The Proof

Stage Three — Abiding: How should one remain?

My friend,

We close this stage with a necessary severity, and I want to explain why it is necessary before I apply it.

Everything in the last three chapters could be misused. Desire, joy, communion, mutual indwelling, the sweetness of remaining — this material can be turned into a private emotional world that answers to nobody and changes nothing. I have watched people do it. I have done it myself, for about eighteen months, and I was never more spiritually satisfied or less useful to anyone around me.

So the elder John hands us a set of tests, and they are not gentle.

Three Tests

Tangible love. Not sentiment. Movement toward an actual person.

But whoever has the world's goods, and sees his brother in need, and closes his heart of compassion against him, how does the love of God remain in him? My little children, let's not love in word only, neither with the tongue only, but in deed and truth.

1 John 3:17–18

Note the mechanism John describes: sees — and then closes. The failure is not a failure of noticing. It is what happens in the half-second after noticing, when something inside shuts. He is describing a decision most of us make several times a week without ever admitting it was a decision.

Walking in the light.

If we say that we have fellowship with him and walk in the darkness, we lie, and don't tell the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.

*— 1 John 1:6–7*

And notice the outcome John reports. Walking in the light produces fellowship with one another. Honesty about ourselves is what makes real relationship possible; concealment is what isolates us. The man with a hidden life is lonely in exact proportion to what he is hiding.

Obedience, against spiritual elitism.

One who says, "I know him," and doesn't keep his commandments, is a liar, and the truth isn't in him... he who says he remains in him ought himself also to walk just like he walked. — 1 John 2:4, 6

This is aimed at a specific temptation, and it is the characteristic temptation of this stage in particular. Having tasted something of communion, a person may begin to feel that the ordinary commands are for beginners — that he has moved to a plane where the plain instructions no longer quite apply.

John's answer is blunt. Knowing God is inseparable from keeping His commandments. There is no altitude at which you graduate from being kind.

I want to be careful here, because these tests can be turned into an instrument of self-torture, and John did not write them for that. Read them as a physician's questions, not a prosecutor's. He is not asking you to prove you are worthy. He is giving you a way to check whether the sap is moving — and if the honest answer is not much lately, that is diagnostic information, not a verdict.

The Bridge

The short letters of 2 and 3 John do something quietly important: they take all this interiority and walk it out the front door.

This is love, that we should walk according to his commandments.

2 John 1:6

I have no greater joy than this, to hear about my children walking in truth. Beloved, you do a faithful work in whatever you accomplish for those who are brothers and strangers.

3 John 1:4–5

Brothers and strangers. Both. The circle is already widening, and we have not yet reached the stage that deals with community. Hospitality — actual, practical, opening your actual door — turns out to be the form abiding takes when it meets another person.

The Witness

See how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to live together in unity! It is like the precious oil on the head, that ran down on the beard... like the dew of Hermon, that comes down on the hills of Zion: for there Yahweh gives the blessing, even life forevermore.

Psalm 133:1–3

Both images move downward, and neither is forced. Oil poured on the head runs down of its own weight. Dew does not decide to fall.

That is the overflow this whole stage exists to produce. What you have been receiving in the secret place was never meant to stay there — and it does not need to be pushed out. It runs down.

The Practice: The Test of the Fruit

The closing-of-the-heart audit. For one week, notice the moment you see a need and something inside shuts. Do not force yourself to act every time — you would exhaust yourself and give up by Thursday. Just notice the shutting. Notice how fast it is, and what reason it offers you.

One concealment, ended. Identify one place where your private life and your public life do not match. You need not announce it to the world. But end the concealment before at least one appropriate person, or before God with the intention of changing it.

One stranger. This week, do one act of genuine hospitality for someone who is not in your circle and cannot repay it.

Ask yourself this week: If someone assessed my abiding purely by my conduct toward people this month, what would the verdict be? Where am I claiming a communion my behavior does not support?

The Close of the Stage

You have an answer now to the third question. How should one remain?

Remain by turning your loves toward their home rather than starving them. Remain by receiving joy rather than manufacturing it. Remain by staying attached rather than pulling harder. And test your remaining by what it produces in your treatment of actual people, because an abiding that changes nothing was probably imagined.

What you should have gained here is steadiness. Not ecstasy — steadiness. Your love should be less conditional than it was. Your spirit should be less at the mercy of your moods. You should be, in a word, harder to move.

Which is precisely what is needed next. Because in the fourth stage you enter the company of other people, and other people will test every bit of this. They will be difficult, inconsistent, and occasionally unjust to you, as you will be to them.

Do not fear that. The friction of community is not the enemy of what you have built here. It is the fire that proves it.

A Blessing

May you remain so deeply that you bear fruit which outlasts you.

May your heart be large enough for mercy and your mind humble enough to keep learning until the very end.

And may the life you have found in the secret place run down, of its own weight, onto everyone who comes near you.