Exploring 1 John: Love in Deed and Truth
1 John 3:16-18 - Sacrificial love can be created and sustained in many ways.
“We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoever has the world’s goods, and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him? Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth.”
1 John 3:16-18 NASB1995
Jesus laid down His life for us, so that when we repent and believe, our sins are forgiven and we have eternal life with Him. Have you ever thought about actually laying your life down for others? Or even risking your life for others (and John describes this as the brethren)? This is an amazing love! In researching these verses, I found a lot of superb commentary so this may be fairly long.
First, I like this commentary from Enduring Word that describes the different types of love and why this love is unique:
By this we know love: What is love? How we define love is important. If we define love the wrong way, then everyone passes, or no one passes, the love test. To understand the Biblical idea of love, we should begin by understanding the vocabulary of love among the ancient Greeks, who gave us the original language of the New Testament.
Eros was one word for love. It described, as we might guess from the word itself, erotic love. It referred to sexual love.
Storge was the second word for love. It referred to family love, the kind of love there is between a parent and child, or between family members in general.
Philia is the third word for love. It spoke of a brotherly friendship and affection. It is the love of deep friendship and partnership. Philia love might be described as the highest love that one is capable of without God’s help.
Agape is the fourth word for love. It described a love that loves without changing. It is a self-giving love that gives without demanding or expecting re-payment. It is love so great that it can be given to the unlovable or unappealing. It is love that loves even when it is rejected. Agape love gives and loves because it wants to; it does not demand or expect repayment from the love given – it gives because it loves, it does not love in order to receive.
Many people confuse the four loves, and end up extremely hurt as a result. Often a person will tell another, “I love you” meaning one kind of love, but the other person believes he means another kind of love. Often a man has told a woman, “I love you,” when really he had a selfish love towards her. Sure, there were strong feelings in the heart – but they were feelings that wanted something from the other person.
“It’s true you can say to a girl, ‘I love you,’ but what you really mean is something like this: ‘I want something. Not you, but something from you. I don’t have time to wait. I want it immediately.’… This is the opposite of love, for love wants to give. Love seeks to make the other one happy, and not himself.” (Walter Trobisch in I Loved a Girl, cited by James Montgomery Boice)
We have studied the word Agape before. This type of love is only possible when you are a child of God and He is working a new life within you. Our cultural elites these days are obsessed with Eros love (“love is love”), are critical of those who talk about storge love (see my last devotional that mentions Harrison Butker) and shove philia love right off the cliff in the rush to divide our nation and create enemies where we should have friends. Agape love is truly indescribable to those who don’t know the love of Jesus.
Jesus laid down His life for us. This love is so hard to fathom, isn’t it? I thought this commentary from Dr. David Allen (who has served at several Baptist theological seminaries) on Precept Austin was perfectly stated:
John essentially says three things about Jesus’ death on the cross: it was voluntary, it was vicarious, and it was victorious… Most people consider the first law of life to be self-preservation. Jesus teaches us that the first law of spiritual life is self-sacrifice… As if speaking directly to the Savior himself, Spurgeon said in his sermon on this passage, “Ah, Lord Jesus! I never knew Thy love till I understood the meaning of Thy death.” The most astounding thing in all the world is the fact that Jesus was willing, out of love for us, to die in our place as our substitute.
There is a famous picture by a great artist of an angel standing by the cross of Christ. With his fingers he is feeling the sharp points of the thorns that had pierced the Savior’s brow, and on his face is a great look of wonder and astonishment. The angel cannot understand the marvel of that love. In fact, no one can fully fathom such love. During his only visit to the United States, the eminent Swiss theologian Karl Barth lectured at Union Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. After his formal address he engaged in some informal conversation with the students. One young man asked Barth if he could state the core of what he believed. Barth took a moment to light his pipe, and then, as the smoke drifted away, he replied, “Yes, I think I can summarize my theology in these words: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’”
Three things that we should never forget: Jesus’ death on the cross was voluntary, vicarious, and victorious! Great words to remember! This love gives us a moral obligation to love others! We can give of ourselves more and more each day, even if we don’t die for someone else today.
This map I included above is from Voice of the Martyrs and shows the areas of the world where Christian belief is restricted or banned, where Christians are treated with hostility or where Christians are monitored by the government. According to Precept Austin, even praying for the people who are affected by these actions is a way of laying down our lives for our brethren. In our intercessory prayers, Steve and I pray for two groups of people: First, we pray for a Christian group who is under persecution or facing hostility (using the Voice of the Martyrs app) and second, we pray for a group of people who have not yet been reached by the Gospel (from The Joshua Project).
