I Have No Greater Joy

D. A. Carson interprets 3 John 1:1–14, especially verse 4, and explores the joy leaders experience when their spiritual descendants adhere to Christian truths. He emphasizes the importance of truth in maintaining healthy church relationships and the personal fulfillment it brings to spiritual mentors.

All of stand on the shoulders of others, and all of us are, at best, unprofitable servants. You start there, and then you give glory to Christ. I would like to direct your attention this morning to 3 John, a little letter of only about 300 words. I’m going to focus eventually on verse 4, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth,” but I’d like to begin by reading this short letter and explaining the text as it stands and then focus on this one verse. Hear, then, what Scripture says.

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“The elder, To my dear friend Gaius, whom I love in the truth. Dear friend, I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well. It gave me great joy to have some believers come and testify to your faithfulness to the truth, telling how you continue to walk in it. I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.

Dear friend, you are faithful in what you are doing for the brothers and sisters, even though they are strangers to you. They have told the church about your love. You will do well to send them on their way in a manner worthy of God. It was for the sake of the Name that they went out, receiving no help from the pagans. We ought therefore to show hospitality to such people so that we may work together for the truth.

I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will have nothing to do with us. So when I come, I will call attention to what he is doing, spreading malicious nonsense about us. Not satisfied with that, he refuses to welcome other believers. He also stops those who want to do so and puts them out of the church.

Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good. Anyone who does what is good is from God. Anyone who does what is evil has not seen God. Demetrius is well spoken of by everyone—and even by the truth itself. We also speak well of him, and you know that our testimony is true.

I have much to write you, but I do not want to do so with pen and ink. I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face. Peace to you. The friends here send their greetings. Greet the friends there by name.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

The Bible has a great deal to say about enjoying God. It is cast in a variety of ways: Sometimes, rejoicing in the Lord. Sometimes, inheriting the joy that Jesus bequeaths. Sometimes it’s cast as our strength. Nehemiah says, “The joy of the Lord will be your strength.” Sometimes it’s tied theologically to what might almost be called generic God-centeredness. That is, it’s not tied to a particular theme; it’s just bound up with having God at the center of absolutely everything.

But sometimes the way we enjoy God is tied to some specific sub-theme, and a light goes on, and you see things as you just normally do not see them. For example, Acts 5:41. Two of the apostles have just been beaten up for the first time for their faith, and we’re told, “The apostles rejoiced because they were counted worthy to suffer for the Name.”

Well, would you like to enjoy God? You start working through all the connections in Scripture that are tied to joy and it’s humbling how many facets of it we just skip over. Here is one of them. It’s tied to the book as a whole, so we have to go through this epistle, but we’ll see that it’s penetrating and takes us very close to the heart of the gospel itself.

“I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.” The book can easily be divided up according to the people who John talks about. By this time, John is an old man. This is toward the end of the first century, and he refers to himself not uncharacteristically simply as the elder, but he writes to his dear friend Gaius. That’s the first person he mentions whom he attests he loves in the truth.

There’s probably a pun there. He loves truly, and he loves in the truth of the gospel. He says a few things about him in verses 2 to 8. Then he says a few things about Diotrephes in verse 9. Then he makes a couple of remarks about Demetrius in verse 12. We’ll follow these three people, first of all.

First, some apostolic remarks to Gaius. He says, “Dear friend, I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well.” That’s just about the reverse of the way most of us think. Imagine if the health of everybody in this church and in the confessing Christian world was tied to their spiritual strength.

Rather, we tend to wish and hope and pray that people will be well, they’ll get over their cancer, that their rheumatism won’t affect them too badly, and so on, and then pray as well that they will be spiritually strong through it all. This is just the reverse. “I know you, Gaius, and spiritually you’re strong through and through, and I pray God will give you physical strength to match.”

Isn’t that a wonderful set of priorities built right into the assumptions of the apostle? This is a man who has taken to heart the depths and multiplied dimensions of Jesus insisting that we are to live with eternity’s values in view, investing in heaven where moth and rust do not corrode, where thieves do not dig through and steal.

Then he speaks of his own joy with respect to Gaius. “It gave me great joy to have some believers come and testify to your faithfulness to the truth, telling how you continue to walk in it.” That is, his faithfulness to the gospel not only propositionally but the way it’s working out in Gaius’ life. In the Scripture, you have to believe the truth and know the truth. You also have to walk in the truth or according to the truth. So also here.

