3 John – Living in the Truth

I want to get to 3 John today, but in order to get there, I want to take you on a little journey through philosophy and history. So I hope you’ll bear with me. This isn’t going to be an entertaining sermon, or an emotional sermon, it’s going to be a thinking sermon. So I hope you are ready to think, or you’re probably not going to enjoy this very much!

We’re going to think about “truth” – a subject with which the Apostle John was very much concerned. But before we get to John, let’s go back in time.

“It was the worst moment in European history.” That was the opinion of Archbishop William Temple about a bitterly cold day in the winter of 1620. On that day, a Frenchman who was just trying to keep warm, bundled himself up with a blanket, climbed into the alcove of a wood stove, and determined not to come out until he had some answers about the nature of truth.

That man’s name was René Descartes. He was a brilliant mathemetician. He developed the XY system for putting numerical values into pictorial form – the same system we use today for drawing charts and graphs – we call it the Cartesian coordinate system in honor of him.

Descartes, along with being a mathemetician was also a philosopher. In fact, he is called the Father of Modern Philosophy. He thought a lot about the meaning of life and about truth. And he found himself wishing that truth in every area of life could have the same precision as the numbers he worked with in the field of mathematics.

Descartes was living in a very troubled world. Europe was in the midst of a long, devastating war—a conflict that was to become known as the Thirty Years’ War. It was a war that was being fought over economic issues, over political issues, but especially over religious issues.

The Catholic Church for over a thousand years had seen herself as the sole custodian of truth. But now, she was being challenged by the many Protestant groups which had sprung up since the Protestant Reformation a hundred years before. The whole question of truth and authority seemed to be up for grabs in Europe at the time. And people were killing each other over it.

So René Descartes, on that bitter cold day, with time on his hands and a blanket round his shoulders, determined that he would try to get to the bottom of the question “What is truth and how do we find it?”

He took a unique approach. He decided to doubt that anything was true unless he could prove it. And with that as his starting point, and after a whole day of crouching in that stove thinking, Descartes decided that the only thing he could be certain was true was the fact that he was thinking.. He could only be sure of one thing—his own existence as a rational, thinking individual. He summed it all up with the famous phrase “Cogito ergo sum”. I think, therefore I am.

And his conclusion was to become the foundation of Western philosophy for the next three hundred years. Man is a thinking being. Our rationality is the only thing that enables us to make sense of our existence. It is only through our powers of reason that we are able to discover truth.

Descartes ushered in what we now call the Age of Reason: the Enlightenment – the time when human beings could begin to make sense of things on the basis of their own ability to think.

You see, prior to that time, Europeans had been dependent upon the church, upon the Bible, upon God, upon some higher authority to tell them what was true. But now, thanks to Descartes, they were going to set out to discover what was true for themselves, through their powers of observation and experiment and objective reasoning. They had “grown up” so to speak. They didn’t need God anymore. They were able to stand on their own two feet and reason their own way to what was true. And that is why Archbishop Temple called it the most disastrous moment in European history. Because it made man the source of truth.

But the disaster did not become immediately obvious. The next three hundred years saw a remarkable explosion of knowledge. There were tremendous advances in the sciences – advances which were brought down to the practical level and ushered in the Industrial Revolution. Technology began to make life better for the common people.

There were great discoveries made in the exploration of the Earth, the continents, the oceans, and the skies. The frontiers of outer space and of inner space began to be rolled back through the use of devices such as the telescope and the microscope.

Vast quantities of knowledge were gathered and systematized and used to unlock the door to even more discovery. This movement was the beginning of what philosophers today call “Modernism”. It ushered in the modern way of life, and the modern way of thinking (as opposed to the Medieval way of thinking).

Modernists were great optimists. Modernists believed that by unlocking the secrets of the universe, we could master nature and make a better world for ourselves. Modernists had great faith in education, progress, technology, because modernists believed that human reason was the key to everything.

A modernist would picture an ideal human being as a truth-seeker who stands as an autonomous individual, who can objectively see things as they really are and who can gain insight and answers and truth simply by reasoning logically.

If you ever watched the original Star Trek series, you have seen the epitome of the modernist way of thinking. The mission of the starship Enterprise was to boldly go where no man has ever gone before; to make discoveries, to find answers, to find truth about the universe. And one character – Mr. Spock – was the highest example of what an Enlightenment man should be. He is totally logical. He is not swayed by human emotions. He always arrives at the right conclusion; always gets the right answer to the problem.

But in the midst of all this optimism at the end of the 18^(th) century—right at the height of the Enlightenment era – a German philosopher named Immanuel Kant threw a monkey wrench into the Modernist movement. He said “Wait a minute. If, as an individual, my sense perceptions are the key to unlocking truth, then truth isn’t something “out there” that I discover; it’s a construct “in here” that I create.”

