The teachers who had left John's church claimed a superior knowledge of God, and John gives the claim a test anyone can apply. The test is plain: 3"if we keep his commandments." Knowing God shows in keeping what he says, and the verb keep means to guard something valuable. John has just said everyone sins and needs the advocate, so the test measures the basic direction of a life, the settled desire to go where God goes.
Then he moves from the word know to the word abide. 6"Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked." The Greek verb for abide, *meno*, means to remain, to stay put, to make a home. Abiding sounds like a mystical word, and John ties it to a street-level one, walking. The small word ought is a debt word. The Greek, *opheilo*, is the language of owing, and John will use it twice more, in 3:16 and 4:11. Each time, what we owe follows from what has been given. Jesus' walk was a foot-washing and a cross, and the debt is to walk that road.
7"I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning." The command to love is as old as their first believing, and older. Leviticus said to love your neighbor as yourself. Then John adds the turn, 8"a new commandment," and it is new because Jesus filled it with a new example: "just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another" (John 13:34). He said it the night he washed their feet. The newness is 8"true in him and in you," first lived in Jesus and now lived in the church, where the new light is already shining.
Then John applies the test. 9"Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness." Again the pattern is whoever says. A claim of living in the light is weighed against how a person treats a fellow believer. The language is stark because the crisis was, and it fit a church that had just been split.
10"Whoever loves his brother abides in the light." Love lights the ground, and a loving person can see where their feet are going. The hater, John says, 11"does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes." Hatred blinds. A person nursing a grudge loses sight of where the road leads, and resentment feels like clarity about someone else's faults while it costs a person their own direction. In a divided church, people who cannot see one another clearly keep stumbling over one another.
Ask who in your church or family you have quietly written off, whose name comes to mind first, and what it would look like to walk toward that person the way Jesus walked toward you.
Prayer
Father, you have taught us that we know you by keeping your word. Forgive us when we have claimed to know you and walked another way. Help us to abide in your Son and walk as he walked, owing him what love owes. Shine your true light on any grudge we have held, and lead us in the way of love. In Jesus' name, amen.