Love One Another
1 John 3:11–15
For this is the message which you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another— unlike Cain, who was of the evil one and killed his brother. Why did he kill him? Because his deeds were evil, and his brother’s righteous. Don’t be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. He who doesn’t love his brother remains in death. Whoever hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life remaining in him.
World English Bible
The first man ever born on this earth murdered the second. Let that sit for a moment. Outside Eden, in the very first family, religion was already present: both brothers brought offerings to God. And hatred was already present too. John reaches all the way back to that field to make his point: the oldest sin in human society is a brother’s hatred of a brother, and it grew in religious soil.
Why did Cain kill Abel? John’s answer is uncomfortably precise: “Because his deeds were evil, and his brother’s righteous.” Abel hadn’t wronged Cain. Abel’s goodness wronged Cain. It stood there as a living rebuke, and Cain couldn’t bear the comparison. Here is hatred’s anatomy laid open: it often begins not with injury but with envy, the shame we feel in the presence of someone else’s righteousness, success, or favor. We rarely murder. But we diminish. We gossip. We secretly delight when they stumble. John refuses to let us call that something mild: “Whoever hates his brother is a murderer.” Hatred and murder differ in opportunity, not in kind. One is the seed; the other is the harvest.
This is why John tells us not to be surprised “if the world hates you.” The spirit of Cain didn’t die in that field. Righteousness still unsettles people; light still provokes what hides from it. The world’s hostility isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong with your faith. Sometimes it’s a sign that something has gone right.
But the heart of the passage is its astonishing test of life: “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers.” Notice what John doesn’t list as evidence: not your conversion story, not your doctrinal precision, not your spiritual experiences. Love for actual, flawed, sometimes irritating fellow believers. Resurrection life is not invisible; it shows up as affection where Cain’s spirit would have planted resentment.
So run today’s honest test. Whose righteousness or blessing stirs something dark in you? That feeling is not trivial. It is the oldest weed in human history, and the life of Christ in you exists to pull it out by the root.
Reflect
- Whose goodness, success, or blessing quietly irritates me, and am I willing to call that envy what John calls it?
- Where am I nursing a “respectable” form of murder: diminishing someone with my words, my silence, or my secret satisfaction at their failure?
- When I look for evidence that I’ve passed from death to life, do I look at my love for actual believers, or only at my beliefs and experiences?
Pray
Ask God to expose the Cain in you (the envy and resentment that hide behind respectable faces), and don’t flinch from what honest self-examination uncovers. Confess any secret pleasure you’ve taken in another believer’s stumbles. Then pray a genuine blessing, by name, over the person whose righteousness or success has been hardest for you to celebrate.