1 John 2:4-9

Living Liars

1Jn 2:4-9

We say that the Apostle John was all for love. In so far he was true to his own loving nature. He was above all things affectionate. Some souls have no affection. They are not wholly to blame. "That which is crooked cannot be made straight; and that which is wanting cannot be numbered." They do not mean to be wanting in affection; they do not know that they are wanting in affection. It is impossible to live with them; you may be compelled to live beside them, but "with" is a larger word than "beside"; it implies indentification, unity, sympathy, oneness. You did not know that there was any want of love; you could only make that disastrous discovery after long experience: hence we have so many shattered, ruined lives, where there is absolutely no cruelty of any kind that can be expressed in words. Homes are made unhappy not by cruelty only, some overt and infernal act of shameless cruelty; but in one heart or the other there is a great gap, an awful vacancy, a piece of leather where there ought to be a living, sensitive, all-answering heart. John was, on the contrary, affectionate, loving, clinging, caressing, always wanting something else to complete the measure of his heart-satisfaction. Yet the fourth verse gives a totally different aspect of the man. In that verse there is no flowery sentiment. A soldier could not be more concise, and soldiers must not indulge in rhetoric before the battle. Here we have the stern disciplinarian. John comes to the Church and rouses everybody: Move on! is the cry of this monitor. Where he finds a man with a whole gobletful of religious liquid, and finds that gospel-bibber drinking it, and saying how good it is, and how delightful a thing it is to be released from the grip of law, John says, You are a liar: that is your name, that is your nature; you are not a Christian man at all, you have no right to any of the promises, comforts, assurances of the Christian sanctuary: we only know that you are good in heart when you are industrious and faithful in service: to keep the commandments is the certificate of a renewed soul. Yet it is difficult for a man to change his whole nature even under some gust of holy excitement

Up to this time John had been speaking in the first person plural very much: "We have heard," "We have seen," "If we say," "If we walk in the light," "If we confess," "Hereby we do know": why not continue the first person plural? it is a cordial utterance; it is a kind of masonic word; it keeps us near to one another, as if we belonged to the same household and brotherhood: why change the grammar? Yet the grammar is changed in this very verse; suddenly the Apostle goes into another direction, speaking in the third person "He that saith." How could that great, warm, ardent heart say, "If we say we know him, and keep not his commandments, we are liars"? Some possibilites cannot be entertained; they distress the imagination, they even defy the fancy: only in some hideous nightmare could we perpetrate the madness of supposing that a Christian professor could do certain things. Better put the case abstractly; better indicate some anonymous stranger a "he" without an address. Here is delicacy, here is exquisite spiritual taste, keeping the man right even in his grammar. With how fine a delicacy are some men gifted! They did not learn it in the schools, they brought it with them from eternity, it is part of heaven's dower. Other men seem fated to hurt everybody; they are all elbows, they are all angles. They do not mean to get wrong, but they never happen to be right. When they are told that they have offended or tried or distressed some person, they are really amazed to hear that they have been guilty of such an offence. When men are amazed in that way you can do nothing with them; there is nothing to work upon: even a bog has been concreted into strength, but the bog of the heart swallows up all the concrete of exhortation and civilisation, and is more a bog than ever. You bray a fool in the mortar, and he comes out just as he went in. Here is a lesson in literature, a lesson in manners; here is more than Chesterfield, no pedantic letter-writing here, but the sweet and easy and graceful expression of the very quality of the man's soul. When we are quite sure that every time we open our mouth we may offend somebody, the best thing we can do is not to open our mouth.

How stands the case in the estimation of this penetrating and candid critic? "He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him." Did you ever meet a liar? Not often. We have often met men who told lies, but men who tell lies may not be liars. A very subtle thing is this life of ours. A man may be better than his speech. I do not say that Peter was a profane and impious blasphemer even when he cursed and swore and denied his Lord. Man is dual. In every man there are two men. The lips are sometimes traitor to the soul. The soul has delivered a message to them which they have not delivered to those to whom they were called upon to communicate the message. Within us there goes on an incessant dialogue. When I do good, evil is present with me: the thing that I want to do I cannot do: the flesh wars against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, and life is a continual conflict. But some men are without the truth "the truth is not in" them. They are false through and through. If you could take them to pieces fibre by fibre, you would find that every fibre is a separate lie. Nor are they to be judged by their method of looking at you. There is a short and easy method with liars, which is just as superficial as it is short. Men say, "He could not look you in the face." The finest, sublimest, grandest liar I ever knew could look at you in the face all day long. He had no difficulty about looking you in the face. His fine blue eyes, in which the morning seemed to rest as if a native of those well-shaped orbs, looked at you with ineffable frankness and ineffable trustfulness; and the lies flowed over those soft young lips like water over some grassy torrent-bed. One of the most truthful men I ever knew never lifted his eyes from the ground when he could help it; the word "liar" seemed to be written all over his bent head. So we go with these superficial and false judgments of one another. To be a liar is to be lost. You can do nothing with a liar. You cannot make him a man of business, an accountant, a confidential servant, a friend; you cannot make him a teacher of your families, you can have no useful and profitable association with him. I do not know what is to be done with liars. They cannot pray, they cannot read the Bible, they cannot hear a sermon: we must leave them with God.

