3 John 1-15

3 John English Standard Version (ESV)
Listen:  https://www.biblegateway.com/audio/mclean/esv/3John.1.1-3John.1.15
Greeting
1 The elder to the beloved Gaius, whom I love in truth.
2 Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, as it goes well with your soul. 3 For I rejoiced greatly when the brothers came and testified to your truth, as indeed you are walking in the truth. 4 I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.

Support and Opposition
5 Beloved, it is a faithful thing you do in all your efforts for these brothers, strangers as they are, 6 who testified to your love before the church. You will do well to send them on their journey in a manner worthy of God. 7 For they have gone out for the sake of the name, accepting nothing from the Gentiles. 8 Therefore we ought to support people like these, that we may be fellow workers for the truth.
9 I have written something to the church, but Diotrephes, who likes to put himself first, does not acknowledge our authority. 10 So if I come, I will bring up what he is doing, talking wicked nonsense against us. And not content with that, he refuses to welcome the brothers, and also stops those who want to and puts them out of the church.
11 Beloved, do not imitate evil but imitate good. Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God. 12 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.

Final Greetings
13 I had much to write to you, but I would rather not write with pen and ink. 14 I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face.
15 Peace be to you. The friends greet you. Greet the friends, each by name.

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I'm circling back around to Third John because it was so much like Second John that I didn't want to do them one right after the other.  It's a very short book (one chapter), so we'll be covering the entire epistle in one blog.

The epistle starts with John's standard greeting.  He is writing as the leader (elder/bishop/overseer) of the Church in Ephesus and he's writing to someone that worked closely with him--Gaius.  This makes this a more personal letter than the others that were addressed to the entire church, but we still have truth that we can glean from this letter, even if it appears at first glance that we were not the intended audience.

We start out with this simple truth--it is important to give encouragement and to tell those you love how much you love them.  We see the Church leaders spend a lot of time in rebuke and correction in the epistles and even in teaching the right way to do things because people were ignorant of the right way or they had been living in error.  However, we less often see them stop to encourage those they work with and even less often that we see a letter written individually to them as a note of encouragement.  John prayed for the well-being of his spiritual children both physically and spiritually and listened for news about them and was encouraged and excited to hear about their successes.  Isn't this what we wanted and loved to have from our biological parents (or the parents who raised us)?  It is important to have those who act as a spiritual father to us and have spiritual sons and daughters who they encourage in this manner.  "I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walking in the truth."--This is every Christian father's dream for his children for sure.

It appears from the next passage that Gaius was helping with the ministry of other missionaries and given the statement about going to the Gentiles, we can only assume John is talking about Paul and his team, and this seems to be born out by the fact that Paul mentions the name Gauis several times in his epistles and it appears that Gaius was one of the few people Paul mentions by name that he baptized.  It seems that John is giving his blessing for Gaius to give his aid and possibly even his companionship to Paul as he travels and shares the gospel and makes disciples of all nations--specifically to the unreached people groups that were not of Jewish ethnicity (the Gentiles).

We also see that there appeared to be some issues with politics even in the early church as someone named Diotrephes seemed to refuse to submit to the spiritual authorities that God had placed over him (my guess would be the leadership of John, Paul, and Timothy since we're talking about the church in Ephesus).  We see this today when some people think that it's their church and they know how to run it, but God has given that responsibility to the pastors and elders.  It is the job of the them to lead and take care of the spiritual welfare of the congregation, while it is the job of the deacons to serve and take care of the physical and material needs of the Church as well as to help take care of the widows and orphans and other things we might call "Outreach" and "Local Missions" in some of our our local churches so that the elders and pastors can focus on what they need to focus on.  Those who are concerned with themselves and gaining political power for their own reasons in the Church are like a cancer to the body, and it is nothing new.  You can't just pretend you don't have cancer, so this is one of the times that John says he was going to come in person and deal with this person and this situation and Paul made similar statements in his epistles about coming to confronting those who stood in opposition to his spiritual authority.--especially because both John and Paul seemed to travel and some people seemed to have an attitude of "What are they going to do about it?  They aren't here."

Church discipline seems to be at the core of this fight though--refusing to put some people out of the Church that are living in sin, and refusing to realize that the purpose of Church discipline is repentance, and refusing to let people back into the Church who have repented.  Again, many of our local churches have these same issues.  This creates an issue in the church where people are confused about sin and grace and forgiveness and it leads people to sin either because they think there are no consequences to the evil they commit because of hyper-grace (everything is already forgiven anyways) or they believe that sin can't be forgiven and they sin by not forgiving as they need to be forgiven (see the Sermon on the Mount).

It then appears that the church may have been considering someone else for service and John wanted to add his own recommendation for Demetrius.  Many of us still take the congregationalist approach to choosing church leaders where the person should have the support of the membership and of the elders before officially being nominated for a position of leadership.

Finally, John closes by saying that he has more that he wants to tell Gaius in-person because pen-and-paper for some reason wasn't appropriate for the topics.  Until then, John wanted Gaius to know that all those who he was travelling with wished him peace and sent their greetings and John wished for Gaius to pass along a similar message to the church (again probably in Ephesus).