What has given the apostle joy is that, although Gaius is at some distance removed (we don’t know how far), some people have come back and said to John, “That Gaius.… He’s wonderful. He’s so stalwart with respect to the gospel. He understands it. He teaches it well. He thinks it through, and his life reflects the glory of God in Christ Jesus. It’s as if he walks under the shadow of the cross. This Gaius is such an encouragement to other people.” John said, “It gave me great joy to have some believers come and testify to your faithfulness to the truth, telling how you continue to walk in it.”

Then he adds, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.” We’ll come back to that. The particular thing in Gaius’ life that testifies to his faithfulness to the gospel needs a bit of explanation. It stands behind verses 5 to 8. “Dear friend, you are faithful in what you are doing for the brothers and sisters, even though they are strangers to you. They have told the church about your love. You will do well to send them on their way in a manner worthy of God.”

I was brought up in French Canada. My accent betrays me. I’m a Canadian by birth. My accent is a little more confused than that of most Canadians because it’s contaminated by French, by living in Europe, and by living here. Now it’s not pure; it’s just confused. Because I was brought up in French Canada, I lived through the times of pretty brutal oppression in the early 50s.

When I was just a little gaffer, Baptist ministers alone spent about eight years in jail for preaching the gospel. We kids were sometimes beaten up because we were maudits Protestants, damned Protestants. It was a pretty brutal time, and even as recently as 1972, there was a grand total of only 35 small evangelical churches in the francophone population of about 6.5 million in French Canada, and none of them had more than 40 people on a Sunday morning. That’s the context in which I grew up and in which my father served as pastor.

From 1972, by which time I was living in Europe, to 1980 (eight years), we grew from about 35 churches to just under 500, many of them with hundreds and hundreds of people. I came back in ‘75. I could tell you a lot of exciting stories of prayer meetings that went on endlessly, the numbers of young people being converted. Incidentally, the young men were getting converted over the young women at a ratio of about three to two.

It was really interesting, but it was also dangerous. These little churches were springing up everywhere, and the veteran pastors, those who had been around and been through the tough times, had so many people they didn’t know what to do with them. You’d start a new assembly and you would appoint an interim, temporary, testing elder, someone who had been a Christian all of nine months, because he was the oldest Christian in the church.

Now there is apostolic grounding for that. When you read of the apostle Paul and Barnabas going out on what we now call their first missionary journey, on the way out they plant churches, and on the way back they start appointing elders in those churches. You do the chronology, and the last church they end in as they start back, they couldn’t have been there more than a few months. Now they’re coming back, and the whole trip is just under two years. They were appointing elders without a scrap of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School training.

I know the Bible says and Paul himself writes that we’re not to appoint anyone who is a novice, but novice is a relative term. In a church with lots of Christians who have been around for decades, you don’t want some brand new convert who is six months old in the Lord becoming the chief preacher, but when the church is growing quickly, you don’t have a whale of a lot of choice, and that has happened at various times in church history. It happened in my own vision of things in French Canada.

What do you do? We set up courses. We had roving preachers. These few veterans were on the road constantly going from center to center. That’s what the Methodists did after Whitefield and Wesley and the Great Awakening. They had circuit-riding preachers. There just weren’t enough stable preachers anywhere, so they would travel and keep going. That’s what they had to do in the early church, too. There were people who were a little more gifted in teaching and preaching, and they’d visit the churches.

Who pays for that? There wasn’t any board of missions. There wasn’t huge organization yet, so local Christians with a passion for the gospel would put them up in their homes, provide them with a place to sleep, a place to rest, a place to work, and send them on their way, which means not only pushing them out the door but giving them adequate resources so they could go on their way, and Gaius was at the front end of that. That’s what’s going on here.

“Dear friend, you are faithful in what you are doing. Even though these folk are strangers to you, they have told the church about your love, not your begrudging sense of duty.” When you got to Gaius’ home, you knew you were loved. If you’ve never done it, you have no idea how tiring itinerant ministry can be.