Here is a lesson which every man may learn. When a man is very anxious about his spiritual state, let him ask whether he is keeping God's commandments. Many persons are very anxious about the matter of the unpardonable sin. Such people are always either too mad to be ministered to by pastors, or too self-conscious to receive any really wise instruction. I have sometimes ventured in the case of people who have come to me about the unpardonable sin to recommend them to take an ice-cold bath every morning at five o'clock till they get better. Do not allow your souls to be swindled by this continual morbidity of self-vivisection, taking yourselves to pieces to know whether you are right with God: judge your morality, your honesty, your behaviour: why make a metaphysical puzzle of a thing that could be settled by a reference to your own wife and children, and customers in your daily business? This is the severity that kills, that may afterwards melt into the gentleness that saves and heals.

The Apostle now puts the matter in another way, and yet not in another, saying, "But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected." To keep God's word is the object of the whole of this great Christian economy. Say it is an economy with a Cross at the centre; the object of that Cross is to create and sustain and perpetuate character. Is the love of God perfected in the monk, who hides himself from the world that he may read his sentimentalism and go through his ceremonial services? He knows nothing about the love of God. He does not know the love of God who runs away into some quiet resting-place, and sits down there, after having shut the door, and says to himself, Now we shut out all the world. Whoever shuts out all the world shuts out God. Whoever severs himself from his own flesh, from humanity, whoever ceases to take an interest in the evangelisation and education of the world, has not begun to pray, he has begun to blaspheme. This is very stern teaching on the part of the Apostle. James is blunter, but really not sterner. James' sword is all blade; we are always afraid that he will cut himself when he lifts it that he may smite others. John's sword is long-handled, velvet-covered, and the edge of that sword is every whit as keen as the edge of the sword of James. It is a mistake to suppose that one apostle takes care of the sentiment, and another apostle takes care of the doctrine: John takes care of them both, so does Paul, and so does James, when rightly read. Many persons are afraid of good works; they have a right to be; and good works have more right to be afraid of them. Some persons are afraid to do anything that is good, lest they might seem to be ostentatious. What self-delusion, what immoral phantasy is this! We must do one of two things; that is to say, we must either do good or do evil. To do nothing is to do wrong. How, then, is it to be? Some men will not let the left hand know what the right hand has done, or the right hand know what the left has done: very good: there is perhaps not much to communicate: who can tell? It would be a pity to annoy the right hand by the left going to it and saying, Brother, I have done nothing to-day: but I did not want to mention the matter to you. There is a school of theology which is very much afraid of morality, that is of keeping the Word of God; very much afraid of what is termed conscience; and extremely sensitive lest we should begin to count up our good deeds and make a virtue of them. I would rather belong to a thoroughly good moral school than to a questionable theological school. Sometimes men are trying to hammer their way into the inner kingdom by trying to do good to little children, to the poor, to the ignorant, and to others who are in need of help: interrogate these persons as to theology, and they know nothing about it blessed be God! Herein it is true that "A little learning is a dangerous thing." If a man could be a theologian, in the real, deep, full sense of that term, there would be nothing more to be; but to suppose that we are theologians because we know certain phrases is to delude ourselves, and is to commit ourselves to a policy of wrong-doing and mischief-making.

"He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked." So John would say to us, How do you walk? do you walk on both sides of the way at once? do you reel in the path? do you walk straightforwardly? do your eyes look straight on? do you walk as those who are walking in the light and are going about on useful business? In the Bible, religion is often described as "walking," and walking is another term for conduct. We may often read a man by his walk. I never fail to do this. I do not want any certificate about the man, I want simply to see him walk down the road when he is unaware that I am looking at him, and I know all about him. "Walk" is a large word in the Christian vocabulary. You can tell by a man's walk whether he is frivolous, or earnest, or solid, or self-conscious; whether he is capable of passion, enthusiasm, devotion; or whether he lolls and dawdles and fails to take grip of the earth he is walking on. So the Apostle John will not allow us to go behind carefully drawn and finely scented curtains that we may examine our souls; he says, You have no business to be examining your souls, your business is to be examining your lives, your character, your walk, your purpose in life; by these things shall all men know whether you are the disciples of Christ or not.

The Apostle will not have it that he is writing anything new. He resents the idea: "Brethren," saith he in 1 John 2:7 , "I write no new commandment unto you, but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which ye have heard from the beginning." God's religion never changes. True religion may be a development, but it never shakes off its past in any sense of inflicting disgrace upon it. Truly developed religion never says, I have made mistakes, and now I apologise and take a new departure. The blossom does not apologise for the root, it tells in beauty what the root is all the time trying to say in darkness. But, saith John in 1 John 2:8 , if you do want novelty, newness, real originality, then arise and be honest and true to your faith and your profession: "Again, a new commandment I write unto you, which thing is true in him and in you: because the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth. He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now" ( 1Jn 2:8-9 ). So the Apostle is not afraid of morality, he glories in it; he says, in effect, People who never can understand your metaphysics can always understand your conduct, and if they find you wrong at the point they can understand, they will not care to go much farther into points which lie beyond their intelligence. Brethren, it is in our power to stun the world by doing good!