I also have to share this story from Dr. David Allen from Precept Austin - by risking it all to tell others about Christ, the impact may be monumental to world events:
I remember when I first read about Boris Kornfeld. I have never forgotten his story. I was in my second year as pastor of my first church in 1983. Chuck Colson’s book Loving God had just been published the previous year. Colson told the riveting story of the Jewish doctor in a Russian concentration camp known as a gulag. What crime against the state he had committed no one knows. Kornfeld met a fellow prisoner, a committed Christian whose name we don’t know, who engaged him in conversation about Jesus. He often heard the prisoner recite the Lord’s Prayer and found himself strangely drawn to the words. While carrying on his medical duties amidst filth and squalor day after day, Kornfeld began to see the parallels in the Jewish people who had suffered so much as a nation and the suffering of Jesus. He became a Christian.
When Kornfeld discovered an orderly stealing food from his patients, he reported him to the commandant. Though there had been a rash of murders in the camp, with each victim being a stoolie who had ratted someone else out and then paid for it with his life, Kornfeld didn’t care. He knew his life would be in danger as soon as the orderly was released from his cellblock. Kornfeld felt a sense of newfound freedom in Christ. He wanted to tell someone about it, but the prisoner who had spoken to him about Christ had been transferred to another camp. One gray afternoon he examined a patient who had just been operated on for intestinal cancer. The man’s eyes were sorrowful and suspicious, thought Kornfeld, and his face reflected the depth of his spiritual and physical misery. So the doctor began to talk to the patient, describing what had happened to him to change his life.
Drifting in and out of the anesthesia’s influence and shaking with fever, the patient heard the doctor’s testimony about Christ and how all of our suffering is in one sense deserved on this earth for our sins. He hung on the doctor’s words until he finally fell asleep. The next morning he was awakened by a commotion in the area. He wondered where his doctor friend was. Then a fellow patient told him of Kornfeld’s fate. During the night, as Kornfeld slept in the infirmary, someone dealt him fatal blows to his skull with a mallet. Kornfeld died, but his testimony did not. The patient pondered the doctor’s last, impassioned words about Christ, suffering, and salvation. He too became a Christian. He survived the prison camp and went on to tell the world what he had learned there. His name was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1970 for his major work The Gulag Archipelago, which brought international exposure to the Soviet Union’s labor camp system. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974.
John then proceeds to give believers a more practical way to love others. We may never have to give our lives for the brethren. However, if we have the world’s goods, through the abundance and blessings of God and we see others in need and refuse to help, how do we have the love of God in our hearts? We need to love in deed and in truth, not just in word and with the tongue. I like what Precept Austin has from a sermon by John Piper about these deeds; the bold sections are from Precept Austin (I was unable to find this sermon on Desiring God, by the way):
How can we say that we are willing to lay down our lives for our brothers if we are unwilling to part with our money for their sake? 1Jn 3:17 [also] means sharing your time with others in need. Many times that's what a person needs far more than he needs money. It takes time to be a friend; it takes time to talk, to listen, to relieve loneliness. And for many of us it is harder to part with our time than with our money. That's where the heart of the battle is for me. My guess is that's where the heart of the battle is for many of you as well.
But if you or I close our hearts with respect to time towards a brother or sister in need, how can God's love be in us? 1Jn 3:17 can also mean sharing spiritual resources with a person in need through a word of encouragement or exhortation from the Bible and through consistent intercessory prayer. And in many cases the sacrifice demanded is greatest at this point. The spiritual battles are very real and very intense, the spiritual energy required is staggering, but the rewards are rich and the glory abounding to the name of God is very, very great. All of this is love. And a consistent lifestyle of heartfelt love that is practical, sacrificial is what God expects of his children. And this lifestyle of love is what God empowers in each of his children through his Spirit.
Steve and I are sort of mediocre to ok at sharing money with those in need and also in praying for others in our intercessory prayers. But we both fall down on the job in sharing our time with others, unless you count the time we spend on writing these devotionals (you never know who you might inspire with your words) or the time that Steve spends doing website work for the church. From John Piper, this giving of ourselves to others is the lifestyle of heartfelt love that is what God expects.
I have never had that personality type that is good at giving others encouragement and love, being heavily weighted towards intuition, thinking and judging on the Myers-Briggs Scale (some of the reasons I became an engineer and not a nurse or teacher). But taking tiny steps every day in increasing the personal sacrifice that affects me in loving others is certainly something that can be prayed about and done indeed!
My next devotional examines 1 John 3:19-22 - The assurance this love brings.
Heaven on Wheels Daily Prayer:
Dear Lord - Please help me to become more sacrificial in my giving to others and not always be thinking about myself. I want to have the lifestyle of heartfelt love that You expect from Your believers. Amen.
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org
Commentary on Enduring Word by David Guzik is used with written permission.
Precept Austin was accessed on 5/20/2024 to review commentary for 1 John 3:17-19.