Scripture
6Love means doing what God has commanded us, and he has commanded us to love one another, just as you heard from the beginning. 7I say this because many deceivers have gone out into the world. They deny that Jesus Christ came in a real body. Such a person is a deceiver and an antichrist. 2 John 1:6-7
Observation
In the books 1-3 John, the Apostle pours out a lot of ink and expends a lot of parchment to express how essential it is that the early church believed there was no disconnect between The Spirit of Jesus and The Body of Jesus. According to Ron Rhodes: “The root of the problem was the Greek idea that the spiritual and material (physical) realms are entirely separate and have nothing to do with each other. In this line of thinking, spirit is good but matter is evil. Some false teachers, therefore, argued that the spiritual Christ could not have actually become human.” Not only was this a contradiction of the very concept of Jesus as Emmanuel, God with us. Not only did this steal the power of Jesus taking our place on the Cross as one of us. It disconnected the body from the spirit in terms of obedience and following God. This early form of Gnosticism played out in allowing those who followed this false teaching to do whatever sinful acts they wanted to with their body assuming it had no bearing on their spirit. This was the great disconnect John was fighting against at the beginning of the church and we must continue to fight against today.
Application
It could be argued that the great disconnect between God’s Word and the way we actually live, between the body and the spirit have led us back to this question. How do we love those who believe this in the 21st Century? John defines love as doing what Jesus commands. The world defines love as synonymous with agreement. In other words, if we don’t agree with their disconnected philosophy of living then we don’t love them. No matter what the world around us is saying we cannot disconnect love from obedience any more than we can disconnect the fact Jesus was fully human and fully divine. John Mark Comer points out the great disconnect that was birthed in the 1960’s Sexual Revolution and what could be considered the fruit of Neo Gnosticism. As a culture we disconnected love from obedience to God’s Word, body from spirit, sex from morality and redefined love all together:
Disconnecting Sex from Marriage = Promiscuity
Disconnecting Sex from Procreation = Birth Control/Legalizing Abortion
Disconnecting Sex from True Intimacy & Fidelity = Legalizing No-Fault Divorce
Disconnecting Sex from Romance = Tinder/Hook-up Culture
Disconnecting Sex from the male-female Binary = LGBTQI+
Disconnecting Gender from Biological Sex = Transgender
Prayer
Lord, the disconnect seems so entrenched I don’t know where to start with this those around me until You remind me to look right in front of me. You call me to move away from the rhetoric and the echo chambers and love the person in front of me. You came to heal a disconnected world. You healed me with Your unconditional love and you call me to do the same. Give me Your heart for those around me.
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