This was written by John to a church leader called Gaius, and is largely about how to deal with another leader called Diotrophes. So again we see that a New Testament church had real problems, this time with at least one of the leaders acting against Christ. These things should not happen in the church, but sadly from time to time they will happen. So we need love, wisdom and power to deal with them when they do occur.
Why did God put this book in the Bible? Well, partly for the reasons outlined above, namely to give us a reality check and to ensure we do not have any rose-tinted view of what the church is like. Secondly, as I have said before, John is the Apostle of love, his letters deal a lot with love, yet he also instructs Gaius to take firm action. The two need not be in conflict. There are two extremes we can go to. One is to just focus on “love”, the other is just to deal decisively with all opposition. Neither is right, we need both. The church in Ephesus that received the first letter in Revelation dealt firmly with false teachings, but forgot her first love. In this letter we have the love message tempered with firmness in handling false teachings and bad leaders.
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