I always get edgy when I hear someone make a definitive statement about God. There are so many aspects to God that any single statement always feels a bit deficient. So, for example, when someone says God is all-powerful, I find myself waiting for them to add that he’s also all-knowing, and ever-present. That he’s compassionate, but then I want to hear that he’s also just. When they say that God is the creator, I wait for them to also say that he’s God the redeemer. But when I read John’s writings It’s different somehow. For example, when he tells us in John 4 that God is Spirit and those who worship him must worship him in Spirit and in truth I’m not worried. In ch 1 of this letter he tells us that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all and that seems OK. When I read these sorts of statements I’m happy to accept them as they are, I guess, because I’m aware that John isn’t trying to provide a systematic theology of God, but simply picking up aspects of God that help to illustrate his point, or to encourage us in our Christian discipleship.
Well, John does it again here in this passage from 1 John 4. In fact twice he tells us "God is love." We began to look at the need to love one another last week. Do you remember the two things we found in ch3 that were necessary for pleasing God? They were that we love one another, and that we remain faithful to what we were taught about Jesus Christ. Well, here again, he exhorts us, "Beloved, let us love one another." And what’s the motivation we’re given? "Because love is from God." In fact, he says, this is the test that you’ve been born of God. "Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8Whoever does not love does not know God." Why? "For God is love."
As we saw last week, the source of love is God, just as the source of hatred is Satan. So love is the evidence that we’re both born of God and know God.
Well, the question then is, how can we show love. Again, as we saw last week the term love can be an ambiguous term. Its meaning has been hijacked by popular culture. And what makes it even trickier is that we only have one word to cover a whole range of meanings. So I can say: "I love my wife," or "I love my children, or my parents," or "I love chocolate," or "I love lying by the pool on a hot summer’s day" etc. But unless you look carefully at the context to see what sort of love I’m talking about it isn’t necessarily clear. What’s happened, you see, is that we’ve come to use the same word for that wide range of meanings as though they were all equal. Well in the Greek language it was a bit easier. There were 4 different words in Greek that were used for love. There was family love, storgé, that kind of love you might have for your parents or your children or your brothers and sisters, There was social love, philia, that sort of love you have for your social group. There was sexual love, Eros, the sort of love you have for a wife or husband, a boyfriend or a girlfriend. By the way, it’s interesting, isn’t it, that Eros is the only Greek word for love that most people would recognise these days. That probably says a lot about the way popular culture has twisted the idea of love. Finally there was agapé love, which was a practical and unemotional love, fairly nonspecific in its normal usage.
Well, why did the disciples choose the term agapé when they wanted to describe Christian love? What was wrong with the other words for love? They were all right. There’s nothing wrong with loving your family, or your social group or your spouse. So what was wrong with these particular words when it came to describing God’s love? Well, perhaps the problem is this: when we use one of these first three words, we’re describing a love that’s essentially grounded in self-gratification. Family love loves those who are of the same flesh and blood. Social love loves those who are of the same social grouping. Both have the virtue of cementing relationships in those groups, and ensuring the groups remain strong. So both are basically aimed at self preservation. Eros, sexual love, by the same token, is biased towards satisfying the desires of the lover. It can be a demanding, craving, hungry love; a love born out of the need of the lover. On the other hand, as opposed to those other three forms of love, agapé love contains the idea of self-forgetfulness. It’s a generous, altruistic, sacrificial love born out of the need of the loved one. In short, where Eros wants to take, agapé wants to give.
The chief model for this type of love, of course, is God himself. John says: "Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. This is how God showed his love among us." How? Not by serenading us, not by offering us roses and chocolates. No, God loved us by sending his Son into the world as an atoning sacrifice. This is our memory verse for the week, by the way. This is one of those verses that every Christian should have etched into their brains, so after the service make sure you get a memory verse card from me with this verse on it: "In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins."
But notice the nature of this love. There’s no sense that God loves in response to our love for him. Rather, as Paul reminds us, it was while we were still his enemies that Christ died for us. You see, it wasn’t that we loved God. Far from it, we were totally opposed to him. So much so that when His Son appeared on earth there were only a handful of people who accepted him for who he was. The rest rejected him out of hand. Even when he performed miracles among them, fed them and healed them and raised them from the dead, all they could do was to cry out for his execution. And yet he willingly submitted to execution so those very people could be forgiven. God’s love is a love that knows no limit. It’s a love that forgives over and over again, without warrant, without tallying up the score, without retaliation.
Well then, says John, if you’ve been born of God, if you’re one who has experienced this agapé love of God, how are you going to respond. In fact is there any choice? Not really. All we can do in response to this sort of love, is to love others the same way.
