We will look briefly at sixteen of the nineteen vices listed here. To make this more manageable, we will look at them under the last ‘love’ heading, at the end of verse 3, which is a negative ‘not loving good’.
- When ‘not loving good’ takes over.
- 3:2-5. We will content ourselves with the general picture – they will be full of themselves. They are proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to parents, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, treacherous, reckless, and swollen with conceit. For the heading that I have used the KJV has ‘without natural affection’. It is like Psalm 103 in reverse – Ps. 103:1-2; note Rom. 1:21. The Christian goal is to become like Christ – Rom. 8:29.
- Powerless religion is all show.
- 3:5. See Isa. 1:14-17; Matt. 15:8-9; 23:25; 1 Tim. 5:8. Goats can look like sheep but they are still goats. A. W. Tozer: If the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95 percent of what we do would go on and no one would know the difference. If the Holy Spirit had been withdrawn from the New Testament church, 95 percent of what they did would stop, and everybody would know the difference.
- Depart from such people.
- 2 Chron. 18:1-3; 19:1-3; Rom. 16:17; 1 Cor. 5:9-13. We tend to imbibe what is around us.
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