Keep sharing good news without ads.
A devotional based on 3 John
One city. I hope you all don't mind getting out of here by 11 this evening. That's because we're going to be looking at 3rd John, 3rd of John's epistles, and as I read this text, I would encourage you to focus upon the word, the various forms of the word.
Truth. It is, I would count how many times it is used in this little book, and listen to the ways it is used, because it is used in ways that are not quite normal for us in the English language, if we can put it that way.
Let's listen to the little 3rd epistle of John. Beloved, you are acting faithfully in whatever you accomplish for the brethren, and especially when they are strangers and they have testified to your love before the church.
You will do well to send them on their way in a manner worthy of God, for they went out for the sake of the name, accepting nothing from the Gentiles. Therefore, we ought to support such men so that we may be fellow workers with the truth.
I wrote something to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first among them, does not accept what we say. For this reason, if I come, I will call attention to his deeds, which he does, unjustly accusing us with wicked words.
And not satisfied with this, he himself does not receive the brethren either, and he forbids those who desire to do so, and puts them out of the church. Beloved, do not imitate what is evil, but what is good.
The one who does good is of God. The one who does evil has not seen God. Demetrius has received a good testimony from everyone, and from the truth itself, and we add our testimony, and you know that our testimony is true.
I have many things to write to you, but I am not willing to write them to you with pen and ink, but I hope to see you shortly, and we will speak face to face. Peace be to you. The friends greet you. Greet the friends by name.
So, here we have this short little epistle, and obviously if we did not have the Gospel of John, and 1 John, and 2 John, probably this wouldn't have really drawn a lot of attention, but we see a lot of parallels that exist, similarities that exist in the language that is used here in 3 John, which we also see especially in 1 John, the epistle of John.
But we just, by way of outlining, so we have the whole letter in our mind, remember this is very early on in the time period of the church, and there seems to be some difficulties here. That is, we know from 1 John that there are many people who were going out from the church, remember 1 John 2, they went out from us, so it might be demonstrated they are not truly of us, if they had been truly of us, they would remain with us.
But so it might be demonstrated that they are not truly of us, they went out from us, there is a period of time where there are many false teachers, and the apostolic age is coming to an end, and it makes sense that there would be a transitionary period from that period where you have apostles, that period where you do not.
And the number of people who would be well taught, the number of people who would have sat under apostolic ministry, who would know the scriptures, and be able to exhort in sound doctrine, those folks would be in short demand.
Not only that, but you also have the reality that we see in Paul's letters to Timothy, that there are going to be many false teachers, false brethren who go out from the Christian church, and they claim, well I knew the apostles too, and my teaching is this, and so on and so forth, it was a difficult time.
And so it seems that some of these teachers became itinerant, remember how even in American history, if you studied American church history, you would have circuit riding preachers, where on the frontiers, where there just weren't enough people to do what needed to be done.
As far as ministering would go, they would have ministers who would go from place to place, and you'd minister in a particular place, and you'd travel to the next town, and next town, and you'd ride a circuit, and that's obviously not ideal, but when you're on the frontier, you do what you gotta do to make things work, and it's almost the same type of situation here.
There are people who are traveling about, and verse eight talks about them, we ought to support such men, so we may be fellow workers with the truth, and he's saying to Gaius, you're a love for these men, your support for these men is well known in the church, but then there are others who don't want this.
There are others like Diotrephes, who is opposing those sound teachers, and he just wants to sort of gather followers after himself, and John says he's gonna deal with him if he has a chance to come and to minister in that area.
And so this is a period of time, it's always interesting to me when people say, I wish we could go back to the apostolic period, and I go, really, are you sure you want to go back to the apostolic period, where only a few people have certain portions of the New Testament, and you've got false teachers running about, and we don't realize how much we stand on the shoulders of the generations that have come before us.
We owe them a great debt, and often we aren't thankful for that, because we don't realize, we think this clarity of thought that we have just landed upon us, and actually that's not exactly how that took place.
So, with that in mind, as to what the main thrust of the letter is, did you notice the use of the word truth? It is very, very interesting. First of all, the altar to the beloved Gaius, whom I love in truth.
