Love Myths #4: How Then Should We Love?
February 7, 2010
Intro:
In this sermon series on what it really means for us to live lives of love, I’ve hesitated to use many examples of love in the context of marriage because of our tendency to romanticize love rather than understand love from a Biblical perspective, where romantic love is a small part of what it means to love, but I couldn’t resist the following story I found online. I don’t know if it is true, but it is certainly believable…
A young couple, very much in love, were getting married in church. However, Sue the wife was very nervous about the big occasion and so the vicar chose one verse that he felt would be a great encouragement to them. The verse was 1 Jn 4:18 which says: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” ( 1 Jn 4:18).
Rather unwisely, the vicar asked the best man to read it out and to say that the vicar had felt that this was a very apt verse for Sue and that he would be preaching on it later in the service. However the best man was not a regular churchgoer. And so he did not know the difference between John’s Gospel and the first letter of John. So he introduced his reading by saying that he was going to read a verse that the vicar felt was a very apt verse for Sue, and that the sermon would be on this verse. But then he read John 4:18, which says “You have five husbands and the one that you now have is not your husband.”
Mis-Reading 1 John…
The “right” verse, FIRST John 4:18, is the launching point for today’s conversation about what love really is, how our culture impacts (and often contradicts) what the Bible says about what love really is, and what that all means for how we live in obedience to Jesus’ commands in response to a question about the “big executive summary of the entire Old Testament”, which I’ve read each week and repeat again today: “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?” 37 Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” (Matt 22:36-40).
The entire verse in 1 John 4:18, (NIV) is this: “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” It is a familiar verse, and one that gets us into some problems because we read it on the surface. We read that and think it says, “if I feel afraid, I am not loved,” – which we get from the line that says “there is no fear in love” – so if I have fear that must mean there is no love; and we get that also from the line that says “perfect love drives out fear”, assuming that means if our fear is not “driven out” then we haven’t been loved. And then the surface read gets even worse, when we think/believe/feel “that’s probably because I’m not really good enough to be loved – I don’t deserve it”, which we take from “The one who fears is not made perfect in love” – we read that as descriptive of something lacking in us, probably evidenced by the very fear itself, conclude we are not “made perfect” which obviously means we are defective, and walk away from hearing the verse feeling condemned and rejected. But the problem with all that is that it is not at all what the verse is talking about – that surface read completely distorts what God is really trying to say, twisting it to mean the opposite.
So why do we go to that place of interpretation? I believe it is because of the cultural messages we receive about fear, love, law, and punishment. These undermine our ability to hear what God is actually saying to us, which (as we will see before we are done) is an incredibly beautiful and liberating reality, which really does as the verse says and drives out fear and makes us perfect.
Love and Fear and Punishment: A Cultural Perspective:
Let’s start with law and punishment. What does our culture say about law and punishment? I know that is wide and open-ended, but lets see where that goes, and probe it a little deeper.
I think that when we drill down to the root of it, our system and culture is based on a desire to create a society that is orderly and functional and that creates rules which everyone must follow, and if they don’t they are punished. Ultimately that punishment is removal from society. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with that in the context of our fallen, sinful world where evil is a very real presence. But that is not the foundation for the Kingdom of God… a thought we shall return to in a moment.
So digging down to the root, even though our goal in punishment is often the good of the person being punished – think of the parent who enforces the curfew of the teenager – the function of punishment is to create fear of the consequences so that the behavior is not done or not repeated. If I try to picture that, it looks like this:
This very over-simplified picture is, I believe, an accurate one as far as it goes for the messages our culture and society send about the doing of right actions. I believe that most of us bring this understanding into our spiritual lives, our relationship with God, in powerfully wrong ways. We just substitute God in the middle as the maker of laws, and amplify the foundational fear of punishment both in eternal consequences and our belief that God thus rejects us when we don’t measure up to his incredibly high standards. This remains the motivation for right actions for many people who call themselves Christians today. And it is incredibly wrong.
It is not even an accurate or complete Old Testament picture, though it can be easy to read and understand it that way. What is missing even from an Old Testament point of view is that the entire system of Law is under-girded by God’s promise of covenantal love for His people – the Hebrew word hesed, demonstrated over and over and over in all the stories of God not rejecting his people but instead welcoming them back, forgiving their sins, accepting them and loving them even though (as several OT passages graphically illustrate) the people of God have acted like prostitutes instead of faithful spouses.
So What About Jesus?
In this series, we keep coming back to the question, “Is that Jesus”? I look at that pyramid and think, nope. I’ve got to make some changes… the goal is still for me to make right choices and live right actions, and there are still “rules” that God and society give that help us to know what those right actions are (and when we really study Jesus we see that that right motivations and the right heart underneath those right actions are really the point, but that is another conversation…), but the foundation is now completely different, and that changes everything else. The rules are no longer externals that I’ll get in trouble from an external authority who will punish me if I break them, and the right actions are no longer motivated by the negative fear or punishment. Now I am back to what 1 John 4:18 REALLY means, which is that God’s perfect love has cast out fear as a foundation for living, and we are now free from those external demands, and are now free to live very real and true lives of love in response to God’s love for us.
Ok, thus far this has been fairly heady so I want to pause here and ask this: what do you think of all that? Questions, comments, maybe you see this as different from me somehow…
How Then To Love?
So to figure out how we apply this practically to our lives, we need more than just 1 John 4:18. Now earlier I used the NIV for the one single verse, since that is the one that most of us know best, but here is what surrounds it from the NLT which I think really helps us see this fundamental, foundational shift I was explaining earlier: “13 And God has given us his Spirit as proof that we live in him and he in us. 14 Furthermore, we have seen with our own eyes and now testify that the Father sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 All who confess that Jesus is the Son of God have God living in them, and they live in God. 16 We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love.
God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. 17 And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we live like Jesus here in this world.
18 Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love. 19 We love each other because he loved us first.
20 If someone says, “I love God,” but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we cannot see? 21 And he has given us this command: Those who love God must also love their Christian brothers and sisters.”
Obviously tons there, but lets just pull out what it says about how to live: (see bold above). Be filled with the Spirit. Live in Him. Live in love, and again that repeats the fact of God living in us. Live like Jesus. I like this version of vs. 18 much better, as it makes it far more clear and positive and encouraging that when we feel fear we can run to God to experience more of His perfect love and that will “expel” our fear – see how it is not about us but rather about that new foundation of the love of God??
Now to make that all more specific and tangible, here is my closing exercise: I want you to think through your day tomorrow, from the time you get up until the time you go to sleep. How can you live in love, live in Jesus, be filled with the Spirit, and let His perfect love be a greater part of your experience, tomorrow? Most of us have a good idea of our schedule for tomorrow, and none of us can anticipate all that we will face, but I want you to think through your plans and your choices in how you will act out of a foundation of how deeply loved you are by God, and His command to live in that love. The specifics of that I leave up to you, and I have provided a little slip of paper to facilitate and encourage the process. I hope you will use it!