But this is more than just a human response to divine love. In fact he says two interesting things here, one in v12 and the other in v19 about our response of love. In v12 we discover that the result of loving others the way God loves us has huge repercussions for the world. You see, one of the great problems people have when it comes to believing in God, is that no-one has ever seen him. I mean we’re not even allowed to have images of him. At least the pagan worshippers had images they could look at when they went to worship. I mean if you were worshipping the God of the Sun, you could look up every morning and at least see him up there in the sky. Or if you worshipped the God of Bulls you could stand in the pit from time to time when the sacrifice took place and have the Bull’s blood run over you. When we were in India some time ago we couldn’t get over the number of shrines you’d come across, each with its image of a god and the offerings of the local people. In fact we noticed the same in Italy last year only with images of Mary. But we expect people to come and worship a God who’s invisible and who prohibits us from using any visual aids to our worship. So how are people to know what this God is like? Well, says John, it’s true no-one has ever seen God, but if we love one another then God dwells in us and his love is made complete in us. So as they look at us what will they see? They’ll see a little bit of what God is like. Just as Jesus was the image of the invisible God, so we too can be images of the invisible God, if God’s love dwells in us.
He goes on to remind them that God does in fact dwell in them through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The proof of the pudding, in this case, isn’t in the eating, but in the confessing that Jesus is the Son of God. Here he returns to the theme of remaining faithful to the apostolic message, this time focussing on the divinity of Christ. The thing that the Spirit does within us is to awaken our minds and our inward eyes and ears so that we can know and acknowledge that Jesus was not just a good man but the very Son of God. And as we realise how the Spirit is living within us we discover that we can rely on the love of God.
But that brings him back to his statement that God is love. Why? Because he wants to remind us that living in love and living in God are equivalents And there are two implications of this that he wants us to understand. First that the corollary of true love is a lack of fear. "There is no fear in love, but true love drives out fear". Why? Because fear has to do with punishment. My father was the Vicar’s warden in my church when I was growing up. And everyone was scared of him. I guess he had an aura about him that demanded respect. But that always amused me, because I knew he was really gentle as a kitten. But there were times when I was scared to go near him and that was when I’d done something wrong and I thought he might have found out. Otherwise I knew that I was loved and so had nothing to fear from this ogre of a churchwarden.
Isn’t it true that so many people shy away from church and from God because they’re scared of having their lives exposed to God’s scrutiny; as if they could hide from him anyway! But too often, the reason they hide away is because their experience with Christians has been that what they’ve felt is judgment rather than acceptance. They’ve felt the condemnation of the righteous of their way of life. Wouldn’t it make a difference if every time they’d come across a Christian they’d experienced the love and forgiveness, the acceptance, that God offers them. Not the acceptance of their way of life perhaps, but acceptance of themselves as people made in God’s image, people for whom Christ died. Wouldn’t it be great if someone you know came up to you one day and said, "I really feel like you’re someone I can talk to without feeling guilty. As though you accept me the way I am. Why is that?" And then you could explain to them, that it’s because you’ve experienced the forgiveness and acceptance of God who gave his Son to die so you could be forgiven.
But the other side of the coin is a bit tougher. He says, "Be careful! Don’t claim to love God, if deep in your heart you’re really harbouring a hatred for someone else." You see, the two are incompatible. You can’t love God at the same time as hating another person. How often do you hear people talk about someone who’s hurt them in some way and whom they just can’t forgive. They might say they don’t hate them, but in the end it adds up to the same thing. As we saw last week, hatred is the opposite of love. If you don’t love someone, then in effect you hate them. There’s no neutral ground. Think about what you’re saying when you say you can’t forgive someone. Aren’t you saying, their guilt remains? Aren’t you saying they deserve to be punished? In terms of God’s response to sin, doesn’t that mean they deserve to die? Isn’t that the same as hating someone? Ultimately to desire their death, as just as that might be? But what does God say? Doesn’t he say "You deserve death, but I offer you mercy, life"? Doesn’t he say, "Of my great love for you I offer you forgiveness for all your sins, even for putting my Son to death on a cross"? Doesn’t he say: "This is love, not that you loved me but that I loved you and sent my only Son to be the atoning sacrifice for your sins."
If we’re followers of this God, how can we harbour any desire for vengeance, any desire for personal retribution in our hearts? Rather if we love God, we’ll also love our brother or sister and desire only that they too experience God’s love and favour. This doesn’t come naturally does it? It only happens as God’s Holy Spirit works in our hearts to change us. So we should be praying that God would change us to be more like him. That he would show his love to the world through the way we love others.
We should be praying that our witness to those around us would make the invisible God so apparent that they would be coming up to us to ask us what our secret is.
Here we come to the second interesting thing John tells us. In v19 he says "We love because he first loved us." Now too often I think we’ve read that as being a command to love in response to God’s love. But let me suggest that there’s another way of looking at it. Let me suggest that John is reminding us that the starting point for our love is God’s act of love towards us. You see, what did God achieve by Jesus death on the cross? He achieved the forgiveness of our sins. But he also made it possible for us to be made new. To be born again. To have our hearts of stone changed to hearts of flesh. So the result of what God has done for us in his love, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is that we can now love with the love of God. We just sang those words from 1 John 3: ’Behold what manner of love the father has given unto us, that we should be called children of God.’ We often think about that in terms of adoption, of God making us his children by decree. But there’s more to it than just that. We haven’t just been adopted. We’ve been born again, made like him. The wonderful thing about being made God’s children is that he gives us his Spirit to enable us to be like him, and that likeness is shown most clearly in our love for others. And so, as we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.
May that be the nature of our life together and our witness to the world around us.
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