This morning we are going to begin by playing a little game called “Name That Christmas Song.” I’ll read a phrase from a well-known holiday song, and you try to “name that tune”:
• We’re snuggled up together like two birds of a feather would be. (“Sleigh Ride”)
• When we finally kiss goodnight, how I’ll hate going out in the storm. But if you really hold me tight, all the way home I’ll be warm. (“Let It Snow”)
• Decorations of red on a green Christmas tree won't be the same, dear, if you’re not here with me. (“Blue Christmas”)
• Please have snow and mistletoe and presents under the tree. (“I’ll Be Home for Christmas”)
• In the meadow we can build a snowman and pretend that he is Parson Brown. He’ll say are you married, we’ll say no man. But you can do the job when you’re in town. (“Winter Wonderland”)
Okay, if you couldn’t get any of those, here is one all of us can get. Hint: The song title is the same as the lyrics!
• All I want for Christmas is you. (“All I Want for Christmas Is You”)
Do you notice a theme here? Most of us would probably consider Valentine’s Day to be the holiday of love, but apparently Christmas isn’t far behind. In fact, in a recent study, researchers found that December is actually the most popular month for couples to get engaged with Christmas Eve being the most popular day to pop the question, followed by Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and then - in fourth place – Valentine’s Day.
It is certainly appropriate to focus on and celebrate love during this season. After all, as we’ll see this morning, Christmas is first of all the story of God’s love for us. But we need to make sure that mistletoe and cuddling in front of a fireplace or going on a romantic sleigh ride, as great and enjoyable as those experiences might be, don’t blind us to what real love is all about.
Last week we began our journey through the season of Advent. The word Advent means “coming” or “arrival” and it is a time that is marked by expectation, waiting and anticipation as we share in the ancient longing for the coming of the Messiah and longingly wait for His second coming.
Last week we began this season by unwrapping the gift of hope, and we lit the first candle on our Advent wreath to help remind us of that gift. [Light hope candle]. Hopefully you’ll remember that Christmas is a time of confident expectation that covers my past sins, allows me to live a godly life in the present and overcomes my fears about the future.
This morning, as we unwrap the second gift of Christmas, we light the second candle on our wreath – the candle of love. [Light love candle].
Once again, we’re going to unwrap this gift by taking a look at a “non-traditional” Christmas passage in the Bible. So go ahead and turn to 1 John, chapter 4. You can follow along as I being reading in verse 7:
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. 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. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
(1 John 4:7-21 ESV)
Although there is nothing in this passage about the birth of a baby boy in Bethlehem, I would suggest to you that this is one of the most beautiful Christmas passages in the entire Bible because it captures the real essence of what Christmas is all about. In particular, verse 9 captures the heart of Christmas in just one sentence:
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world,
And then John reinforces that same idea again in verse 10 and verse 14 where he repeats the idea that God manifest His love toward us by sending His only Son into this world. The fact that God loves us shouldn’t be a surprise at all because God’s very nature is love. But what might surprise us a bit is the nature of genuine, Biblical love. That is because it is nothing like the way our culture tends to view love and it is certainly not the kind of love that is portrayed in the Christmas songs we identified earlier.
So I’d like to use this passage to accomplish two things this morning:
• First, I want us to see what this passage teaches about genuine love. There are two reasons for us to consider that. First, it helps us to better understand who God is. And that’s always something that helps us grow in our relationship with Him. And second, since we are to love others the same way that God loves us, it helps us develop our human relationships as well.
• Then the second thing we’ll do is to see what this passage teaches us about what to do with this gift of love.
WHAT THIS PASSAGE TEACHES US ABOUT GENUINE LOVE
1. Love acts
It’s really unfortunate that in English we have only one word for “love”. So we use the same word when we say “I love pizza” that we use when we say “I love my wife” or I love God.” So in our culture that word “love” is primarily used to describe an emotional response to someone or something.
The Greeks, on the other hand had at least four different words that described varied kinds of love. Out of those four words, the one that was least used outside the New Testament was the Greek word “agape”. That particular word is rarely found in any writings outside the New Testament, but is used over 300 times by the New Testament writers. Essentially these writers appropriated a rarely used word and redefined it and used it to describe God’s love for us. And that is the word that John uses 25 times in the passage that we’re looking at this morning.