He wrote a book about it – he called it the Critique of Pure Reason. In it, he said that we do not so much discover what is objectively out there in the universe, as much as we project order subjectively upon the universe. “The human intellect does not derive its laws from nature; it prescribes them to nature.” In Kant’s view, human consciousness is not the key for discovering reality; it is the source of reality. Truth is subjective, not objective.

And that sounded the death knell for the modernist movement, although most people didn’t realize it at the time. It actually took over a hundred years before the implications of what Kant was saying really began to take hold.

And that brings us to the middle of the 20^(th) century when a specialized little group of scholars, who dealt with the question of how we interpret literature, began to write some very disturbing things. They called themselves “literary deconstructionists”. And they said that when you come to a text—be it a sentence, or a book, or a poem—you have to realize that the meaning of that text is not something inherent in the text itself, but in the way that you, as a reader, interpret that text. And the way that you interpret that text is a function of many things about you—your education, your previous training, your past experiences, your emotional state, your culture, the “interpretive community” from which you come, and so forth. This all affects the meaning that you give to the text.

Philosophers picked up that idea and began to apply it to the world as a whole. Just as a text can be read differently by different readers, so reality can be “read” differently by each person who encounters it. This means that there is no one true meaning to the world, but many meanings – as many different meanings as there are different people. And many of these meanings may be mutually contradictory. Because truth is a function of the unique perspective of each individual.

So the universe is really not a uni-verse at all; it is a di-verse, it is a multi-verse, a poly-verse. And to talk about truth as though it were some objective, independent quantity “out there” waiting to be discovered, is meaningless. Truth is all about the meaning we give to our experience.

This is where we are today. This is how people now think. This is the philosophy that now holds sway in our world. We are now living in a Post-modernist era – an age of ambiguity, an age of uncertainty, an age of subjectivity.

As Modernists, we made ourselves the source of truth; and now as Post-modernists, we have ended up with no truth at all.

But the Apostle John was a Premodernist. Unlike a Postmodernist, he believed that there was an objective truth that exists independently outside of ourselves. But unlike the Modernist he didn’t see this truth as an impersonal set of facts that we discover by using our powers of reasoning.

No, for John, the source of truth was a person—a person named Jesus Christ—a person who is, in fact, God. Over and over again in his writing, John presents Jesus as the source of truth.

He said “The Word (or the Truth) became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory: the glory as of the only begotten of the Father – full of grace and truth”. (John 1:14)

At the beginning of his first epistle, John wrote “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched — this we proclaim concerning (the Truth) the Word of life.”

Now the idea that Truth in essence is a Person is a pretty radical idea! Especially in light of these philosophical movements we’ve just been discussing.

If you are a Modernist, you believe that truth is just a neutral set of cold facts out there waiting to be discovered by your intellect. Not much warmth in that! That’s ultimately not a very satisfying worldview.
If you are a Postmodernist, you believe that truth is nothing more than the interpretation, or the meaning, that you give to your own personal experiences. In other words, you yourself are the truth. And that’s not a terribly comforting worldview – there’s certainly not much security in that idea!
But if you are a Christian, you believe that Truth is a person; a person who knows you and who loves you; a person with whom you can have a personal relationship. What an incredibly attractive idea!

As Western evangelicals, we have tended to gravitate to Modernism more than to any other philosophical movement. This is probably why we feel so threatened by Post-modernism – because we place such a high value on the idea of objective truth. We are more Modernist than we realize – it’s written into our evangelical DNA. And we have carried this Modernist mindset into the way we practice our faith. In the way that we approach God, the Bible, and theology, we have tended to treat them as facts to be mastered with our rational minds.

But if, as John says, the truth is a person, then knowing the truth is going to be more than just an intellectual exercise. It’s going to involve me on more than just the rational level. It is going to engage my will, my emotions, that social part of me that is relational. It is going to involve me as a whole person; a complete human being. And only when I’m involved to that degree can my Christian life be satisfying.

Think of your best friend in this life. It may be your spouse, or someone else. How do you know your best friend? Just with your mind? Just with your intellect? No – there’s a lot more going on in your relationship than just thinking! There’s emotion, feeling, volitional activity – you do things for that person and with that person. There is involvement on the physical level. And, in a very close relationship such as marriage, your spirit becomes one with that other person.

Our problem has been that we have tended to think of truth – even spiritual truth – as being something that exists only on the intellectual level. That is not what John is saying at all.

