60 - Integrity and Impersonal Love

Integrity and Impersonal Love; 1 John 3:9-12

1 John 3:6 ^NASB "No one who abides in Him sins…" If "abide" there is belief in Christ then it could be read, "Whoever believes in Him does not sin." That is patently false and is a contradiction to what John says in 1 John 1:6-10 where he recognises that believers sin. The ^NKJV says: "Whoever abides in Him does not sin." That is a much closer rendering of the original. It is a true statement; it doesn't say what kind of sin. It doesn't say, "No one who abides in Him commits heinous sexual sins," yet that is how most people hear it. They think of whatever their worst sins are and say that if somebody abides in Christ and they want to interpret that as belief they say that no one who abides in Christ or believes in Him, no one who is a true believer, sins. John goes on in the second half of verse six to say ^NASB "no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him." That is, the person who sins is in a not seeing or not knowing state. At that point the believer is out of fellowship and in darkness, and in spiritual darkness the Word of God is as irrelevant as if he was blind and ignorant of the Word because he is under the control of the sin nature.    

1 John 3:9 ^NASB "No one who is born of God practices sin, …" In the ^NASB there is the insertion of the word "practice" and yet there is no such word in the Greek text which uses poieo [poiew], the word to do: ^NKJV 'Whoever is born of God does not sin.' That could mean one of two things. It could be taken to mean that no one who is born again sins, i.e. believers just don't sin. We have already refuted that error. It is clear that John means something else. "No one who is born of God does sin." Why? "… because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God." He starts off talking about the believer in the first phrase but when we get to the second phrase we realise he qualifies it as the believer whose "seed abides in him." Don't stop in mid-sentence with the fact that this is a believer. This is a believer where his seed abides. There are believers where the seed doesn't abide. What is the seed? Some have suggested that the seed is the Holy Spirit; others that it is Jesus Christ; the passage here never tells us what the seed is, but we do have seed in other passages of the New Testament and it is the gospel or the Word of God. E.g. 1 Peter 1:23 ^NASB "for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, {that is,} through the living and enduring word of God"; Matthew 13 and the parable of the sower where the seed is defined in context as the Word of God. Furthermore, Jesus said in John 15:4 ^NASB "Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither {can} you unless you abide in Me. [5] I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing… [7] If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you." So this gives s a simple direction of abiding. Not only does the believer abide in Christ but Christ and His Word abides in the believer. This happens at the same time. So when we are abiding in Him, at the same time He is abiding in us and His Word is abiding in us, and that means it is being productive because we are walking by the Holy Spirit. When we are out of fellowship His Word is not abiding in us, we are not abiding in Him, and He is not abiding in us. He is indwelling us but he is not abiding. Remember that this word "abiding" is talking about intimate relationship or fellowship. When we are in fellowship with God there is a mutual abiding that takes place.

So "All who are born from God do not do sin  because his seed abides in him." He is not just talking about a simple believer, he is talking about a believer who is abiding, whose seed abides, and in that state he cannot sin—literally, "he is not able to sin," the negative ou [o)u] plus dunamis [dunamij] which means not able to and excludes any possibility of being able to sin. He doesn't qualify the sin. There is one other way to take this, and that is that John is describing what is true about the abiding believer, that only the abiding believer can reach the state of not sinning.

John is saying that only the person who abides, only the person who is born again, is capable of producing righteousness and it is only the believer who has his seed abiding in him that is capable of not sinning. He is not stating that of you sin you were not ever a believer; he is not saying that believers can't sin; he is stating that only believers have the possibility of being sinless and practicing genuine righteousness; and that only occurs when they are in that status of abiding in Christ.     

1 John 3:10 ^NASB "By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious:  anyone who does not practice [poiew, do] righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother." Obviously, he is talking about believers and the Christian life, he is not talking about believer versus unbeliever.

To get into full-blown adulthood we have to understand what love is. Love is the unique characteristic of the believer versus the unbeliever. This is what is going to characterise the believer—not just practising righteousness but it is connected with the believer who loves his brother. Love becomes a major theme for the rest of this chapter and down through 5:5. Love is chosen because love is designed to represent and to characterise what the mature believer looks like. This isn't going to be produced in the life of the immature believer; he doesn't know enough yet, he hasn't grown enough and matured enough yet.

John 13:34 ^NASB "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. [35] By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another." He is not saying "by this all men will know that you are saved." Being a disciple is different from being a believer. A disciple is someone who is a learner, a student, someone who is implementing all of the teaching of his master. That is why in John 15 Jesus talks about abiding in Him. They are already believers. If a believer is automatically going to love, already going to abide, then why tell them to love and abide? If a believer does not abide he will not produce love, and that is why love is the mark of the disciple, the one who is abiding, the one who is advancing and is growing to spiritual maturity. In John 13:35 we see that this is the unique mark of the disciple of Jesus Christ. 

Remember that in the Old Testament the command was "love your neighbour as yourself." Jesus said: "Love your brother as I have loved you." There is a big difference between those two. In the Old Testament the analogy was "as yourself," and it was directed towards your neighbour who is anybody. Burt the command here is to love your brother, i.e. other believers, not like you love yourself but as Christ loved them. So it grounds that mandate in an absolute concept as displayed by Jesus Christ on the cross. There is no wiggle room when Jesus is the model.

1 John 3:11 ^NASB "For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another; [12] not as Cain, {who} was of the evil one and slew his brother…" Murder is the ultimate result of mental sins of resentment, hatred, revenge motivation, and is the opposite of love. John uses this extreme example because murder is the product of not loving. Cain was focused on himself. If the believer is self-absorbed, if he is oriented to what is going on in his life, then he can't ever love anyone. The kind of love that every unbeliever has is a pseudo-love that is based ultimately on arrogance and on self-gratification. It can't be otherwise for the unbeliever because he doesn't have the Holy Spirit to produce this kind of love. "…And for what reason did he slay him? Because his deeds were evil, and his brother's were righteous." He did not have integrity; because he was not a believer he could not produce any kind of love that would provide any kind of stability.