Phil Robertson

And he talks about the dear chosen lady.

probably someone's house that hosted the house church, but also has that still meaning of the Lord's people in the church.

And we talked quite a bit about that because he uses this term children of God, which I found really interesting when you look at that text as well, because John used that a lot in his original book.

And also in the book of John, he talked about this idea of truth.

And

He mentions it three times in two verses here, this idea of truth, love in the truth, know the truth because of the truth.

25 times, 109 times this Greek word is used in the New Testament, 25 in the book of John.

When he's talking about the idea of truth.

But what's interesting is, is he uses it in terms of love.

And you think about truth and love going together.

And I want to read this quote because in verses four through six, he makes the point that it's back to that same thing he mentioned in first John is that you have to love one another.

which obviously that's becoming a problem because it's not there.

And so he's trying to tell them that this is anchored in truth.

And I don't know if you ever heard this quote before, Zach, but this is from John Stott, who was an old preacher from way back.

And he had a very interesting thing because you kind of think about it as an art of trying to walk between truth and love.

And he said, our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth.

And our truth grows hard if it is not softened by love.

And when I read that, I thought, man, that's the age-old struggle always by trying to put love and truth in the same context together.

Because what we tend to do sometimes, especially in the modern church, if we're champions of truth, then we forget about love.

The idea that that's what it was based on.