It’s emotionally fatiguing, but you get to Gaius’ place and put your feet up and have a Diet Coke and some good conversation and read a book by the fire and get a good night’s sleep, and he’ll pray for you, you’ll have a wee taste of heaven, and you’ll go on your way, because Gaius loves you.

That’s what’s going on here. “They have told the church about your love. You will do well to send them on their way in a manner worthy of God.” That old expression in Greek, you will do well to do so, basically means, “Please send them on their way in a manner worthy of God.” How would you send God on his way? These are God’s voices. These are God’s preachers and teachers.

Verse 7: “You have to remember, my dear Gaius, it was for the sake of the Name that they went out.” That’s why you send them on their way in a manner worthy of God. It was for God. It was for Christ, the name that is above every name. It was for the sake of the name. The name represents the person in biblical thought. “It was for the sake of the Name that they went out,” and of course, in their itinerant ministry, “They received no help from the pagans.”

Why would John mention that? In the first century, there was no tertiary educational system as we think of it. What happened instead was there were teachers, communicators, who would set up shop in a local marketplace and begin to expound their philosophy, their way of looking at things.

What they meant by philosophy was not quite what we mean by philosophy. What we mean by philosophy is a relatively arcane academic subject taught in small departments in big universities that gives you a right to criticize everybody, but what they meant by philosophy in the ancient world was basically a worldview, a how-to-live way of looking at everything, and there were different camps. There were Stoics, and there were cynics, and there were Epicureans. There were other camps, and they competed for public attention.

If you were good, then, eventually, you might rent a house, like the School of Tyrannus. You might rent a house and then some rich people might send their sons to you. They didn’t normally send their daughters in those days. They might send their sons to you so that these sons would sit at your feet and you’d teach them and you’d train them to be good thinkers, and so forth, as well.

Some of the training in some cases included mathematics and law and how to read documents, rhetoric, communication skills, and so forth. If you were really good, you charged more and more money. In other words, the pagans were supporting these itinerant preachers. These itinerant preachers were known throughout the ancient world.

Paul runs into some of them in Acts, chapter 17, and inevitably, these traveling Christians were viewed by others as, more or less, equivalent. “There are cynics and there are Stoics and there are Epicureans and there are Christians. They’re advocating some kind of philosophy.” It’s sort of tertiary education on the trot, but Christians didn’t want to be viewed that way.

They weren’t advocating an alternative philosophy. They were announcing the gospel of God. They were re-revealing the revelation of Jesus Christ, so they refused to take one red cent from the pagans. They refused to take a cent. The Corinthians didn’t understand that. They got really ticked with Paul because of that very point, but the Christians refused to take a cent, because, in the first place, they didn’t want to be seen as somehow being peddlers of the truth, having your job to clean the ears of neighborhood friendly pagans.

They wanted to be faithful to the truth, but you still have to eat, you still have to buy books, you still have to study, you still have to travel, and who pays for it? There are some parallels today, you know, with our mass appeals over TV and sometimes over Internet, securing money left or right for this ministry or that ministry from Christians and non-Christians alike. I think Paul would have squirmed in embarrassment. John certainly would have.

“It was for the sake of the Name that they went out, receiving no help from the pagans. We ought therefore to show hospitality to such people so that we may work together for the truth.” This is how we do it when we send people out in cross-cultural church planting that we call mission. Whether it is mission at home or abroad, we work together for the truth. That’s the way you are to see your gifts, not as paying them.

Let me tell you frankly. You can’t pay pastors enough for what they do. You support them in co-working together for the truth. I have sat by too many deathbeds and officiated at funerals for babies. You can’t pay me for that, but I thank God for Christians who want to support the work of the ministry that we may be co-workers together for the truth, and that’s what Gaius was good at.

Secondly, some apostolic remarks about Diotrephes. By contrast, Diotrephes. “I wrote to the church.” Perhaps because the apostle John was sending out a new band of teachers. I don’t know. “I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will have nothing to do with us.” Now that is an interesting description of a demagogue. He loves to be first.

Contrast Gaius who loves and loves to serve. The only thing Diotrephes loves is himself. He’s power hungry. This raises the question about whether he was a duly appointed elder/pastor who has now become a kind of petty dictator or some sort of self-promoted demagogue who has taken over things. The short answer is we don’t know, and I don’t think for the apostle John it would have made much difference. In either case, the man is dangerous.

