places, even in many places that would be considered Christian, I think the idea of what mercy is is becoming more and more foreign. I deserve eternal punishment for my sin. That is what I deserve. But in truth and love, when I understand that, and I sought God and He saved me, and I couldn't have put all these things together in that moment, but I knew I was lost. I knew I was a sinner. And I sought Him for salvation, and He gave me peace that we're going to talk about in a minute. He forgave me. I didn't merit that forgiveness. Look, when you ask someone for forgiveness, you're not asking them to let something go because you've done something else to make it right. You're asking for forgiveness. You were wrong. And when you go to God, when you receive His grace, the truth of that is, I was wrong. And I knew that when I was lost. And the Spirit of God convinced my heart of that. And though I had gone through the motions, and I was a pretty decent kid by the standards of the world, I think, to that point. I knew I was lost. And I knew in that moment that hell would be where I would go. And I knew that I needed mercy. But you can't have mercy only. You can't have the love without the truth. And the truth is, I need to understand why I needed mercy. To seek it and to experience it and to enjoy it and to rejoice in it. How can you rejoice in grace and mercy when you didn't know you needed either one? When you were disconnected from the truth of both. Sometimes I think what we truly need is a good dose of simple truth about who we are. To seek the Lord in a right way. To find His grace and mercy in truth and love. It's true that I'm lost, or that I was lost. It's true that I was lost at that moment, but it was also true that God sent His Son because He loves me. And His Son went to the cross and He died for me because He loves me. I receive these things in truth and love. And finally, peace. Just the absence of strife, of war. It's a relationship that is tranquil. Tranquility is another word. There's no strife. There's no division. That's what we have in truth and love. The truth is as much a part of these gifts of God as love is. These things are given to us in truth, so then truth must be faced, shouldn't it? If you want grace, mercy, and peace, you're going to have to reconcile the truth. and the truth of what God has done in Christ for you because you're lost. And God will come and he will seek you, he will call you to himself. But again, how can you experience grace without knowing and understanding your unworthiness before God? How can you experience that grace without understanding the truth that precedes it? How can you experience and possess mercy without knowing the truth of what your sin deserves? And how can you experience and possess peace without understanding how you are an enemy of God outside of Christ? James 4.4 tells us that. We won't take time to read it. So many today, I think, are attempting to possess these incredible, unspeakable gifts of grace, mercy, and peace, but they're unwilling to walk the road of truth to get there, and you can't separate them. You can't divide them. The joy, by the way, of the combination of truth and love, there's a joy here to be seen. there is true joy to be found. When you combine truth and love, the joy of that combination is that one never threatens the other. What do I mean by that? When you have wrestled with the truth of God, who He is, who you are as a sinner before Him, and you've sought Him, and you've found mercy, and peace, and grace, and you have salvation, the joy of the combination of the fact that you walked the road of repentance, driven by the truth of your lostness, and an understanding of an awareness of your sin. The joy of the combination of truth and love is that one never threatens the other. There will be no future discovery. Listen, when God saved my soul, He forgave me of my sin and I walked the road to Him in repentance and truth and I walked that road not disconnecting myself from the truth of who I was and what I was and the joy that I feel now some many decades later. As that 11 year old boy was forgiven and God said, I have forgiven you, you are mine and I am yours and you will be forever with me in heaven. The joy of having truth and love together is that there will never be a discovery in the future that is going to take away the love of God from me. He's not going to find something else. Truth and love have come together. No discovery in the future will threaten to take away the love of God. But what sometimes people want to do is they want to go down a road without facing the truth, and even if they feel something and convince themselves something of a love of God, there's always a fear, isn't there? It's like human relationships when we're not honest with one another. There can be something of a healthy relationship, but then there's always something. of fear that the truth is going to reveal and take away the love. But with God, truth and love are inseparable. There will be no love that is less than what it could and should be by ignoring the truth when you allow and you keep these things, these ideas together, truth and love. This is the only path to peace. It's the only way to get there. It's the combination of truth and love. I won't take the time to read, go through verses 4 through 6. I feel like the Lord has communicated this morning what He wanted to. I pray that He has in your own heart. I know He's certainly communicated a lot to me. But don't separate truth and love. As you move toward God, move in that direction fully acknowledging the truth, of what the Scriptures say, what God has said, what He is saying to your heart, even perhaps now. Acknowledge it. Nod your head. Don't argue. Don't push back. Fall on your knees, asking for mercy, grace, and peace. And understand that as you do that, you face the truth of why you need those things, that you're a sinner, but then you also, then you see what love really is, in that God sent His Son to pay the price for your sin. You've seen the truth of it, and now you see the truth that God has paid the price. He sent His Son, and in this way God has loved the world. He's truthful in that He is judging sin. His own Son took it upon Himself and went to the cross and died. So as you go to Him, never hide from the truth. As I close, perhaps one question. Are you living outside the combination of truth and love? Are you hiding from truth? Never seeing that by doing so is exactly how and why you are also hiding yourself from love. Hiding from God's truth is going to be the very same situation and circumstance as hiding from His love. Because you can't have one without the other. They are inseparable. Are you claiming to love without a concern for truth? You'll never experience peace this way. And as John did, those of us who know God and have come this way to Him, acknowledging the truth of our lost condition and finding Him in salvation, in mercy and grace and forgiveness and repentance for sin and faith in Christ, when we have come that way and when we come to these passages, may we do what John did as he said in verse 4, I rejoiced greatly. May that bring to our hearts a rejoicing. that the love that I have in my life is not based on a fairy tale, a fantasy, a movable political spectrum, a king, a friend, a family member. It's based on the unchanging truth of God. And in so doing, it is love that overflows and is always sure and steadfast and will never leave us or forsake us. Truth and love. Pray the Lord it speak through his word today.