John writes about love for neighbors

We now come to our final Tuesday in the month of February, our month of love.

So far we have examined love for our parents, love for our widows, and last week, love for our family.

To conclude our month, I would like to briefly examine a very different love found in John’s gospel, chapter eight. It’s the story of a woman who has been brought before Jesus by his antagonists, the Jewish religious leaders.

While there is much that can be garnered from this story, to find love here we must look to what is almost invisible — that this story is found exclusively in John’s gospel. Why did John include it to the exclusion of all the rest?

If we were to survey the New Testament for the word “love” and all its derivatives, we find that almost half of them are used by John. What this means is that John has a particular interest in the subject of love. It is his theme.

Think about it.

It is in his gospel that we find the perhaps most famous verse of the entire Bible, John 3:16, and that is about love: “For God so loved the world, that he gave …”

It is here that we find Jesus giving his disciples the commandment to love each other, and not just once, but twice. And it is also here where we find that this thing called love will be Christianity’s defining trait, for by this one trait Jesus said “shall all men know that ye are my disciples.”

This theme is continued in his first epistle, where we find that you cannot love God and hate your brother. John will underscore this here in Chapter 3 by concluding that Christians cannot murder (verse 15), in Chapter 4 through use of the word “liar” (verse 20) and in Chapter 5 by saying that his commandments are not grievous (verse 3).

By the time we come to Second John this theme reverberates as he takes a look at “the beginning.” Written after 90 A.D., what John is talking about here is when Christianity began before Jesus’ crucifixion. And what they received “in the beginning” was our obligation to love one another.

While this is hard to see in Third John because the love of self is so prominent in the life of Diotrephes, this theme figures rather prominently in the book of Revelation in Chapter 2 when Jesus addresses the church of Ephesus. Specifically, this church had left its first love, and Jesus was not happy.

While many suggest this was in reference to the church no longer loving Christ, I think this would more likely be only indirectly so. It is probably much closer to the truth that as a church they had stopped loving each other, and so had stopped loving Christ.

Very likely, this is even the church John is addressing in his second epistle. Needless to say, however, this lack of love was considered so grievous that they were threatened with the loss of their church.

Now, we have said all this to say with Paul, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” In short, Jesus had a tremendous love for sinners. He certainly spent most of his earthly time with them. While I am not glorifying sin, what this teaches us is that we must never lose sight of our own sinfulness. When Paul penned the above quote, he added to it, “of whom I am chief.”

Chief of what? Chief of sinners.

The truth is that every Christian out there today has both a sinful past, of which they should be ashamed, and a sinful potential, against which they should guard. And both of these ought to govern how they deal with sinful people: lovingly.

What we really need to ask ourselves is where do we fit into this story. At some point in each of our lives we all could fit into the part of the woman; that goes without saying. But where it concerns love, only Jesus demonstrated love to the woman. I don’t know about you, but I want to be like Jesus.

Ron Hamman is pastor of Independent Baptist Church of Wasilla. Contact him at 357-4229 or ron.hamman@gci.net.

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