Yet, the question raises not only a historical point but a theological one. It is worth thinking this one through. When you have a lot of itinerant preachers around, which ones do you trust? You’re in the first century somewhere maybe 30 miles outside of Ephesus, and an itinerant preacher comes through. There has been no email to tell you he’s coming. Nobody has a cell phone. He shows up, and he claims to be representing Christians from Ephesus. How do you know? How do you know he’s telling the truth?

Maybe he hopes to have a little Christian hospitality and a little bit of support for the next one, too. Certainly, at the beginning of the second century, there were documents circulated after the New Testament was finished trying to put some rules in place about what to do with these people who were going around claiming to be Christians when, in fact, they were false teachers.

How do you know it’s not the equivalent of a friendly Jehovah’s Witness showing up on your door claiming to be a Christian and teaching things that really don’t stand in line with the truth of the gospel? I am sure what Diotrephes did was claim to be protecting the church from false teachers. False teachers sent out by the apostle John? But that’s what he was claiming, and historically, that sort of approach did make a bit of sense.

What comes to your mind if I say to you today the word bishop? Well, it depends on your background probably. If you’re a chess player, it’s a piece on the board. If you have a Catholic or an Episcopal background, then it’s a religious leader who was a little bit up from a local parish priest. He usually rules over a diocese or something. An archbishop is a little further up again.

In the ancient church.… Even Anglicans who are well taught in history understand this is the case. In the ancient church in the New Testament, there were really only two orders. There were deacons in the local church, and there were pastors-elders-bishops. The three names were for one person.

The word elder suggested an ancient village where elders ruled. They had to be a little more experienced, a little more mature than others. The word pastor simply means shepherd. It came from the agrarian countryside. A shepherd ruled in some sense but also looked after the sheep and fed the sheep and taught the sheep. The word bishop simply means overseer.

In the first century, the pastor was the elder was the bishop, but inevitably, some churches eventually became strong enough to have some pastors who really were more learned, more instructed, and more experienced. They had been Christians for 20 or 30 years. Two, three, or four decades were in place, and they had been tested and so on.

Now with the church still expanding rapidly at the first century, inevitably some church out there in a suburb would start saying, “Listen, Joe Bloggs is recently coming by and is offering to do some teaching here. What do you say about him?” This chap knows, and he says, “I don’t think you should go for him. He has a bad reputation of splitting churches. You don’t want to consider him.” Gradually, this chap is beginning to have a veto on what takes place in that local church.

It was a way by which the church protected itself. It was ad hoc to begin with, and eventually those pastors became bishops over a broader area. What starts off as a good ad hoc device for helping and protecting the church eventually becomes concretized into a system that is far removed from New Testament local church governance, which is really a long-winded way of saying good motives can produce bad results if you step too far away from the Word of God. Be careful.

Diotrephes sounds as if he was someone like that, but the people he was excluding were actually John’s men. “I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will have nothing to do with us.” There is nothing here said about John being heretical. Nothing here is said about false teaching. He may have been a false teacher, but that’s not what is said. All that is said about him is he loves to be first, because the truth of the matter is you can do as much damage in the church with a leader who loves to be first as with a leader who is really gentle but loves false doctrine.

Many is the church split over the centuries that really turns on love of self, sometimes love of self even in the interest of orthodoxy. You start defending the truth, and then somehow you start defending your own allegiance to the truth, so that it’s no longer quite certain whether you’re defending the truth or yourself.

Even your defense of the truth becomes, in some ways, self-justifying, and anybody who disagrees with you is disagreeing with God because you’re defending the truth. Suddenly, you have the makings of something astonishingly dangerous simply because you’re wrestling with a leader who loves to be first over against a Gaius who loves to serve.

John says, “So when I come, I will call attention to what he is doing, spreading malicious nonsense about us.” The expression malicious nonsense means not only that it was nonsense but also that it was mean. Malicious nonsense. “Not satisfied with that, he refuses to welcome other believers. He also stops those who want to do so and puts them out of the church.”

That’s what happens when you have someone who wants to be first. He not only stops certain people from coming in who might run competition, he stops others who want them to come in, and then he actually puts out of the church some others who want to be sympathetic to those. You have second- and third-degree separation built in all in defense of me being number one. It’s vicious.