Now, that could just simply be said to be, I truly love Gaius. I'm not just writing the opening to this letter to you, and I'm not just being flowery and so on and so forth, I truly have a deep and abiding love for Gaius.
And that would be true, but it could also be love in truth in the sense of love in the bonds of the gospel, because it seems that this term truth takes on a very wide range of meanings here in John's letters.
Notice how he then says, in verse 3, for I was very glad when brethren came, these would have been some of these traveling teachers, when brethren came and testified to your truth. And that's literally what it means, they were testifying in regards to your truth.
Now, what does that mean? That's not normally how we speak. When was the last time we were speaking of one of the brethren, I testify to his truth. It would be more like I testify that he speaks the truth, or his truthfulness, or his consistency with the truth, or something like that.
But literally, it says that they testified to your truth, how you are walking in truth. Now, of course, we know this term walking. Normally, it refers to living one's activities, one's life activities, in all of one's life.
It's not just a physical action, but it refers to how one lives one's life. And so, these men have come and they've testified, this Gaius, he's like, remember what Paul said in Galatians 2 when he said that Peter and the others were not walking straight in accordance with the truth of the gospel.
And so here you have these men testifying, this Gaius, he walks straight in accordance with the truth of the gospel. There is no variance. We testify to his truthfulness, to his truth. It's almost like truth here is invading the area and touching the area of faithfulness.
He's a faithful man. Indeed, it would be difficult to define the term faithful without referring to truth, wouldn't it? You have to have some standard to determine when someone's faithful, faithful to what?
There's got to be some standard that they're faithful to. And so, you have love and truth, you have testified to your truth, you're walking in the truth, and then the next use is pretty parallel to that.
I have no greater joy than this, to hear my children walking in the truth. Well, isn't that just what Paul's talking about when he says that people are, I hear your faith being testified throughout the whole world?
Of your faithfulness? Here it's walking in the truth. So, there is something about the everyday behavior of Gaius, and then here John says, I just don't have any greater joy than to hear that my children, those who have come to faith or come to know the truth through my testimony, through my words, that they continue to walk in the truth.
And so, I think we have here a use of the term that might help us to, you know, sometimes we use terms over and over and over again. We talk about remaining in the faith, and we talk about the fact that, you know, if we gather here again on the Lord's Day, and we've gathered here for years, indeed decades.
Some of you have been here even longer than I have, and you've been gathering here for decades. We go, well, you're still standing in the faith. Why are you in the faith? Well, we know it's because the grace of God who sustains us and keeps us.
And we sometimes use that language so often that casting a little different light on it, using a little different terminology might help us to see an aspect of it that maybe in our minds the other terminology doesn't bring to our thinking.
And I think that's what this does here. When we talk about walking in the truth, truth, true doctrine, the truth of what God has done, all those things are exactly right. But we see here once again, just as we saw, remember back in 1 John, where you have action verbs, where you do things, faith is something you do.
Here, truth is something you live. And for a lot of folks, truth can unfortunately become just something that's mental. It's just something in your head. We all know you can't sit in this church very long without being reminded that to profess the truth but live in a way that denies it is hypocrisy.
That there is an 18 inch distance between here and here. And if you got up here but you don't got up here, there's something wrong. But here you have it laid out. Walking in the truth. It doesn't just mean having your doctrine right.
It means that. And people who say it doesn't mean that are missing the boat. You can't walk right without having light to see the line to walk by. You've got to have that doctrinal truth. No question about that.
But on the other side, you can sit there with a KC light of truth. Remember KC lights used to be on the top of all the pickup trucks and it had a little smiley KC thing on it. I even had them on my truck.
My truck was so small, it had such a small engine that anytime I turned them on, the engine almost stalled. Because you know the alternator was about to blow up. It was really sort of silly to have them on there.
But they were really bright and they were cool looking. KC light, man, you turn those things on, it turns night into day. Well, you can have this big, huge light. But if you're not using it to see anything, if it's not guiding you, who cares?
