MONDAY April 24th
3 John 1:11-12
‘Beloved, do not imitate evil but imitate good. Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God. Demetrius has received a good testimony from everyone, and from the truth itself. We also add our testimony, and you know that our testimony is true.’
I have already mentioned that this is a personal letter to Gaius, and three times already John calls him ‘beloved’, and immediately after making reference to Diotrephes and what I will call his bad behaviour in the church, John calls Gaius beloved again and then says, ‘do not imitate evil but imitate good. Whoever does good is from God’.
What we are as the children of God is essential to our maintaining a good testimony, if we imitate evil then we cannot truly be from God, because all evil is opposed to God because he is a righteous and holy God. Therefore we should at all times imitate good. Good morals, good standards, good lifestyle, good business practise, good work ethic etc. Now being good is not what saves us, we are saved by grace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, but being good should be evidence that we have been saved.
In Psalm 34:14 we read ‘Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.’ We initially turn away from evil by turning to the Lord Jesus Christ and responding by faith, but once we have done this we should do all we can to continually turn away from evil, that is anything that this world can try to beguile us with to keep us from being the children of God that we should be and should want to be.
Being good ensures that we have a good testimony to those around us. That is why it is so essential that we draw a line of demarcation in regard to those things we will happily do or be involved in when with unbelievers versus those things that we will not and should not do as believers, we are representatives of God in an unholy world, we should be those whose testimony speaks out loud and clear to all, that Jesus really has made a difference in our lives, so that watching us others will want to know and to have the same experience of salvation, for if we truly believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, we will want others to know, if we truly believe that Jesus is the living bread that truly satisfies our spiritual hunger we will want others to know as well, if we truly believe that Jesus can satisfy the deepest longing of the soul then we should do all we can to avoid anything that would seem to deny the truthfulness of the gospel that we should be seeking to represent and to present to others.