God Is Love
1 John 4:7-21
For many, the Christmas season is a period of dread. The days are getting shorter, decorations need to be hung, parties attended or prepared for, homes cleaned, shopping to be done and presents to be wrapped. All this under the countdown of the clock which reminds Christmas is looming and time is running short. Christmas for many, rather than being a season of peace, joy and love, becomes a period of mounting misery as the seasonal blitz draws nearer. A recent survey of more than 1500 people showed that Christmas comes second only to financial problems at the top of everyone’s stress and worry list. Christmas, when it comes, is traditionally a season of love, peace and joy, of family reunions, of friendship and generosity, a time when we want to feel good and look great, instead is marked by increased stress, short fuses, tempers flaring, and self-centeredness as everybody tries to get what they want.
In midst of all of this, Shane Claiborne writes, “I am incredibly hopeful this Advent, because there are so many signs of Christians who are longing for new ways to celebrate our Savior that are not cluttered with the noise of shopping and infected with the myth that happiness must be purchased. On the biggest shopping day of the year ("Black Friday"), a bunch of us here in Philly headed to the Gallery Mall to exorcise the demons of the Shopocalypes and to heal the disease of Affluenza. Dozens of joyful, singing, dancing, liberated consumers converged on the mall to invite people to re-imagine the season. With messages of "Love doesn't cost a thing," "Spend time not money," and "Buy less and love more," the celebration was magnetic. One woman passing by (shopping bag in hand) stopped and said pensively, "Why do we do this empty routine every year? Thanks for making me think." Sometimes we just need permission to say "NO" to the 450 billion shopping dollars spent during this holiday, and to remember the poor, the refugees, the invisible people abused all over the world making the products we buy in the name of the one born in the manger.” Maybe this Christmas we need to really sit down and think what we really need for Christmas.
The first thing we need this Christmas is for us to love one another, not as the world loves but as God call us to love. The very concept of love is one of the most permeating themes in modern society. The Beatles sang about in the sixties. Their message to a hurt and frightened world was, "love is all you need." According to Amazon.com, there are at least 32,507 books currently in print with the word "love" in the title (over 145,000 that deal with the subject of love) and over 11,000 popular albums/CDs with "love" in the title. If you were to do a google-search on the internet, you’d discover at least 121,000,000 web-sites that that use the word "love" as one of their key words. It is unmistakable, how important love is to our culture -- to people in general. But with all this information available, love has become a very confusing subject. When I watch TV, check the internet, or scan magazines in the checkout lines, it’s clear that our society has a very poor understanding of love. Love is about passion, romance and fun. Love is about what you receive and not what you give. Love is about what you feel and not what you do. Much that is called "love" in modern society bears no resemblance or relationship to the holy, spiritual love of God.
With humanity so confused about love, who is to say what love is? The answer is God! It has accurately been said that "love does not define God, but God defines love." So it is important that we dig a little deeper into this passage to discover what God’s love really is. John indicates four characteristics of God’s love in these verses. First, God’s love is personal. Verses 7-8: "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love." The overriding notion of these two verses is that the love of God is personal. God’s love causes us to know Him, and Him to know us. One of the most powerful messages that we can take to people today is that God loves them. Every individual person is important to God, and He loves each one. G.K. Chesterton understood this truth when he said, "All people matter. You matter. I matter. It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe." God loves you and He knows everything about you. God’s love for us is personal. Jesus illustrated this again when He said, "I am the good shepherd, and I know My own and My own know Me, even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep" (John 10:14-15). The image of shepherding is lost on many American’s today, but when Jesus walked the streets of Jerusalem, shepherding was as common as farming is in this part of the country. One of the outstanding characteristics of good shepherds was that they knew each one of their sheep by sight and often by name. And so Jesus says, "I know My own." God’s love is universal, but it is also individual. As Augustine put it, "He loves each one of us, as if there were only one of us." The first characteristic of God’s love is that it is personal.
Second, God’s love is proven. "In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." verses 9-10 God’s love for us was "made manifest" or proven to us, through the life and death of His Son Jesus Christ. Love is not about how we feel, but what we do. Love requires actions; it is demonstrated through behavior, and the love of God is no exception.
