Love Is a Good Listener
John doesn’t want us to be afraid. He knows Jesus. How many times, John remembers so well, Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid.” John wants us to be wise. He wants us to be faithful. He wants us to be loving: doing love in Spirit and truth; that is, in Christ. Thus, John also wants us to be wise about false prophets (4:1). Real false prophets don’t come ugly, beloved. They come as though kind, compassionate, understanding; they come persuasive, just like Christ, just like the Spirit of God. Like. Not the same. The message is like the Spirit’s message. It isn’t the same. There’s a difference or two. The persuasive persuasion of the false prophet will be for convincing you that the difference of his or her message isn’t really a difference, not an important difference, anyway.
False prophets will talk to us much about love; after all, love is God. John tells us God is love. Does it matter which word comes first? Like the Bible, the best human values also say love is God; enlightened people understand this. God is love is what Scripture says. False prophets will talk to us much about love; they’ll bring in the Bible, but not all of it. They don’t want to, and they can’t. False prophets are in the service of the goodly words of the world’s ways. They’ll speak of love, movingly, persuasively. It will be falsehood because it is love without Spirit, love without Truth. At heart, it is love of darkness: much can be done, under cover of darkness.
Our salvation depends upon the truth: not my truth or your truth, or his truth or her truth but the Truth. But people don’t agree about truth, anymore. Truth is subjective; truth is arbitrary. Obedience is living out our salvation—with fear and trembling—according to and in the Truth. The fear and trembling aren’t from some mean-spirited threat of divine punishment ever looming over us. Our fear and trembling are from our Spirit- and Word-clarified view of the danger from which God has just now saved us, swerving the car just in time, grabbing us as we’re starting to slip, lugging us bodily out of the undertow sweeping us into the deep, cold waters. The danger comes differently and is always the same danger: the lovely falsehood that leads to death. True love truly saves, because Truth is true love. Truth looks like something: Jesus Christ. Christ saves. People wonder from what: oppression, injustice, inequality, Republicans?
The fear being nailed into us by the world is that you and I can no longer be both loving people and faithful Christians, at least not in the way faithfulness has been understood for the past two thousand plus years. Love has . . . evolved, and so must faithfulness, as we are told. Evangelical pastor and theologian John Stott offers a response: “Neither Christian faith nor Christian love is indiscriminate.”[1] Indiscriminate—not picking, not sorting or sifting or choosing—just broadcast, like seed sown everywhere—onto well-worn paths, among rocks, dandelions and plantain. Like rain that waters wherever it falls—whether upon soil or stone or sea. Indiscriminate—does it sound like grace? Free, equal.
Apart from the sad social history of the word, to discriminate is to choose. To be indiscriminate is to have nothing to do with choosing, to want nothing to do with choosing. We know, we’ve been told, oh so often, that it’s such a small step from choosing to judging. Lord knows we don’t want to be thought of as judging anything! Beloved, grace is a choice: God’s choice. By God’s grace, we can choose to offer grace. Grace is not for tolerating darkness and lies. Grace is for change, for purification, for obedience. Grace is for endurance. Purification and obedience discriminate, they choose: good from bad, right from wrong, true from false, truly loving from loving falsehood.
But these words, discriminate and discrimination, for us conjure thoughts of injustice. Following John’s advice to “test the spirits” (4:1), Stott uses the words differently, to describe prudence, wisdom, obedience, and faith. As Christians, we need to educate ourselves about what is good, better, and best, and about what is bad, what is worse, and what is worst. Paul urges the faithful,
whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you. (Philippians 4:8-9)
Discrimination in this sense is wisdom, holy wisdom, and walking at peace with God, reconciled and being reconciled. Making accurate distinctions is wisdom. Discrimination in this sense is love: love desires the very best for the beloved. God desires the very best for us. Apart from God, God’s Word, and God’s Way, people have very different ideas about what is the very best. Even having God’s Word, people have very different ideas!
