Love God | 2 John 4-6
Welcome to Main Street Church, it is good to be with you all this morning. If you don’t know me, my name is Jack I am on staff here at main street church and I wanted to start out this morning by sharing one of my favorite things in the world with you guys and that is watching babies learn how to walk. It is one of the best parts about serving downstairs in the nursery, especially for someone who does not have kids; we get to see the progress every couple of weeks.
It’s one of the funniest and most heartwarming things to watch. They’re wobbly, uncoordinated, and determined. Their heads seem a little too big for their bodies, their legs move like they’re made of rubber, and their balance lasts about three seconds… on a good day.
They take a step, look proud, and then immediately fall on their diaper with a thud.
They try again, arms straight out like tiny airplane wings, feet slapping the floor, smiling at whoever’s watching, because they want help, they want approval, and they want to know someone is cheering them on.
And the whole time, the parent is just a few steps ahead, saying,
“Come on! You can do it! Just walk to me!”
The child doesn’t really know how to walk yet.
They just know who they’re walking toward.
And somehow, that’s enough.
That picture is surprisingly close to what John is talking about in 2 John.
He says some believers were “walking in the truth.” Taking steps toward Jesus. Learning, wobbling, getting back up, and keeping their eyes on Him.
And just like a child walks toward a parent who loves them, John reminds us that our walk with Jesus always leads us toward loving others, because the One we’re walking toward is love.
Now, if you weren't here or don’t remember, my series in our larger In-Between theme is going through the book of 2 John and how it connects very well with our church mission: Love God, Love others, and Make Disciples.
Last time we talked about loving God and how that looks: knowing the truth, enjoying the truth, and abiding in the truth. Today we are going to go over the second part of our mission, Love Others, we will see today walking with Jesus means walking in both truth and love, and that genuine love for others flows from knowing, trusting, and obeying God through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Let’s take a look at what’s happening in 2 John 4–6:
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.
2 John 4–6
Verse 4 is really what begins the body of the letter. I love that the first thing John says to this church is that he is so excited that there are members walking with the Lord. John isn’t guessing; he has seen or heard firsthand that some believers are living faithfully.
One quick note, we are going to use the word “Walk” a lot today, so I think it is worth defining what it means.
The New Testament explains to Christians multiple times how to “walk” in faith. “Walk” is used throughout as a metaphor for daily life. A great example, Romans 6:4:
We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
Romans 6:4
Our lives as Christians are a journey; we are to walk forward and make progress. You can’t walk without making progress; you are either going forward or backward.
Today, we are going to look at two specific aspects of walking: walking in truth and walking in love, and see how they are joined together by loving others.
Back to John, why is John excited? Because nothing brings more joy than seeing God’s people actually live out what they say they believe. I love the example that John sets for us here; you even see this in 3 John 1:4:
I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.
3 John 1:4
Same language, same heart from John.
And that unity of heart John talks about, walking in truth and love, is something God keeps teaching us over time. I’ve had to learn it the hard way. Let me share a story from my childhood that shows exactly what I mean.
Andrew K Story
I have a two-part, very humbling story to share this morning. I'll finish the story near the end of the sermon, but I didn’t realize that growing up, I had way more of an identity crisis and cared about what others thought of me than I wanted to believe. It is a big part of my testimony and something I honestly still struggle with today. But as most of you know, playing baseball was a big part of that. I wanted to be known as the baseball guy, and when we were in little league, that was the dream my buddies and I always talked about: getting scholarships, playing in college, and making it to the pros. But I want to focus on one particular relationship I had. During Little League and for a few years after, I primarily played on the same team with the same guys and coaches. And as we got older and older, the play got more competitive and the spots got fewer and fewer, kind of like a funnel.
Now, growing up I was really really slow, like so slow it was bad, it looked like I was pulling a trailer while I was running. BUT I wasn’t the slowest kid on the team, for sure the second, the slowest was a kid named Andrew. Andrew and I weren't just the two slowest; we played similar positions, we both pitched, and we weren't the best players on the team, but not the worst either, so we were battling each other for playing time.
But what started as friendly competition turned into me putting him down to build myself up, I would say stuff like “Oh did you see that error he made” “Look how slow he is running out there, couldn’t be me!” and unfortunately, I thought that was working, my teammates were like, yeah that was bad, yeah he is slow, yeah you are better. So I kept doing it and doing it and even going personal. It got so bad that our moms had to get involved, which, at 13, 14 years old, is the last thing you want to happen.
