I want to ask something of you.

2 John 5 Now I ask you, lady, not as though I were writing to you a new commandment, but the one which we have had from the beginning, that we love one another. I want to ask something of you. I ask that you join the live to love journey with me. That’s the idea of asking that we find in this verse. John wasn’t asking his readers a question; he was asking them to do something. He asked that “we love one another.” He also gave the reason for what he was asking them to do. They had been commanded to love from the beginning. I’m not sure what beginning John had in mind. It might have had in mind the commandment of God in Deuteronomy 6:4. “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” Maybe he was thinking of Leviticus 19:18 “You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD.” But more than likely, he was referring to Jesus’ commandment that He gave them in John 13:34. “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” By the time of John’s writing, the commandment to love one another as He had loved them wasn’t new. It was what they heard from the very beginning of their walk with Christ. I believe that when the disciples were sent out by Jesus to make disciples as they went to the nations and teach what they had been taught, they taught Jesus’ commandment to love with Him. I think that the church has lost this message. It’s not something that is commanded of people when they first hear the gospel. Perhaps it’s not given because the full gospel has not been proclaimed. The gospel isn’t that we must accept Christ and then live for Him. The gospel is that God has accepted us in His Son and given us to Him so that He might give us eternal life. That life is in His Son, given to us, so that we might live to love through Him. The good news is that we died to living for ourselves in our own power when Jesus died. Furthermore, because we were raised up with Christ, we receive the life of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit who is given to us. His love then is poured out in our hearts, and we become instruments of His love in this world. May we walk in this truth, for the sake of the truth, for the glory of God.