And there is nothing in this passage that indicates that God’s love for us is just an emotion or a feeling. That is not to say that God does not have feelings for us, although probably not exactly in the way we think about emotions. For instance, the Bible reveals that both God the Father and Jesus had compassion toward humans at various times.
But here in this passage, God’s love is manifest not by His feelings, but by an action – sending His only Son to earth to be born in humble surroundings, to live in the midst of human sin and depravity for a little over 30 years and then to die on the cross in order to be the propitiation for our sins.
Perhaps you’ve heard that word “propitiation” before but you don’t really know what it means. Although we could spend our entire time this morning discussing all of its nuances, the word simply means “the turning away of wrath by means of an offering”. That is exactly what Jesus did for us on the cross. He offered His own life so that the wrath of God that all of us deserve would be turned away. But before that could occur, God first had to send His Son into the world, which is what He did that very first Christmas.
In the previous chapter of his letter, John had earlier introduced this idea that love is not merely an emotion nor is it expressed adequately only by the words that we say, but rather it involves the actions that we take:
Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.
(1 John 3:18 ESV)
I often tell Mary that I love her. And I certainly do have deep feelings and emotions toward her as well. But ultimately, the extent of my love for her is going to be demonstrated most accurately by my actions. And that is true in all my other relationships as well.
2. Love acts even when the other person doesn’t deserve it
God didn’t wait to send His Son into this world until we did something to deserve His love – and boy am I thankful for that! If we had to wait until we deserved God’s love before He gave it to us, we would never have received it. This is the same idea that we read about in Romans 5 earlier this morning.
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
(Romans 5:6-8 ESV)
God sent His Son to this earth while we were still sinners and then Jesus died on the cross while we remained sinners. Throughout the Bible we see example after example of God loving His people even when they didn’t deserve it.
So in my relationships with others, that is also how I need to love them. I need to be willing to take actions for the good of the other person even when that other person has done nothing to deserve it. In fact, I need to do that even for my enemies. I think Jesus had quite a bit to say about this principle in the Sermon on the Mount when He talked about turning the other cheek and letting your enemy have your cloak as well as your tunic and “going the extra mile.”
I think we tend to do a pretty good job of this at Christmas time both as a church and as individuals. I think about how we collect food and toys for the Gospel Rescue Mission or about how our family adopts a needy family each year. We don’t do those things because those people have done something to earn our loving actions. We merely do those things in order to be a conduit of God’s love.
But loving others when they don’t deserve it shouldn’t be limited to just one holiday season. We are called to love the other people that God brings into our lives like that every day of the year.
3. Love acts even when there is nothing to gain
Not only we were underserving of God’s love, but God sent His Son down here to earth even when there was nothing in it personally for Him. In fact, He did that knowing that most people would actually reject the gift of love that came down that first Christmas.
Love is risky like that. Sometimes when we do loving things the other person won’t even acknowledge what we’ve done or say thank you. And in other cases, they may even outright reject what we’re trying to do for them. We see that every year at the Gospel Rescue Mission Children’s Christmas party when we give out gifts to needy children. While most of the people there are really grateful and express their gratitude and say thanks, there are always a few who will complain about the gifts they receive. But our responsibility is just to love them that same way we love everyone else.
There are a lot of people in this world who are not Christians who still do good things for other people. They do things like donate money or give of their time to help out others. But based on my observations I think they often do those things for very selfish reasons. If they were completely honest they would admit that they were expecting something back in return - either something tangible like a new business contact or a tax deduction or even because they needed the other person to do a favor for them, or something intangible, like a good feeling about themselves. But based on what we see here, I’m not sure that is love, and it certainly isn’t genuine Biblical love.
4. When love acts, it changes hearts
We get just a hint of this in verse 18, when John writes that “perfect love casts out fear”. Although the Bible is full of God’s command to “fear not”, it is the loving act of sending His Son to this earth so that we might live through Him that actually makes that possible. As John points out here, it is that act, and not just God’s words, that makes it possible for us not to fear His punishment.
