Difficult to Be Different
What is world-born is world-bound; what is Spirt-born is heaven-bound. With Jesus, the spirit-born are called to live differently from the world-born. Scottish pastor and biblical scholar William Barclay wrote that believers in John’s day “were [. . .] under the great and dangerous temptation to compromise with the world. It is always difficult to be different.”[1] It’s difficult to be different, despite any claim to the contrary. The world applauds diversity, so long as the difference is in conformity with the world’s values. Christians find themselves strangely disinclined to conform. The truth has gripped our lives; the blood of Christ is in us, active, at work. There is power in the blood: power for life, new life, life different from the ways of this world. To be a Christian is to be marked. For its part, the world pledges itself to bring you over, or at least undermine you.
The world knows how to entice us, knows that, though God has called us out of the world, our hearts and thoughts are stained with the world’s ways. See all the flesh, fun, and freedom the world is offering you! Sure, it all comes with a price, but the world assures you that you can have it all—after all, you deserve it all. It’s yours for the taking, just for the asking.
Do you realize how much time, money, and labor are poured into market research?
John wants to wake us up: “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them” (2:15). Jesus told us “anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jn 12:25). By surrendering any desire for what the world tries to sell you, you are offering your life to God, pleading for the life only God can give: eternal life. Hate is strong language. It’s meant to be: we are being told something of highest importance. Jesus has to shock us into wakefulness: he must pry us out of the world’s grip. Because we remain in the world, we tend to become comfortable here, very much at home. It’s going to take a holy shock. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). What do you most want? Happiness? Fun? Wealth? Health? Security? To whom is your first, highest devotion? Team? Family? Nation? You?
Love. We don’t regard love as a matter of choice. That wouldn’t fit the story. Love is a matter of choice, though: God’s choice. Love is not blind, or blinded. Love sees. Love sees the one. Love stops for the one. Love looks like something. God speaks, shows, and shares His love to everyone. Some are convinced God doesn’t love them—let’s find them and bring them here. Others will gladly let you know they don’t love God: they’ve got no use for God. They have what they want. They have plans to get what they don’t yet have.
The world would have us believe that love is passion—sudden, overwhelming, whitewater, bungee plunge—when those feelings change, when the thrill is gone, it’s the sure sign that love is gone. Love is unaccountable, fleeting—here one day, gone the next—fickle—now fixated upon this one, now upon that one. Obsession, infatuation, as so many pop singers have sung. Obsession, which is not so different from possession, or at least the desire for it.
As I read John—indeed, as I read the Bible—I find love is accountability. Love is accountable. John Stott, the evangelical pastor and theologian, observes that “love [. . .] is not an uncontrollable emotion but the steady devotion of the will.”[2] Love is the Spirit-steadied, Spirit-enabled devotion of the will being reformed by the Spirit. We understand that love is not the same as infatuated, obsessive lust. Understand also that the world continually tries to confuse our feelings about love and our thinking about truth.
It’s difficult, being different. Why set your heart against the world? Because, as John tells us, “everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world” (2:16). Barclay comments that, “The flesh’s desire is regardless of the commandments of God, the judgment of God, the standards of God and the very existence of God.”[3] If God gets in the way of satisfying desires, then God has to go, or at least undergo a little remodeling to suit the tastes of the times: gray remains one of the top interior colors.
Something has got to change, be different; we fear we can’t change; nothing changes. How to experience that power? Something has to come from outside the world. Someone has to break through to us. What is world-born is world-bound. What is Spirit-born is heaven-bound. Salvation comes from outside; true love comes from outside the world. Christ’s love was no uncontrollable, unaccountable emotion. His love is that steady devotion of the will Stott mentioned. Jesus set his face toward our need, steadied his heart for the sacrifice necessary to save us from ourselves, from what we had become, what we had done—what we still do, to ourselves and others whom God calls us to love. Get caught up on the news: just see how we love one another! Just see how we love God.
Those motivators of human conduct, lust and pride, fear time: lust and pride demand indulgence before time overwhelms them, before death overtakes them. Philosophers from the beginning have wrestled with the question of time: change, and mortality. John is philosophical when he writes, “The world and its desires pass away”; he is theological, when he adds, “but whoever does the will of God lives forever” (2:17). Lust and pride are not the way to live forever; the world seems to have no innate power to go another way. The English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, some two hundred years ago, wrote “Ozymandias”:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The world and its desires pass away, the fever and the fury; the absurdity of it all becomes obvious, ages later, though the historical record brims over with the blood of the brutality of our lust and pride. Love also looks like something: love looks like obedience, because love looks like Christ. Whoever does the will of God lives forever.