I’ll finish the rest of the story at the end.
But maybe you can relate to a similar story where you felt you had to put someone down to feel better about yourself. Or didn’t want to love someone else because it was not convenient to you.
Like I said today, we are going to talk about walking in the truth, walking in love, and how John merges those two to help us follow God’s commandment to love others.
Walking in the Truth
Walking in the truth, in our context today, essentially means loving God; how are we growing in our walk with God and loving him more?
John right away connects us, walking in truth, to obeying God's commandments. This is an essential statement that John makes right here. He is so excited that the church he is writing to has people who are walking with the Lord and following the Father's commandments.
This also implies that there are some at the church who aren’t walking with the Lord and may not be following his commandments. But it also shows us that living in obedience to God’s word is not an optional choice for just the really committed Christians. It is a basic command of God for all of his people.
Walking in the truth is not optional.
We can learn from him here that a believer should find great joy in the faithfulness of other believers. If we love truth and love people, we will be delighted when people live faithfully according to God’s word. One commentary that I was reading phrased it well…
What causes you to rejoice is a significant indicator of your heart.
Walking in the truth is not an easy walk; we all know that we are not promised this walk to be easy, so we can and should rejoice with others when they are walking faithfully! Celebrate together when things go well! Help each other when things are hard, hold each other accountable to walk with the Lord, and confess sins to one another so that we can grow in our walk and keep walking forward. All of that means that a part of walking in the truth is that…
We have to be in community with each other.
Still, none of these practices stand on their own. They grow out of a life rooted in knowing God. Two well-known preachers: Vance Havner, a North Carolina evangelist and pastor. He often said,
“What we live is what we really believe. Everything else is just so much religious talk!”
I love his honesty! Maybe brutal honesty
Jonathan Edwards said something very similar in his own words:
“The informing of the understanding is all vain, any farther than it affects the heart, or, which is the same thing, influences the affections”
(Some Thoughts, 367; emphasis in original).
I think John would agree with both of these men. He was convinced that unless truth reaches and affects the heart, the inner parts of ourselves, it is of no real value, regardless of what it may do in the head. Truth should grab hold of the head, heart, and hands.
The head being our knowledge of God, again, I talked about this a few weeks ago, but I don't think it is bad to repeat it. We cannot follow a God that we do not know. If we don’t know God and we are claiming to follow him, in reality, we are just following a made-up God in our heads.
The heart is what we believe. To all these men’s points, do we truly believe what we hear from God? The heart is the difference between believing that what God says is faithful and loving what God says is true! It’s easy to say we believe God is good when life is smooth. But the heart shows what it truly believes when things fall apart. Do we trust His character then? Do we obey even when it costs us?
Then, finally, the hands are what we do. If the hands move without the heart, it becomes an empty religion. Checking boxes. Performing for people. Doing the right things for the wrong reasons. Like the Pharisees. Your hands will always reveal where your heart is, because we live out what we actually trust. Our actions expose our real beliefs. I think a couple of good tests for us here are: are we being generous when no one is keeping score? Are we telling the truth, even when lying is easier? Are you being patient, even when your kids are annoying you more than you ever thought possible?
The head, heart, and hands all go together. If we walk in the truth, if we align our hearts with God, are in community with each other, believe that what he says is true, we will want to follow him, and that will lead us to walk in love. Or, loving others.
Walk in Love
Lets read verses 5 and 6
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.
2 John 5-6
Remember that John is writing this book to a local church, that is, the dear lady, and John has spent almost a quarter of this small book setting up his main encouragement, loving others, that you cannot love others rightly if your affections are not first pointed to God.
I love the way this commentary says it. Wrong thinking inevitably leads to wrong living. If the mind is confused, the heart will be corrupted. Right thinking, however, is the right soil from which emerges the fruit of right living. For John, right living is a life of love that is the supernatural response to the love one experiences in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
So now John is merging the idea of walking in truth with walking in love and is saying that it is a reminder, not a new commandment. This is written to the local church, probably around 50 years after Jesus died. There are false teachers and others who are giving different teachings, and John is simply reminding his audience to look back to Jesus and his teachings.
John was given this commandment directly from Jesus and wrote about it in his gospel, in John 13:34-35:
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this, all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
John 13:34-35
We see here that loving God, or walking in the truth, is to love others!! These go hand in hand!!!