John, when he gets there, won’t hush it up. What will he do? He’ll tell it to the church. That goes back to the teaching of Jesus. There are ways of dealing with disputes (quietly one on one, two on one, amongst the elders and leaders of the church), but eventually, in the ugliest situations what you have to do is explain the whole thing to the church. That’s what the Lord Jesus says. “Tell it to the church.”

When Paul is dealing with a really messy instance of ex-communication in 1 Corinthians 5, it’s when the whole church gathers together, and Paul is there, as it were, in Spirit, and the power of Christ is transparently present in the congregation that he wants certain decisions to be taken. It’s a corporate wisdom under the authority of the one true head of the church, Jesus Christ himself. That’s what he will do. He will tell it to the church.

Thirdly, some apostolic remarks about Demetrius. By way of foil, “Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good.” All of us copy people, of course, and Diotrephes must have had some attractive features. Even really ugly, selfish people have some attractive features, so some are drawn to them, but be careful what you imitate. Be careful who you imitate. Be careful who you look up to.

“Anyone who does what is good is from God.” Look for goodness reflecting the goodness of God no matter how personable, how magnetic, or how charismatic. “Anyone who does what is evil has not seen God.” Here’s the foil. “Demetrius is well spoken of by everyone—and even by the truth itself.” That is an expression that simply means the facts speak for themselves.

“We also speak well of him.” That is, we, an editorial, apostolic we. “I speak well of him.” This is apostolic testimony to the goodness and faithfulness of Demetrius. If you’re going to follow somebody, follow somebody like that. “I have much to write you, but I do not want to do so with pen and ink.” That’s the thrust of 3 John. Now let me come back to verse 4: “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.” Let me take several steps.

1. What gives you the greatest joy?

Going shopping? Who wins the football game? Getting a job again in a down-turning economy? A child being accepted at Harvard or Duke? Being declared all clear from your cancer? A promotion at work that you’ve been angling for and working toward for two and a half decades?

All of which things are, on some measurement, good things. The question is not whether you enjoy them, not whether or not they give you pleasure. The question is whether they give you your greatest pleasure, because what gives you your greatest pleasure is inevitably a reflection of your values. Inevitably.

About 25 years ago, I started observing a difference in incoming students. It went through a cycle of about 15 years. It has slipped away again now, but for about 15 years when you asked students coming in to Trinity why they were training for the ministry, an astonishingly high percentage of them said things like, “Well, my pastor has been giving me some things to do in the church, and I think I could be fulfilled in pastoral ministry.”

Well, there’s certainly fulfillment in pastoral ministry. There are some kicks in the teeth, too, but there is some fulfillment, but it troubles me if that’s the primary reason why they’re training because the entire focus is on me. “I will be in the ministry because I will be fulfilled.” Where is verse 4?

The ministry ought to be, by definition, other-orientated. By definition. But this is so self-focused! John is not saying, “I have a lot of time for this man, Gaius, for he has supported me in my apostolic ministry for years.” That’s not what he says. Aged apostle though he may be, he says his greatest joy is in the new generation coming along and their conformity to the gospel.

A number of years ago at Trinity, we asked Carl F.H. Henry and Kenneth Kantzer to give some talks to the entire student body about their take on evangelicalism in America in the twentieth century. If you’re an older Christian or you’ve been a Christian for a long while, you know who those men are. If you’re a younger Christian, you may not have heard of them.

Carl F.H. Henry was one of the movers and shakers in confessing evangelicalism in the twentieth century. He was a dear friend of Billy Graham. He founded Christianity Today and made the journal at the time (it’s not like that today) the most influential Christian thought journal in the Western world.

He was the inspiration behind the first Berlin Congress on World Evangelism. He wrote about 40 books that had wide circulation. He not only had two earned doctorates, but at the same time he was the sort of bloke who, on one occasion, for a whole week put on shabby clothes, took no money, and lived off the streets so he could find out what it was like to do that and evangelized to hobos on the streets. He wanted to know just how bad the situation was. He had a compassion that was as broad as all outdoors. That was Carl F.H. Henry.

Then there was Kenneth Kantzer who abandoned a life of personal scholarship precisely so he could be the founding dean of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and all that has come from it. His influence through that means has been worldwide and immeasurable in point of fact. He became almost a kind of surrogate father to me, certainly a surrogate grandfather to my children.