“Dear children,” John continues, “this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour” (2:18). Two thousand years later, Jesus Christ continues to be the crucial event, the turning point of all human history. Because of all Jesus Christ has done, we know we are headed toward the fulfillment of all things. Opposition to Christ continues, as we know; we know this opposition is bound to increase, especially as we continue to hold on to the full message, the old message that makes new.
Antichrist sounds scary, conjuring perhaps images of beasts, blood, and fire. Antichrist will not come ugly, beloved. His work is to lead away as many as he can, or at least undermine them. He won’t do it by force unless he’s left with no alternative. His preferred means is persuasion: emotion-evoking, thought re-shaping persuasion. “You just feel it’s right,” he’ll say. “You just know it’s not wrong,” he’ll say. He won’t look or sound like a monster. He will look like me, or you. He works upon us through our emotions and our world-formed, world-inclined thinking—he wants to change how we think about the things of God. He understands, consummately, that “people will respond to their feelings.”[4] Barclay rightly observes that, “for John the battleground was in the mind.”[5] It will be in the heart, too. As our hearts go, so goes our thinking. The mind will never win over the heart; the heart must be changed.
John was writing to help the faithful recover after a painful division in the church. There were those who held to error, clung to false belief, false hope, who wanted the name of Christ but wanted the difference on their terms. The churches under John’s apostleship refused the error and false belief. There was discord, division, and departure: who were they, to say “error”? Who were they, to say “false belief”? People left, hurt and angry. They wanted a church where they would be welcomed, loved, and not challenged, not questioned, not called to another way of life, not different. Every church has been through similar experiences. Between those who leave and those who never show up, we begin to question whether we’re on the right track, whether we’re getting it right or going terribly wrong. Hard questions. Our hope through it all is the gift of endurance. “[S]alvation,” Stott observes, “is [not] the reward of endurance, but [. . .] endurance the hall-mark of the saved.”[6]
John reminds us where this endurance comes from: “you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth” (2:20). We long for an experience of God. Recall, with joy and peace, that God has given us this experience: He has called and claimed us. He has anointed us, touched us as with His own hands, the hands of His gracious love in the wounded, glorified, healing hands of Jesus Christ, in the encouraging, purifying hands of the Holy Spirit. We know the truth, John tells us. In large part he means we know Jesus Christ. We know he knows us. “[N]o lie comes from the truth,” John writes (2:21). As, by the grace of our anointing, we endure in the truth in Christ Jesus, we will be accused, called liars, and condemned. Anyone who feels hurt by the truth, anyone for whom we will not accommodate our beliefs, will regard us as the liars. John assures us we have the way to true life; we already have true life—Jesus Christ. Truth is not a thing to be felt or a concept to be thought: truth is a person to be known, a living, acting, forgiving person. All those in Christ know the truth.
Kind lies still lead to darkness. Lies love darkness; much can be done under cover of “darkness,” the darkness, for example, of an accommodating theology, the darkness of a laissez-faire attitude to choices those in the church make. Writing more than fifty years ago, Barclay still speaks with powerful relevance: “What we need is not new truth, but that the truth which we already know become active and effective in our lives.”[7] “As for you, see that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you. If it does, you also will remain in the Son and in the Father. And this is what he promised us—eternal life” (2:24-25). Hold on to the old message. By it, you have life in fellowship with God; you have God’s love; You have Christ. We hear by the Spirit. The Spirit is in us, working from the inside out.
“I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray” (2:26). Who? The world, the world in the church, pledged to lead us astray, gain a following, claiming the light, claiming the way of true love. Light, love—what better way to win followers? Opposition to Christ and truth won’t come ugly, brothers and sisters. God offers defense, the way to abide in God, abide in Truth. When you know Jesus Christ, you will be different.
To the God of all grace, who calls you to share God’s eternal glory in union with Christ, be the power forever!
[1] William Barclay. Letters of John and Jude. Daily Study Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975. 57.
[2] J. R. W. Stott. Epistles of John. Tyndale NT Commentaries. London: Tyndale, 1964. 99.
[4] Leonard Sweet. Postmodern Pilgrims: First Century Passion for the 21st Century World. Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman and Holman, 2000. 86.
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