Let us desire the very best for one another and for those choosing less than the best. Love judges. That’s a hard one to hear! But judgment is not for the termination of relationship, beloved. Judgment is a firm and clear expectation and offer of the way to restored relationship. Is there no connection between justice and healing, in God’s way? Stott points out that “There is such a thing [. . .] as misguided charity and tolerance towards false doctrine.”[2] Who am I to say? What do I know? Turn those questions around: ask Who do I know, and he will help you know what to say; he will also help you to say it, in love.
Love loves the truth because love loves God. Love does not love to hurt, and the bandage must be removed if the wound is to be properly treated. To leave the bandage untouched is to run the risk of the wound becoming infected; so, from a well-meaning yet misguided notion of “love,” we end up causing harm, more harm, worse harm. But who am I to say, and what do I know? It’s easier, isn’t it, to keep quiet, just go along. Who wants the stress of being different, of living differently?
What is the Gospel? “Just try to be a good person.” “Live and let live.” “Don’t judge!” Stott writes, “The world recognizes its own people and listens to a message which originates in its own circle. This explains their popularity.”[3] The world’s “gospel” slogan might go like this: “Passionately seeking our truths, together.” Only, at the same time, behind and beneath it all, the world is ruling what can and cannot be among the permitted “truths.” If Christians are accused of being judgmental judgers, how much more this age, this society, this culture! The world is not offering a neutral forum for hearing all ideas. What gets ruled out is not ruled out according to truth or righteousness, but ruled out according to power and identity. For the world, power and identity are truth. When the world recognizes a disciple of Jesus Christ it responds accordingly. If the world mistakes you for one of its own, how has this happened? Popularity is a dangerous thing, fleeting and fickle as love. Popularity rarely comes with saying what needs to be said, as John witnessed first-hand.
Not many people enjoy conflict. Some are more inclined to get it over with, others more inclined to shy away from it, avoid it, at all costs. All costs. Maybe John says something here that might help: “You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world” (4:4). It is difficult to be different; with God all things are possible. With God active and at work in us and among us, we have confidence that we shall overcome—He will overcome, for us; He will purify us for Himself. We do not need to concern ourselves with popularity: gaining it, growing it, harming it, losing it. We don’t gain a following. God gains followers. He chooses them. He chooses us to choose whom we will follow. Some people follow an idea; more follow a feeling. We follow Christ: the Way, the Truth, the Life. He is love. He is progress in love.
Christ Jesus, alive and at work in us, “is greater than the one who is in the world.” The Tempter, antichrist, the enemy of our salvation, though he speak with what feels like truth, though he offer what delights as though it were light. So long as we remain in the world, even though we no longer be of the world, we remain vulnerable to the one who is in the world. His aim is our harm, typically in the gentlest, most persuasively sympathetic way, encouraging the lies our hard hearts desire, the disobedience our stubborn wills want, the impurity our weak flesh craves. “Did God really say?” No, no—we’ve got God’s Word all wrong, but antichrist will explain it to us, and we will then understand by the new light, the greater light. What indignation rises, surges, when God’s Word tells us no! What kind of God tells me No?!
Many claim Christianity. There are those whom Christianity has claimed. We have evidence that the faith has claimed their lives: their living, however imperfectly, is a hearty striving for purity, for obedience, for the love of God: the love God shows us, gives us, teaches us, by which He shapes us, admonishes us, draws us nearer, draws us together.
Love speaks. Even more often, love listens. Love is a good listener. As we make progress in love, God makes us better listeners by His Holy Spirit. As we listen for the sake of love, for the sake of obedience and purification, God blesses our listening with a spirit of discrimination, apart from which we cannot tell truth from falsehood, apart from which we would never want to.
To the God of all grace, who calls you to share God’s eternal glory in union with Christ, be the power forever!
[1] J. R. W. Stott. Epistles of John. Tyndale NT Commentaries. London: Tyndale, 1964. 152.
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