These two men, at that point both in their mid 70s, we invited to give some reflection in their senior years on what they had seen about the progress of the gospel in North America in the twentieth century, and they both lectured for an hour. The next day, I was tasked with interviewing them, and I didn’t tell them in advance what the interview’s questions would be. I asked them all the obvious things, what they thought about this and what they thought about that movement and so on, and inevitably, they responded well.

Finally, toward the end I asked them, “A lot of old men become so cranky that they begin to destroy what they built up, Christian leaders who were movers and shakers in their youth, and then gradually they become protective, inward looking. They begin to resent younger, more energetic, brighter minds coming along behind. They build a castle around themselves and pull up the drawbridge.

They begin to be more and more defensive, sometimes angry. They’re no longer visionary, and they can’t see what they’re doing. They become cranky and actually begin to destroy what they built. Now you two men have avoided that. You’re still outward looking. You’re still constantly asking about the next stage. You’re interested in a new generation coming along behind.

I don’t detect any resentments of the enfeeblement of age that is just part of living in this death-cursed world. I don’t hear that. From you, I hear gratitude and maturity and an expectation of better things to come. How did you manage that? Don’t just tell me it’s the grace of God. I know it’s the grace of God, but how did the grace of God work out in your life so that this is where you are now?”

Both of these very articulate senior men started sputtering. The whole video is worth it just to see these two giants of the faith sputtering a wee bit. Eventually, Carl F.H. Henry blurted, “How can anybody be arrogant when he stands beside the cross?” It was the best moment on the whole video. In other words, they preserved their humility, their “other” orientation, precisely because they live under the shadow of the cross where the “other” orientation is at maximum disclosure, Jesus dying for others.

That inevitably draws us to ask the question, “Where is your greatest joy?” Is your greatest joy located in the person whom you counseled in the faith 20 years ago and is still pressing on? In sharing your conversion story in your neighborhood and watching some people, no doubt, turning away but others being drawn and hearing the gospel and coming to know Jesus, too? Where is your greatest joy?

Leading a Bible study and watching some people with their eyes opening up and seeing things they’ve never seen before, things you have presupposed for years and years and years, and your heart is just overwhelmed with gratitude for the spectacular privilege of watching people’s lives change by the Word of God? You say, “I know what John is talking about. I have no greater joy than to see that my children are walking according to the truth.”

2. What obvious extension is there of this source of joy?

You see clearly the child here is Gaius, and then generically, the people for whom John is responsible, his children, his spiritual children, but what is the obvious extension in this source of joy? It is seeing other Christians advance even if they are not immediately your children in the faith.

For example, that will affect ministers who are in discouraging patches where things are not going well. Do they look 20 miles down the road and see a ministry that is spectacularly fruitful with many being converted, and testify, “I have no greater joy than to see other Christians being fruitful in the Lord even when I’m not, because at least this is gospel fruitfulness that is affecting people’s lives”?

If this must be true for those whom I have directly influenced, should it not equally be true for Christians everywhere who are advancing in the faith? To look around and see Christian leaders, whether they’re leaders in the local church or leaders in the broader world, advancing in the faith and get down on your knees and cry, “Thank you, heavenly Father, for giving us that brother or that sister. Thank you for this progress of the gospel even in discouraging times. It’s wonderful to see what is going on.”

I don’t cry very easily, but at the end of the first national conference of The Gospel Coalition to watch 3,500 people, 80 percent of them under the age of 40, and then to know all the plenaries were being watched by 28,000 people on the web, and those 28,000 were not an average age of 75, because the 75-year-olds usually don’t spend a lot of time on the web, hearing Scripture expounded.

They’re not my children. I don’t know most of them. I haven’t influenced any of them directly, but they were hearing the Tim Kellers, the Bryan Chapells, the Mike Bullmores, and the seminar speakers right across the board, and they were growing, and Christians began to say, “I have no greater joy than to see these believers growing in the truth.”

A number of years ago when the Berlin Wall came down, the USSR, over the next months and years, just basically dissolved. Although I had made trips to Eastern Europe before that, now I was making a few more trips and seeing some remarkable things. In Slovakia, for example, in the early- to mid-90s I met with a group of pastors.