Loving God and loving others are not mutually exclusive.
But I feel like our tendency, or at least mine, is to instead do one of two things
First is the idea of checking boxes or Legalism. Well, the Bible says that we need to love our neighbor, so I am going to do it. I feel like I did this a lot growing up with my little brothers, especially when we were playing wiffle ball, basketball, or any other sport, competing against each other. I didn’t like them during that! I didn’t want to be kind to them, apologize to them, or forgive them! But oh, okay, I will do it because if I don’t, then God will be mad at me.
Do you tend to do this too? Are you loving others out of a sense of obligation or fear?
If Christ is truly the center of our lives, then our obedience flows from trust in Him, not from a sense of duty or fear of punishment. Our walk is meant to be lived by faith in Christ, not by our efforts alone.
So legalism is one option, or we can tend to just ignore God’s command to love others, which is also failing to love God.
Most of the time, this doesn’t happen in some huge dramatic fashion. How many times have you said to yourself, “Well, Jesus wouldn’t love this person if he knew how much they hurt me,” or "That doesn’t apply to me in my situation.
It can be something as simple as I just don’t really want to make the effort to get to know my neighbors, I am just SO busy, and they have that dog that barks really loud when we walk by, and ugh, it’s fine, God will understand.
Ignoring God’s command is a form of self-centeredness. It’s saying, whether consciously or unconsciously, that our comfort, pride, or preferences are more important than His desire for us to reflect His love. It’s easy to fall into this trap, especially in difficult relationships, with people who irritate us, or in situations where showing love costs us something.
Failing to love others is failing to love God. Loving others is a very tangible way, some would say the biggest indicator of how much we love God. When we ignore that command, we are essentially telling God that I am more important and I will decide when and if it is convenient for me to love others.
The reality is walking in Love, loving others, lies somewhere in the middle. Jesus made it clear that He, not His followers, is the One responsible for their salvation in John 14:5–6.
Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
John 14:5–6
We can’t love God or love others well enough to earn our salvation. There is no scoreboard in heaven keeping track of how many times we have loved others enough.
Jesus also pointed out later in that same chapter of John 14:21 that we do indeed need to keep his commandments.
Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.”
John 14:21
We cannot just ignore what Jesus tells us to do.
Loving others is a response to the Love that God has graciously given and shown to us
I think that leads us to the question, how are we supposed practically to love others in Christ? We know that we shouldn’t ignore it, we know that it is not supposed to be legalistic, so how do we do it?
To love God is to obey him. He says that in John 14:15:
If you love me, you will keep my commandments. To love others is to encourage and help them to obey God.
John 14:15
Too often today, people think that to love someone is to indulge them, to let them do what they want, but indulgence is not true love. We do not demonstrate love if we do something to or with another person that God forbids. If we encourage or tell someone to do something God tells us not to do, this is not genuine love. Rather, we demonstrate love by seeking to prevent someone from disobeying God and urging them to LOVE God.
We see in 1 John 4:21 that John says
And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
1 John 4:21
I think it is important for us to understand that this is groundbreaking news! Jesus is uniting a group of people by one thing: love for one another. Other groups are created by skin color or native language, but those things don’t matter in the kingdom of God. We are charged to love each other because we are in Christ.
If we look at Jesus, who is the perfect example of love and how to love others
Jesus demonstrates a love that:
has no conditions (Romans 5:8),
He gives of Himself completely (2 Corinthians 5:21),
He extends forgiveness (Ephesians 4:32),
His love endures forever (Romans 8:38–39).
It is holy, because He Himself is holy (Hebrews 7:26).
The ultimate expression of His love is seen in His sacrificial death, His burial, and His physical resurrection (1 John 4:9–10).
This is the incredible love that Jesus has shown us and is a model for us.
And as followers of Christ, we are called to show this same kind of love to one another.
So how are we supposed to love others?
As believers in Christ, we have the holy spirit in us! So that looks like obeying the holy spirit, through the word of God, we can learn to love like Jesus.
We are to show love that is unconditional, sacrificial, forgiving love to fellow believers, but not just to fellow believers. We also show the love of Christ to friends, to family members, to coworkers, neighbors. Paul says in
Ephesians 5:15-21
Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.
We are even supposed to love our enemies, as we see in Matthew 5:43–48.
