The Revelator: Truth in Love

Luke 6

He’s the Revelator. He has given us the story of Jesus in his gospel.  He has given us three epistles in which the Holy Spirit inspired him to write important matters to the church.  And he has given us the visions of Christ and the end of the world. John takes up a huge part of the New Testament by his writings, and he is there with Peter as a companion in the first twelve chapters of Acts.

Two things characterize John: truth and love.  If you want to know how to describe John, you can describe John as a man of truth and a man of love, and that is the most desirable mix possible.  If you could wish for anything in your growth, wish for that.  If you could pursue anything, pursue that.  Know the truth and hold it with love.

Ephesians 4:15

But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ:

What does it mean to be spiritually mature?  It means to speak the truth in love.  That's where we're to be heading, folks.  We need a balance of those two pinnacles of Christian virtue.  It’s easy to say, but it takes a lifetime and a constant scrutiny and most of all, the mighty work of the Spirit of God and His Word to produce that balance.  It means knowing sound doctrine, but it means also bearing the fruit of the Spirit, which is love, first of all.  It is an elusive balance, and so easy to lose.  Christ was the perfect expression of truth and the perfect expression of love.  He is the model.  He said, "I only speak what the Father shows Me to speak." 

There are plenty of people today who are heavy on the love side.  They are ignorant, very often. They are deceived, the truth is missing.  And what they're left with is an error or shallowness often clothed in their kind, tolerant sentimentality. 

On the other hand, there are the orthodox who have all of their theological ducks in a row and who know doctrine, but are unloving and self-exalting.  They are left with truth as cold facts, stifling and unattractive.

If you're looking for a mature example of the right balance, John will do very well.  Christ is the perfection of that. John is the human example of that.

There was a time when preachers were just firing out hell-fire and wrath and damnation and they needed a dose of balancing love.  It seems as though we now live in a day when it's all love, love, love and who cares about the truth?  Shallow teaching is all around.  Tolerance of error abounds. 

John was eventually made humble.  He didn't start out that way as a son of thunder.  But because he's so self-effacing in his gospel, it is assumed by most people that he was always that way, sort of a meek, mild, wimpish, pale-skinned, ashen guy. That's the way he shows up in Medieval art.  You know, he appears frequently leaning on Jesus' shoulder looking up with a blank, dove-eyed stare into space, sort of the passive beta type.  But that’s not even close to reality.

When James was calling down fire from heaven to burn up the Samaritans, John was echoing big brother.  And when the mother, the wife of Zebedee, came to Jesus and said, "I want my boys on the right and the left hand," it wasn't just James there, it was John too.  Believe me John was in the middle of all the arguments among the apostles about who was going to be the greatest in the kingdom. 

If you study Matthew, Mark and Luke you always see John with Peter and James.  Only one time in three gospels does John appear and speak alone.  And so if we want to know what he's like, that's a good place to go. It’s in Mark chapter 9. 

This is the transfiguration, as Jesus is glorified before the 3 of them. As they come down the mountain He tells them not to tell anyone what they saw. That’s a tall order. They have to talk about this. So they talk to each other away from Jesus, and it turns to a competition of which of them is the greatest. I can imagine one saying, “I was standing the closest to Him when He became ablaze!” Jesus knows what they were saying and rebukes them. He teaches them that instead of having conflict with each other, you need to embrace each other.  And instead of desiring to be first, you need to take the role of last.

And this cut to the heart.  It was a serious rebuke. Particularly John got the message and here we have the only time John speaks in these three opening gospels. 

Mark 9:38

³⁸ And John answered him, saying, Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and he followeth not us: and we forbad him, because he followeth not us.

I think John spoke because he was convicted.  I think he felt the sting of this rebuke.  This is the intolerance of John.  This is the son of thunder.  This is Boanerges.  This is that sectarianism, that narrowness, that ambition, that desire to have it all for you and not share it with anybody else, especially somebody outside the group. 

But something's changing in John because now he begins to see that attitude as something undesirable, and this is his confession.  John is saying, "I confess, we did that."  Because he now is beginning to feel that that's wrong because of what Jesus had just said.  His conscience is bothering him.  He's being tenderized.  He's always been strong for the truth, he's always been zealous and passionate, but the Lord has been teaching him love. 

Some wonder, why does the Lord choose explosive guys like John or James or Peter?  It is because when shaped, it is useful to God. That kind of courage and strength belongs to the history of the Christian church, doesn't it?  The movers and the shakers, the people who literally are the fulcrums that turn the earth.  You go back and it's the strength of those men, it's the relentlessness of them, it's the courage of them, it's the boldness of them that have really written the history of the church. 

John had potential for being the blend of truth and love that God wanted.  His strength was shaped by the Lord into a loving devotion to divine truth.  And you see that in his writings. John, of all the writers of the New Testament, is the most black and white.  He is the most absolute.  He is the one who speaks in certainties.  There doesn't seem to be any gray area in John.  You read his gospel and you're either in the light or the darkness.  It's either life or death, kingdom of God, or kingdom of the devil, children of God, or children of Satan.  It's the judgment of the righteous or the judgment of the wicked.  It's the resurrection of life or the resurrection of damnation.  It's receiving Christ or rejecting Christ.  It's fruit or no fruit.  It's being cut off and burned, or bearing fruit to God's glory.  It's obedience or disobedience.  It's being loving or not loving.  It's absolute all the way down the line.