Jack Kelley, foreign affairs editor for USA Today, tells this story: We were in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, during a famine. It was so bad we walked into one village and everybody was dead. There is a stench of death that gets into your hair, gets onto your skin, gets onto your clothes, and you can’t wash it off. We saw this little boy. You could tell he had worms and was malnourished; his stomach was protruding. When a child is extremely malnourished, the hair turns a reddish color, and the skin becomes crinkled as though he’s 100 years old. Our photographer had a grapefruit, which he gave to the boy. The boy was so weak he didn’t have the strength to hold the grapefruit, so we cut it in half and gave it to him. He picked it up, looked at us as if to say thanks, and began to walk back towards his village. We walked behind him in a way that he couldn’t see us. When he entered the village, there on the ground was a little boy who I thought was dead. His eyes were completely glazed over. It turned out that this was his younger brother. The older brother kneeled down next to his younger brother, bit off a piece of the grapefruit, and chewed it. Then he opened up his younger brother’s mouth, put the grapefruit in, and worked his brother’s jaw up and down. We learned that the older brother had been doing that for the younger brother for two weeks. A couple days later the older brother died of malnutrition, and the younger brother lived. I remember driving home that night thinking what Jesus meant when he said, "There is no greater love than to lay down our life for somebody else."
Third, God’s love is perfecting. Verse 12 says, "No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us." Since God’s love is already perfect, the phrase "His love is perfected in us" actually has to do with perfecting us. Another way to translate this phrase would be "God’s love completes us." We would never be complete/perfect in how we love because we would love as the world loves. God’s love -- as with all true love -- is meant to foster the personal growth and development of the one He loves. This means that God’s love is unselfish; He is genuinely looking out for our best interests. God wants good things for us. But those good things are not material, they’re spiritual. God is concerned with our spiritual growth. That’s what agape love means -- wanting what is best for another person. And God’s love is such that He will supply us with all we need in order to grow spiritually, "until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature person, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ." (Eph. 4:13). I remember the 1996 movie, Jerry Maguire, which became famous or one particular line in the movie, where Tom Cruise says to Renée Zellweger, "You complete me." That’s a very romantic statement, but it is misleading. In reality there is no other relationship we can have on earth that will truly make us complete; none other than the love of God.
Fourth, God’s love is preserving. Finally, please look again at verse 14: "And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world." God did not send His Son to die on the cross just to prove that He loves us, but to save us. God’s love for us is one that wants to preserve us -- to save us and bring us home. The Bible says, "The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). God wants every person on earth to be saved. That’s why He sent Jesus to die. The Bible tells us that, through His death, Jesus "became to all those who obey Him the source of eternal salvation" (Heb 5:9). John 3:16 says, "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life." Because of God’s love, we can be saved -- we can have eternal life.
Rick Hamlin writes, Last Christmas (2007)…well, I keep thinking about last Christmas. Last December I had open-heart surgery and that meant Christmas was mostly a time of recovery. No parties, no singing, no traveling, no shopping. One day, scarcely home from the hospital, I walked very slowly to the corner to get a gift certificate for Carol. That was about it. Christmas Eve, with the help of a few painkillers, I made it to church and then went to bed early. Carol would just as well forget last Christmas. She took pictures of our celebration around the tree but she’s never let me see them. She says it’s because I look so bad. It wasn’t much fun for her to hold the holidays together with a half-functioning husband. Last Christmas is something she could just skip. But there’s stuff I vividly remember and want to hold on to. All the cards, all the food that people dropped off. All the visits and phone calls. All the prayers and emails. It’s funny—I don’t remember much about the pain in my chest and being tired a lot and never feeling warm enough and running a low-grade fever. What I recall is feeling loved and appreciated. Please don’t get me wrong. I want you to have a Christmas full of abundance and good health. But if you’re having a hard time, if you’re worried about your health or your job or a loved one, let me tell you that there will still be something to treasure. The good stuff shimmers in the dark like tinsel in candlelight. Think of that first Christmas. It was one of the hardest on record. Look what came of it. Merry Christmas. Let it be imperfect. Even in its imperfections you can find yourself surrounded by love.
We have God’s love to give. Having said all this, I think convention would have me say, “All right now. Who are you going to love this week?” Probably I’m supposed to give you some suggestions on how to do that, and you’re supposed to remember them. But there’s this nagging whisper inside of us that says, “I’ve tried that. And I’ll tell you, I can’t do it, and I don’t need the guilt.” So I’ll tell you what. Don’t even bother trying. Don’t even try it, because it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work to love people begrudgingly, to love when we don’t have God’s love inside us. If we’re on empty, we don’t feel like we have God’s love to give. Instead, I suggest you just get loved up by God! Read the NT just looking for God’s great love for you, and memorize some verses that you find. Pray, thanking God for the love He has given you. No measuring up, no pity party—just tell Him, “thank you Lord for loving me.” Simply let God love you. Let His love fill you up so that it spills out to other people in your life. Open it up and let it flow. Let it flow and love one another.
