MONDAY 13th
1 John 2:9-11
‘Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.’
Our verses today continue on from the verses we looked at in the previous devotion, to live by the new commandment which is that we should love one another.
Have you ever stopped to wonder what this world would be like if everybody embraced and lived out this commandment! Sadly ‘love’ has become a distorted word today, where love is related or accepted in terms and behaviour that goes beyond what the Biblical understanding of love is all about. But that’s another subject.
John introduces another word here that contrast with love, the exact opposite, hate. He has already drawn contrast between light and darkness, now he speaks of love and hate, but the hatred he is talking about is not the hatred we see in the world, but that which can be found in the Church, a hate that really shouldn’t even exist at all.
He talks of someone and we understand he is talking about believers here because he has called them his children (v1) and beloved (v7) (the NIV uses ‘dear friends’) who says he is in the light, that is walking in fellowship with other believers and with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ and yet at the same time would say that he hates his brother (in the Lord). John considers this to be a serious offence against the light of the gospel, he says that that person is actually still in darkness, if we go back to 1 John 1:6 we read ‘If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.’ In other words the person who hates his brother (or sister) in the Lord is not practising truth, and is not in true fellowship with the Lord, we are living out of synch with the command that the Lord has given us and we are living in a way that betrays the message of love which the gospel is all about.
John writes later in this letter ‘We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him’ 1 John 3:14–15. Again in this letter he says ‘If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother’ 1 John 4:20–21. These verses contain some serious words!
We can only truly love in the way in which the new commandment commands us with the help of the Holy Spirit, our old nature will do its best to cause us to stumble, but as we learn to love God ‘with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’ we will also learn to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’
May God helps us to love others in the same way in which he has loved us and to ensure that we never harbour hatred in our lives towards a brother or sister in the Lord. As I ended the previous devotion, we may not like everything about an individual after all we are all uniquely different in so many ways, but we learn to love them in the same way that Christ has loved us and given himself for us.