Of the older ones (40 or 45 and up), none of them had gone on for tertiary education. They were forbidden tertiary education because they were pastors. They had known only one enemy: communism. Many of them had suffered, some of the physically, some of them jail time, and all of them to some measurer of penury.

Then there were the under 40s. They were all doing their second or third degree and debating the merits and demerits of postmodernism. They were struggling with all kinds of ideas that were coming in. University outlook and university missions were all very, very different. I sat at a table with a group of these pastors, some of the older ones and some of the younger ones, and somebody translated for me. I speak no Slovak.

The older pastors clearly in discussion thought the younger ones untested, untried. They had never suffered. They were talking intellectual games all the time. The younger ones were thinking the older ones were out of touch, irrelevant, too narrow in their focus, that they could only see one enemy.

Do you know what? Both sides were right. New things were coming into the country. The pastor of that church told me he had never seen pornography sold anywhere in Slovakia until three weeks after the wall came down when it was sold on the streets in Bratislava, the capital. Suddenly, the church was facing a range of things they hadn’t faced.

Do you know what they needed? To rejoice in the other, to rejoice in the service of the other, the fruitfulness of the other, the steadfastness of the other, to rejoice wherever Christ was glorified in the other, in their limitations, in their cultural location, in what they were called to. The older ones had to rejoice that a new generation was coming along. The younger ones had to rejoice that they stood on the shoulders of giants.

If you live long enough, there’s even another extension. I’m getting old enough to qualify. A few years ago, I was speaking at an evangelistic mission at Cambridge University, and some bright, sparky, young 18- or 19-year old young woman came bouncing up to me, full of vim and vigor, and she said, “You don’t know me, but I’m here because my parents were converted when you did a mission at Cambridge 25 years ago.” You begin to understand, “I have no greater joy than to know that my children are walking according to the truth.”

Are there particular foci of this principle in the New Testament? There’s this generic expansion to delighting in Christian growth everywhere, but are there particular foci where this works out? Let me mention three very quickly, and we’re done.

A. Biological children.

Clearly, what John means by my children are people like Gaius. They’re his spiritual children. How much more ought it also to be true of our biological children, of our familial children? “How’s your son doing?”

“Great. He just entered graduate school. It’s fantastic.”

“How’s he doing with the Lord?”

“Well, that’s a bit rough.” Oh, it’s right to be proud of our children’s achievements in all kinds of domains, but let me tell you quite frankly, it’s much better to have children who are ditch-diggers or garbage collectors who rejoice in the Lord than having an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. You who are children, do you want to give Christian parents pleasure? Let them be able to look at you and say, “I have no greater joy than to see that my children are walking according to the truth.”

B. Husbands and wives.

Let me give you another instance likewise familial. This is from a well-known text, Ephesians, chapter 5. “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies.”

You men, what does it mean to love your wives as Christ loved the church? If words mean anything, what it means is you love her self-sacrificially and for her good. That’s what it means, because that’s how Christ loved the church, self-sacrificially for the church’s good. That’s what it means. In other words, it’s another instance of passion for the good of the other. If this acute love for the other is only biological and is bound up first and foremost with you being cock of the heap, then it’s not loving your wife as Christ loved the church.

Intrinsic to Christian love is the passion for the other’s good that involves some kind of self-sacrifice for that other’s good. It wouldn’t take long to find corresponding passages regarding wives and their husbands, but that’s what Christian love looks like so that there is a sense in which every husband wants to say, “I have no greater joy than to see my wife walking according to the truth.”

I don’t just mean that she has become ethereally spiritual and talks in King James language. I don’t mean that. I mean so conformed to the gospel and so full of the Lord and so growing in her understanding of things and in her maturity as a Christian woman that I burst with thankfulness to God for what is taking place in her life.

C. Leaders.

Do you remember the remarkable passage in Matthew 20, verses 20 and following? “Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons …” That is, James and John, two of the apostles. “… came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him.” Get the picture. Two apostles and their mummy. “ ‘What is it you want?’ he asked. She said, ‘Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.’ ”

Clearly, she didn’t have a very good idea of what this kingdom was going to be like. She was still thinking of a primarily political kingdom with Jesus being a kind of souped-up David, and now she wanted one to be secretary of state and the other to be minister of defense. “You might have 12 apostles, but I’d like my two boys to be numbers one and two.” That’s what she’s asking for.