What good is it? It doesn't do you any good at all. So we have to have a balance. There's so many people today that are on the one side, don't worry about doctrinal truth, don't care about that, they have no light.
But we don't want to go to the other side where we can name the doctrine. We can absolutely cross our T's and dot our I's with 17 points of Calvinism. But if we're not walking in that, in the sense of application in life, what does it matter?
What good does it do? And so Gaius is walking in the truth. And John has no greater joy than this. And I can tell you something. When you minister the Word of God, when you teach and you can see somebody who comes to know the truth of your ministry, and then you watch them grow and you watch them remain consistent, you watch them go through trials and difficulties, there's no greater joy than to see that.
Because you're seeing the work of the Spirit of God. You know you couldn't do that. It's the work of the Spirit of God that is continuing to do that. And so here you have these uses. And I wanted to especially point us to the use in verse 8.
Because we're talking about these men who are speaking the truth. They're going about. And John says when we support these men, that action causes us to be synergists. Now wait a minute. Don't get upset with me now.
Don't start throwing hymnals at me. Synergism is a perfectly fine biblical word. You just have to know the context being used in it. Now if you're not familiar with the term, let me explain why I said what I just said.
We are monergists in the doctrine of salvation. That is, God effectively brings about the salvation of his people. He is not dependent upon a secondary source or power to bring about that salvation. And so in that restricted field, asking about who truly accomplishes salvation, we oppose synergism.
Because a synergist believes that salvation is the result of multiple energies, at least two, gods and mans, cooperating together. One without the other doesn't work. The general idea being God's grace is just sort of like peanut butter.
It's given to everybody. But it's man's working that makes the determination as to whether God's effort is going to be successful or not. But the term synergoi, fellow workers, is found in the New Testament a number of times.
Paul uses it when he talks about that we're fellow workers with God's grace, and fellow workers in God's kingdom. And here, we are fellow workers, very same term, synergists, synergon, fellow workers with the truth or for the truth.
There's a number of ways that you can look at this specific construction in the original language. But we are synergoi. We work together with or for the truth. In this context, he's speaking about supporting these men who are preaching the truth.
And I think it's a really useful image to us to think about that. Because I'm afraid that sometimes one of the dangers that exists for us, who rightly recognize the centrality of preaching, we rightly recognize that the central act of worship that we come here into the Lord's presence on the Lord's day to engage in, is through the proclamation of the word.
Remember what the pastor was saying, I believe it was last Sunday, where he was talking about the word of God as it's going forth. Is this truly the word of God? We know that God wishes to communicate to us, to speak to us, through his word.
And it is that central aspect that causes us to not want to get sidetracked with all the things that frequently sidetrack others. I mean, let's face it, in a lot of situations, you just got to sort of sneak the sermon in after you've managed to make all the room you possibly can for all the entertainment and all the special music numbers and so on and so forth.
Don't get me wrong, I love Christian music. But if it's not there to lead one to the centrality of the act of worship, which is hearing God speaking his word, then it's just getting in the way. And that's a commitment we've had for a long time.
And so we believe very strongly in this idea that the word, the central aspect of the worship is that proclamation of the truth. But one of the dangers that comes with that, that I think we need to be aware of, can be a sense of passivity that can breed a sense of apathy.
I'm a bump on the law. I'm here to hear somebody else working. Somebody else is up there, and I'm just passively sitting back. And I've spoken about this a number of times, for example, in regards to the Lord's Supper, emphasizing the fact that we are actively testifying of our faith in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ when we partake of the supper.
We are active in that action. You say, but I'm just sitting there going like this. Yes, you are active in doing that. You are making a proclamation. But when you come into the presence of God to hear the word of God preached, and when you come in with your heart prepared, when you come in expectant, when you come in faithfully confessing that what I'm doing is hearing God speaking, you are a fellow worker with the truth.
Have you ever thought about that? I emphasize that in a book I wrote last year called Pulpit Crimes. And I emphasize the fact believers have a ministry to those who are bringing forth the word of God.
It's called attendance and obedient listening. And it's not just a passive thing. It's an active thing. Not only do you bring yourself here, but you should be active. You know the terminology I use in the pastoral prayers frequently?