You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Matthew 5:43–48
The love of Christ shown in a believer’s life is completely different from the kind of “love” that comes from our sinful nature, which can be self-centered, prideful, lacking in forgiveness, and lacking sincerity. In 1 Corinthians 13:4–8, we see a beautiful picture of the kind of love Christ produces in those who live by the Spirit.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
1 Corinthians 13:4–8
We don’t naturally express the kind of love described in 1 Corinthians 13. To love in that way, a person’s heart must be transformed. This begins when we recognize our sin before God and understand that Jesus’ death and resurrection provide the only way for forgiveness.
When we choose to trust Jesus as Savior, Jesus forgives us, grants us eternal life, and brings us back into right relationship with God.
And through Jesus and this amazing act of redemption, we come to know what it truly means to be loved by God.
With this new life comes a new ability to love as Christ does, because God’s unconditional, self-giving, forgiving, everlasting, and holy love now resides within them.
Loving one another means showing this Christlike love to other believers. When we love through the power of the Holy Spirit, our lives become clear evidence that we are genuine followers of Jesus.
Walking with Jesus means walking in both truth and love, and that genuine love for others flows from knowing, trusting, and obeying God through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Conclusion
Back to the story from the beginning
I apologized to him and stopped the mean comments. I knew it was wrong but I also just didn’t want it to keep happening.
Andrew stopped playing baseball about a year or two later and focused solely on golf, which he is very good at, and he got a scholarship to play golf in college.
I, on the other hand, was cut from the high school baseball team my junior year. It shattered my identity. Not only did people view me as not a good baseball player, but it also made me wonder what else they thought of me.
I also played golf in high school, on the same high school team as Andrew, and he was wayyyyy better than I am. I couldn’t even try to say anything bad about his golf game because he was just worlds better than me.
Now I wish I could say that after my identity was crushed from not making the team, that I quickly found my worth in Jesus and went and apologized to Andrew, and we have been best friends since. I would say that I am kind of jealous of people’s stories like that.
It has taken a lot of time, while we did become much better friends when playing high school golf together, it took a lot of other trials and growing pains to get to the point where I am walking in the truth and because of what God has done in my heart and what he did on the cross, we are all able to love in the truth.
That doesn’t mean at all that life is perfect or that we are all always going to love others well. But we now have the ability and the desire to Love others with the same love that Jesus has for us! That unconditional, self-giving, forgiving, everlasting, and holy love that the holy spirit gives us. That is amazing!!
Main Street, I hope this morning you grew to love 2 John 4-6 as much as I have this past week. I love the way that one theologian put it, he said:
Verses 4–6 are so simple; they are almost poetic. Walk in the command to love, and love the commands in which you walk. Truth is something we believe. Truth is also something we live.
Loving others is always going to be one of the hardest things about our walk with the Lord. People are hard to love!! We, me, you, all of us are hard people to love!
We need to be reminded, those of us who follow Christ, that even though we see the commandment all over scripture to love one another. We cannot do that just by putting in extra effort. By just putting on our big boy pants and going “Ugh, I have to show love to this person again.”
We love because God has already loved us perfectly. His love isn’t distant or forced; it’s real, personal, and life-changing. When Jesus saves us, He doesn’t just forgive our sins and promise us eternity; He actually fills our hearts with His own love through the Holy Spirit. That means love isn’t something we have to drum up or fake.
We’re not trying to run on our own strength or make ourselves feel more loving. Instead, we’re learning to let His love work through us. The love we show others is meant to look like His, unconditional when ours would fade, sacrificial when we’d rather choose what’s easy, forgiving when we’d naturally hold a grudge, and pure when our own motives might not be.
So real love from Jesus isn’t something we produce on our own; it’s something we receive from Jesus and then share. And when His love flows through us like that, it becomes one of the clearest signs that we truly belong to Him.
Application
We are going to move into a time of reflection and I have a couple challenges for you this week, again we are coming up on thanksgiving so this is a really convenient time to show God’s love to others. Here are some ways that we can consider doing that this week.
Spend time in God’s word, to know him and love him
Tell someone you are thankful for them
Forgive someone you’ve been holding a grudge against.
Serve someone quietly, with no expectation of recognition.
Speak life to someone, send a Scripture, a note, or an encouragement to someone who is struggling.
Show patience in a situation where your natural reaction would be frustration.
Give generously where the Spirit nudges you to give. Maybe this week, that is a meal to a family in need, one of the giving tree options that we have in the hall, there are so many needs this time of year