“ ‘You don’t know what you are asking,’ Jesus said to them. ‘Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?’ ” This is an expression that means, “Can you actually share in my experience? Can you do that?” What he’s thinking of is the cross. In this kingdom, Jesus reigns from a damned cross, and with spectacular arrogance they smile and say, “We can.” So deep is their ignorance.

You can almost hear the chuckle in Jesus’ voice as he says, “You will indeed drink from my cup,” because he knows one of them is going to become the first apostolic martyr and the other one is going to be exiled in old age to an island off the coast of Asia Minor. They will experience some suffering after all, though that’s not what they have in mind.

“ ‘… but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.’ When the ten heard about this …” That is, the ten other apostles. “… they were indignant with the two brothers.” Not because they thought the two men were out of place but because the other 10 didn’t get their dibs in first.

“Jesus called them together and said …” Here it is. “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave.”

What does that mean? It’s this passage and others parallel to it that have generated our expression, servant leadership. It’s not a bad expression, but I think it’s often slightly misunderstood. Servant leadership doesn’t mean you go around sort of like a depleted, wet dishrag, and you have no backbone or courage. It doesn’t mean you just become everybody’s whipping post and that you can’t exercise any genuine leadership because, after all, the very next verse says, “… just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve …”

Whatever else Jesus retains, he retains his authority. Leadership does involve authority. What’s the difference then? The kings and the rulers and the governors of this world exercise their authority. “But it shall not be so with you. You came not to be served, but to serve.” But Jesus does exercise authority. What does he mean then? What does servant leadership really mean? Jesus exercises all of his authority for the other’s good. That’s remarkable. “… just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

You become president of the United States, and inevitably, part of your self-presentation to the populous (I don’t care what party you’re from) is that you have come to serve the people. You’ve come to bring good ideas to take us out of our mess and to bring about a change and so forth.

Every party promises the same thing, and undoubtedly, some of it is well-intended, but inevitably … inevitably … you’re in office just a wee bit and you begin to think these things are your due and you’re a cut above others and people serve you. You have Marines and you have Secret Service people waiting on your every need and providing your security. You’re above the hoi polloi.

If you’re the president of IBM, yes, yes, yes, you want to run the company for the good of the company and for the good of the shareholders, no doubt, but pretty soon, they serve you, too. The structures are all built that way, and it can happen in the local church. You become an elder or a deacon or a pastor or you head up this kind of ministry (the women’s ministry, the children’s ministry) and pretty soon there are some certain things that are your due, and you’ve come to be served rather than to serve.

But Jesus says that is the whole difference. This pattern shall not be so with you, but rather, what you do, the way you serve, the way you take on the post is precisely for the other’s good. Do you know why? Because we serve the arch-example of that. Jesus came not to be served, but to serve, and that’s why he went to the cross. That’s how the passage ends up.

I’m sure when the apostles heard this the first time they didn’t have a clue what Jesus was talking about. I’m also sure when they thought about this after the cross and resurrection, many of them wept. I can’t imagine James and John and their mother not weeping over this. “… just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

For men and women today stand by grace with their sins forgiven and their eyes looking forward to heaven and in the community of brothers and sisters in Christ with hope that lifts their hearts and the knowledge that guilt is gone because Jesus bore their sins in his own body on the tree for others.

In perfect accord with the Father’s will, his great self-disclosure of his own glory was motivated by the sure and certain knowledge that it was for our good. Now go and do likewise. And John says, “I have no greater joy than to know that my children walk according to the truth.” Let us pray.

You know us through and through, heavenly Father. You know how very easy it is for any of us, even those who have been Christians for a long time, to get tripped up in these matters and to begin, once more, to think of ourselves as being at the center of the universe. How corrosive is that? Forgive us our sins and draw us back to the cross again and again, not only so that we ourselves may taste forgiveness afresh, but in adoration renew our covenantal vows to confess Jesus as Lord, not only in word but in deed and truth.

Father, if there are some here today for whom all of this seems very strange indeed, O Lord God, work in their own thinking by your Spirit so they will see there is a better way, another way than self-promotion and self-justification and self-focus and self-delusion, and it begins by standing before the cross and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” For Jesus’ sake, amen.