Doing what? The work of worship. By attending the word of God, by reverently recognizing what I'm hearing here is the very means that God has ordained to bring to me his truth, to bring his truth to bear in my life.
By doing that, you are active. You are a sunergoi, a fellow worker with or for the truth. You're active. And I think sometimes a lot of folks get the idea that, you know, there's certain people, they're very active in the church, but I'm just sort of, you know, their background.
No. When you come into the place of worship, and you come in as a believer, someone who is professing faith in Jesus Christ, when you come to this place, you're saying to everybody who sees you pulling into the parking lot, however few there might be, that you are here to worship God.
You believe that what we're doing in this place is special, and some of you come from a long ways to do that, and are encouragement to the rest of us. I wasn't looking just one direction for that, but there are certain people that applies to.
You are active in that. As you're driving here, you are giving a testimony. As you come into the Bible study, and by the way, it starts at quarter till. We have opening things in there at like 3 or 2, but quarter till is when we get started in here, and we look forward to seeing you Sunday morning.
You are testifying to your faith. You're saying, I want to be instructed in the things of God. I want to open my Bible. Right now we're studying the Synoptic Gospels. I want to understand what Matthew, Mark, and Luke have to say about the ministry of Christ, the teachings of Christ.
You are a fellow worker with the truth. You're honoring the truth by doing that. You're not coming here to argue about it. You want to learn more, and that attitude says, I believe this is the truth. It's an act of faith.
It's testimony. You're supporting the truth. When we walk into the service, and we prepare our hearts, and we sing the songs, and we open the Scriptures, and we follow along, and we've prepared our hearts here, we are testifying concerning the fact that we believe we're hearing truth.
A truth we're not going to hear anyplace else. I'm not saying another church, but you can't sit at home and watch the TV and do this. We're being obedient to the command of Christ and the Scriptures to gather together with the people of God and be instructed in the things of God.
We are fellow workers with the truth. That means you're active. Not just passive. There's no room for apathy in that. You are active in doing that. I hope you'll think of it that way, because I think sometimes there's a real danger of people thinking, man, I just wish I could do something.
Well, you better be doing something. The whole of Christian life is an active thing. You're in a battle. And you're either going to be a fellow worker with the truth, or you're going to be a wounded soldier lying by the side of the battlefield.
One of the two. There's no room for any apathy. And I think one of the things that was somewhat exciting about those early years was they were in constant battle. And man, that was stressful. I can tell you.
I can't imagine what it was like to be a Christian leader in those days. You didn't have 2 ,000 years of Christian history to look back on. It was a struggle. And so the idea of anybody getting apathetic in that day and age, when the church is under persecution and there's false teachers every which direction, we would probably be going, wow, has the Lord sort of lost control of things?
No. No. He's using that to purify his church and to create in his people a passion for the truth. He's going to do the same thing amongst us as well. So I just turn to this little text. And you can get to, for example, you know that our testimony is true and things like that.
But just to remind us that truth is not just simply an intellectual object out there that we acknowledge. There have even been some amongst Reformed folks who have sadly reduced faith down to the mere acknowledgement of certain intellectual propositions and they were wrong.
The New Testament will not allow truth or faith to be so limited in that way. Because the Bible tends to use those words in ways that are a little uncomfortable to us in English. Because they're very action-based.
You do faith. You do believing. You do truth. The idea that we could have just an intellectual thing out there that does not impact the very core of our being, our heart, our passions, our priorities, unknown.
Unknown New Testament. Doesn't exist. We of course live in a day where this is I think very important to us. Because the world around us will do everything it can to extinguish passion in your heart. And if the world can convince you to be an apathetic Christian who just sort of puts it off to the side, just make your way through, I'm doing as good as anybody else, then the world has won that battle.
The scriptures won't allow us to see it in that way. So think of yourself this evening. Ask yourself, how am I a fellow worker with the truth? How tomorrow can I be a fellow worker with the truth at the office, at my workplace?
As long as you're doing what you're doing, the glory of Christ as a servant of Christ, you will be a fellow worker with the truth. Pastor.