If you look at 3 John, you will find that he mentions “the truth” a lot. But it is always more than just an “intellectual truth”. It is a personal truth – truth that affects all of life. He talks about

loving in the truth (v.1)
faithfulness to the truth (v. 3)
walking in the truth (v. 3 and v. 4)
working together for the truth (v. 8)
being well spoken of by the truth (v. 12)

We never see John mention the name “Jesus Christ” even once in this letter. But because of what we know from his other writings – the Gospel of John and his first two epistles – we know that when he uses the term “the truth”, he is referring to Jesus Christ. Try reading through this letter, substituting the name Jesus Christ every time you encounter the term “the truth”. It makes perfect sense.

So you have…

v. 1 The elder, To my dear friend Gaius, whom I love in Jesus Christ.
v. 3 It gave me great joy to have some brothers come and tell about your faithfulness to Jesus Christ and how you continue to walk in Jesus Christ.
v. 4 I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in Jesus Christ.
v. 8 We ought therefore to show hospitality to such men so that we may work together for Jesus Christ.
v. 12 Demetrius is well spoken of by everyone — and even by Jesus Christ himself.

There is this personal presence of Jesus Christ throughout this letter. John says that He is the organizing principle around which we are to live our whole lives, because he is the Truth..

As Christians who are living in a Postmodern world, we are going to make a very big mistake if we try to defend the faith as though it were a set of propositional truths to be believed because they are reasonable. Postmodernists will just laugh at us, because they don’t think that way anymore.

But if we show by the way we live and the way we talk and the way we relate to others that our lives are centered around—not a set of propositions, not a body of doctrine—but around a supernatural Person, then they will not be able to ignore us. Because Jesus is the Truth and the Truth is thus more than propositional—it is personal.

John wrote this letter to his friend Gaius, who lived in Asia Minor (the present day nation of Turkey). We don’t know anything more about this individual than what we read here. There were two other Gaius’s mentioned in the book of Acts, but we have no reason to believe that they were this particular man. Gaius was a common name in those days in the Roman Empire.

Gaius evidently had come to faith in Jesus Christ under John’s ministry, because John refers to him as one of his children in v. 4, and you can sense the warmth and concern with which he writes this letter.

The reason John writes this letter is to encourage Gaius to keep on living faithfully for Jesus Christ – to “walk in the truth” as he puts it in verses 3 and 4 – with all that that entails.

Specifically, John commends Gaius for the hospitality that he has shown (and continues to show) to the itinerant preachers – the “brothers” v. 5 – who were traveling throughout the region, preaching the Good News about Jesus Christ.

(If you’ll remember back a couple of weeks ago, we looked at 2 John, and in that letter, John had to warn the church about certain false teachers who were going around denying that Jesus was the Christ. John warned that those teachers were NOT to be given hospitality by the church.)

But there was a problem of a different nature in the church where Gaius was. We read about it in verse 9ff.

I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will have nothing to do with us. So if I come, I will call attention to what he is doing, gossiping maliciously about us. Not satisfied with that, he refuses to welcome the brothers. He also stops those who want to do so and puts them out of the church.

You will find that there is no such thing as a perfect church. Wherever you have people, you will have problems.

Here is a man named Diotrephes. What do we know about him?

He loved to be first – he had a pride problem
He was unteachable – he rejected John’s (the Elder’s) instruction
He was a malicious gossip – (there’s no such thing as good gossip) Prov. 10:19 When words are many, sin is not absent, but he who holds his tongue is wise.
He was inhospitable – he refused to welcome the brothers
He was on a power trip – he stopped others from being hospitable and put them out of the church if they were. It was his way or the highway.

This man was evidently a leader in the church – he had a position of influence. But he was using that position to throw his weight around; to “lord it over people”.

1 Peter 5

To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder, a witness of Christ’s sufferings and one who also will share in the glory to be revealed: Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, serving as overseers — not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not greedy for money, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock.

In Mark 10:45, Jesus said…

For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

How important it is that we have church leaders who are servant leaders; who exemplify the spirit of Jesus Christ. Diotrephes was not like that, and his leadership troubled the church.

And then John concludes with the statement in v. 11…

“Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good. Anyone who does what is good is from God. Anyone who does what is evil has not seen God.”

If you know Jesus Christ, you know God. Jesus said “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”

And if you know God, that’s going to have moral implications; it’s going to show in the way you live. You are going to do what is good (v. 11). Not because you have a intellectual commitment to a set of rules and regulations. But because you are in a close personal relationship with someone who IS good and His goodness rubs off on you.

The world is in a moral quagmire today. Nobody knows what is good because nobody knows what is true.

A Christian is someone who has met the True One – Jesus Christ, the Truth personified; and therefore knows how to live. If you do what is good, you are from God; if you do what is evil, you have not seen God; you don’t know God.