1 John 3:16-24
“Love Is Known in Action”
“This is how we know love: Jesus laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.”
Lay down our lives?
What in the world does that mean?
For Jesus it ultimately meant death on a Cross.
And sometimes, for us, self-sacrifice can mean physical death, but more often, the stakes are lower.
But the principal is the same.
We lay down our hold on our lives when we put others first.
We lay down our lives when we live for the good of others.
We lay down our lives when we take time for others.
To love others is to lay down our lives for them.
When we lay down our completely normal human desire to live for ourselves, and when we instead allow the love of God to reorient us toward the needs of others, we are laying down our lives.
And there is nothing more beautiful in all the world!!!
In our Scripture Lesson for this morning we can see that John was pretty hard on Christians who say they have the love of Jesus in their hearts but don’t share their material goods with those in need.
What would he say to you; what would he say to me?
John goes on to write, “let’s not love with words or speech but with action and truth.”
In other words, love is not only a word—it’s an action.
And laying down one’s life, in this passage, is responding to people in need.
In Matthew 21:28-32 Jesus tells a Parable of Two Sons.
In it a man asks each of his sons to go into the vineyard to work.
The first son answers that he will not go, but later he repents and goes into the vineyard to work.
The second son answers that he will go to work, but he does not go into the vineyard.
The second son responds to his father’s request in word only.
The first son loves his father by his actions.
When it comes to love, Jesus is never just talk.
He is first and always a doer, Someone Who actually serves.
“How can you claim to receive the love of God in your life,” John asks, “if you do not show love in your actions?”
It has been said that “many Christians today claim they believe in Jesus Christ.
By that, they mean they assent to the truth of the Gospel.
But what is the truth of the Gospel, if [you don’t believe] that living a life of sacrificial love is the starting point of our new life in Christ?
Believing in Christ means believing that Christ saves us by making us like Himself.”
Faith and love are bound together in one package, are they not?
You can’t have one without the other.
In Mother Teresa’s biblical mindset, when we love others, we love Jesus.
She said, “At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done.
We will be judged by: I was hungry and you gave me [something] to eat.
I was naked and you clothed me.
I was homeless and you took me in.”
Now there is no doubt that we will falter.
We won’t get it right every time.
But loving and serving is a natural reflex of the love of God living in us, working through us.
In his book, Run with the Horses, Eugene Peterson tells how he saw a family of birds teaching their young to fly.
Three birds were perched on a dead branch that stretched out over a lake.
“One adult [bird] got alongside the chicks and started shoving them out toward the end of the branch—pushing, pushing, pushing.
Till the end one fell off.
Somewhere between the branch and the water four feet below, the wings started working, and the fledgling was off on his own.”
Peterson writes, “Birds have feet and can walk. Birds have talons and can grasp a branch securely.
They can walk and cling.
But flying is their characteristic action, and not until they fly are they living at their best, gracefully and beautifully.”
It’s similar with a person.
Giving and loving is what we do best.
It’s the air into which we are born.
It is the action that was designed into us before we were born.
Some of us try desperately to hold on to ourselves, to live for ourselves.
We look so bedraggled and pathetic doing it, hanging on to the dead branch of a bank account for dear life, afraid to risk ourselves on the untried wings of giving.
We don’t think we can live generously because we have never tried.
But the sooner we start, the better, for we are going to have to give up our lives finally, and the longer we wait, the less time we have for the soaring and swooping life of grace.
You know the bumper sticker: “Whoever dies with the most toys wins.”
The truth about life is: “Whoever dies with the most toys loses.”
At its core, loving service is not something we do for ourselves.
When it is just self-motivated, it tends to be sporadic, done only when its convenient for us.
This is what John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Movement, called “the doctrine of the devil”—doing good when you feel like it.
Many of us have little bursts of good works at Thanksgiving or Christmas.
But people are hungry in April, homeless in September, malnourished in July.
Real love in action is regular, constant and a normal part of our lives.
That is what John is talking about when he says, “This is how we will know that we belong to the truth…”
Isn’t it awesome to know that the measure of whether or not we are God’s children is whether or not our lives are orientated outward—toward others—in love?
Whether or not we are becoming like God is measured by how much we empathize with our fellow humans.
It’s measured by our generosity.
And it’s measured by whether or not we lay our lives down for others.
Because, that is what God does and is!!!
That’s the kind of God we have!!!
John tells us, that the command for our lives is to “believe in the name of [Jesus] Christ, and love each other…”
And the way we keep those commands is by the Holy Spirit which God gives us.
That’s right, it’s all about God.
It’s all about grace.
In Ephesians we are told that we are saved by grace through faith, not by works or something we have accomplished.
And that even this faith is a “gift” from God.
So that none of us can boast about ourselves.
And then it says, “we are God’s accomplishment, created in Christ Jesus to do good things.
God planned for these good things to be the way we live our lives.”
What a way to live.
It’s the only way to live!!!
Mother Teresa used to say, “In the poor we meet Jesus in the most distressing disguises.”
Shane Claiborne, one of the founding members of The Simple Way, a Christian community in Philadelphia describes how God has revealed God’s self to him through the homeless.
“I saw a street kid get 20 bucks panhandling outside of a store and then immediately run inside to share it with all of his friends,” writes Claiborne.
“We saw a homeless man lay a pack of cigarettes in the offering plate because it was all he had.”
“We met a little 7-year-old girl who was homeless, and we asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up. She paused pensively and then replied, ‘I want to own a grocery store.’”
Claiborne asked her why and she said, “So I can give out food to all the hungry people.”
Hunger is everywhere.
Hunger for food, hunger for love, hunger for belonging, hunger for employment, hunger for hope.
What hunger can we satisfy?
How can we feed the hungry of the world?
When God creates saving faith in our hearts, God creates active love in our lives.
And thus, we begin the transformation of becoming the people God created us to be.
I have been so impressed with the way many of you have become involved in our weekly mentoring, tutoring, feeding program called East Ridge Cares!!!
This ministry is making a huge difference in the life of children.
They are being shown the love of God through you!!!
If you have not yet come and laid down some time from your life to participate in this exciting and important ministry, I encourage you to speak with myself or Marcy Hall.
We are also working on starting up a Shepherding Program for these kids, where you will be asked to take one of these little ones under your care on Sunday mornings…
…escorting them to Sunday school…
…sitting with them during worship.
I pray that all of us will adopt one of these kids.
We cannot believe in Jesus without believing in love, and we cannot have love without action.
And the good news is that when we act lovingly, we can be assured that nothing less than the love of God in Jesus Christ is pulsing through our hearts and hands.
When we love, we are one with Christ, John tells us, and Christ abides in us!!!
May we love through the Spirit God has so graciously given us.
Amen.