You read 1 John and he says, if you're a believer, then you're in the light and you're confessing your sins and you're walking the way Jesus walked and you're loving your brother and you're obeying the commandments and you're not loving the world and you're not continuing in sin and you're ministering to your brother when you see him in need, and you're keeping the commandments and you're living righteously and you're pure and you're loving the truth, and on and on.  You read his second epistle and he calls for complete, total separation from all that is false.  Then there’s this:

3 John 1:11

He that doeth good is of God: but he that doeth evil hath not seen God.

He spoke the truth unwavering without exceptions.  But he did so with a warm, personal, pastoral tone.  The Lord had taken that tendency toward narrowness and an uncompromising attitude and He had tied it to the truth.

You never find in any of his writings the slightest hint of pride or ambition, with one humorous exception, as he told us he outran Peter to the empty tomb. It was the truth! And I think he said it in love for his friend, teasing. Don’t be surprised in heaven if he hands Peter a red ribbon. But really he shows no pride.  And the best insight into that is that in his entire gospel, twenty-one chapters, he never once uses his name, never.  He would have every reason to do so had he chosen, but he never does, not even when talking about the race. "Does he ever refer to himself?"  Yes, but he always refers to himself in reference to the Lord. 

John 13:23

Now there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved.

Since John was so critical to the ‘revelation’ of the truth, it was essential that it be balanced with love.  And so the Lord, I think, took on John as a special project and taught him how to love.  How do you teach a man how to love?  By loving him the way You want him to love.  You learn to love by being loved.  And so John got it, he gripped it. He was not the man ‘whom Jesus had called’, not the man ‘whom Jesus had chosen’, not the man ‘whom Jesus had taught’, but the man whom Jesus had loved. 

John 19:26

When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son!

John has learned love so well that Jesus said from the cross to His mother, "Woman, behold your son," and He was referring to John.  I'm your son and I'm leaving, so I'm giving you a new son to care for you.  And He said to John, “Behold, your mother."

Had John learned to love?  I promise you he had or Jesus wouldn't have given him the care of His own mother.  He told Peter, "Feed My sheep."  He told John, "Care for My mother."  There are records in church history that indicate that John never left Jerusalem and never left the care of Mary until she died.  He had become a lover because he was loved in a unique way.

When you get out of seminary, you're just loaded to the gills with truth and you're real short on patience.  And you want to come blasting into the church. I see it with young men even today, you want to come blasting into the church and dump the truth on everybody and get immediate response.  And you have to learn patience, tolerance, and mercy, and grace and forgiveness and tenderness, and compassion.  And that's where John was.  It's great to find the boldness, it's great to find the thunder, but he needed to love. This is not a mad hunt for fish, this is the church! This is not the cutthroat corporate world, this is the church! This is not a construction site, this is the church. Learn to love or you’re gonna die with the legacy of the roughneck that couldn’t be taught!

John uses the word "love" over eighty times in his writings.  He learned to love because the Lord loved him and he got that message.  He learned to love the way the Lord loved him.  And in his writings he taught that God is a God of love, that the Father loved His own Son, that the Father loved the disciples, and all men, that the Father is loved by Christ, that Christ loved the disciples, that Christ loves individuals, that Christ expects men to love Him, that Christ taught that we should love one another, and that love fulfills the law.  Yet his love never slid into tolerant sentimentality, masquerading as love. That’s what the gay community errantly embraces.

To the very end of his life he was still a son of thunder.  To the very end of his life he lost none of his intolerance for lies.  It was near the end of his life, in the 90s AD, from 90 to 95 of the first century... He died in 98 or so. [He wrote the Revelation in 96.] It was in the 90s when he was writing his epistles that he was still thundering out the truth. 

He uses the word "witness" about seventy times.  It's another dominant word because he was always the witness to the truth.  He referred to the witness of John the Baptist, the witness of Scripture, the witness of the Father, the witness of Christ, the witness of the miracles, the witness of the Holy Spirit and the witness of the apostles, all witnessing to the truth.  When all the other apostles were dead, he was still building Gentile churches on truth and love.  He was the fiery lover of the truth and lover of God and lover of men.  He hated what the Lord hated, but he loved whom the Lord loved.

For nearly 70 years, he had become the patriarch of the churches in Asia Minor, modern Turkey.  He was banished, Revelation 1:9 says, "For the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus.” His speaking the truth in love was more than the culture could bear, and so they boiled him in oil and he miraculously survived, so they banished him to a small island five miles by ten miles called Patmos. It's in the Aegean Sea off the west coast of Turkey. There he received the Revelation. And he was on that rock in exile because he wouldn't give up the truth and he preached it out of love for God and love for men.  Two years after he received the Revelation, around 96 A.D., in the year 98 A.D. during the reign of Emperor Trajan, he died, tradition says. 

2 John 1:4

⁴ I rejoiced greatly that I found of thy children walking in truth, as we have received a commandment from the Father.

Boy, that's the way it went, from the Father down through us to you came the truth.  And you're walking in it. 

2 John 1:5

⁵ And now I beseech thee, lady [church], not as though I wrote a new commandment unto thee, but that which we had from the beginning, that we love one another.

The fishermen brothers of Galilee, Peter and Andrew, James and John, became fishers of men on a tremendous scale, gathering souls, founding the church.  In a sense, they’re still casting their nets into the sea of the world by their writings.  And the same Christ who took very common men and made them into very uncommon apostles, seeks to do a similar work in your life.