In much the same way, our loving actions toward others also have the potential to change hearts – both theirs and ours. I think the relationship between Ruth and Boaz is the perfect illustration of this principle. In the beginning, there is no evidence that Ruth and Boaz had any kind of romantic feelings toward each other. But as Boaz took actions to meet the needs of Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi and as he observed the way Ruth loved Naomi with her actions, eventually their hearts were changed and those romantic feelings did develop.
I love how C.S. Lewis articulates this principle in his book Mere Christianity:
Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone you will presently come to love him.
In other words, I need to let my actions change my heart rather than letting my emotions dictate my actions.
So far, we’ve accomplished our first goal – to determine what this passage teaches us about genuine love. With that in mind, let’s move on to our second task and see what it teaches about what I need to do with that gift.
WHAT I NEED TO DO WITH THE GIFT OF LOVE
1. Receive it:
Just like with any other gift, the gift of love won’t do me any good unless I actually receive it. There are two ways I need to do that. While it is not particularly John’s focus here, we do get some clues about how that gift is received.
• From God
Just as we saw last week with the gift of hope and as we’ve seen consistently in our study of Romans, the gift of God’s love is available for all. As John writes in verse 14, God sent Jesus into the world to be “the Savior of the world”.
But then in verse 15 we see that not everyone receives that gift. Only those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God have God abiding in them. This is a crucial qualification, especially at Christmas time where much of the world is willing to celebrate the birth of a baby in Bethlehem over 2,000 years ago, but fail to take their worship any further than that. The only way that a person can receive the gift of love that God sent to this earth in the person of Jesus is to acknowledge that Jesus is in fact God’s one and only Son. That’s what it means to “confess” that that Jesus is God’s Son.
That means that in order to receive God’s gift of love, that I need to understand that the birth of Jesus was not an end in and of itself. It was only the beginning of God carrying out His plan of salvation that He had developed from before creation. That plan not only required that His own Son take on a body of flesh, but that He also live a sinless life and die on a cross to be the propitiation for our sins.
So once again this morning, if you have never received that gift of love by putting your faith in Jesus, we invite you to receive that gift today. At the end of the message I’ll give you some more specific instructions about how you can do that.
For the rest of us who have already received that gift, we need to constantly give thanks to God for the gift of love that God sent to earth that first Christmas. And we shouldn’t limit that gratefulness just to this season, but instead express it to God constantly throughout the year.
• From others
John doesn’t really state this idea explicitly, but it is implicit in his command to “love one another” that begins this passage. The Greek word translated “one another” here and nearly 100 other times in the New Testament is a pronoun that has no singular form. So it is a word that is focused on community rather than the individual. It describes a reciprocal or mutual relationship.
We’ll talk more about our responsibility to give love to others in a moment, but what I want us to consider now is that in such a mutual or reciprocal relationship there has to be both someone giving love and someone receiving it. And from what I’ve observed over the years, it may very well be that many of us are often much more reluctant to receive love from others that we are to give it.
And I think the reason for that is simply our pride. In a world that values “self-made men” and encourages us to “pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps” – whatever that means – we’re reluctant to receive help lest someone else view that of a sign of weakness. As I’ve shared with you before, this is an area where I tend to struggle but I’m really trying to be much more gracious. I am blessed to have some very generous, loving people in my life and I wonder how many times in the past that I’ve robbed them of the joy of loving me by either refusing or being reluctant to receive their acts of love in my life.
So I first need to receive the gift of love from God and from others. But once I receive it, is not a gift that I am to hoard for my own selfish pleasure. So once I receive it, I also need to…
2. Give it:
• To God
At least four times in this passage – in verses 10, 20, and 21 – John implicitly writes about our love for God. And in verse 19, he specifically points out that our response to God’s love for us is that we are to love Him:
We love because he first loved us.
So exactly how do we love God? Although this passage certainly doesn’t give us a complete answer to that question, but it does provide us with some important ways we can do that. We only have time to scratch the surface here.
• The first thing we see here is that genuine love for God is more than just our words. Look at verse 20. John reveals that just saying we love God does not mean that we really love Him. It is our actions that demonstrate whether we really do love Him.
• In verse 7, John reminds us that loving God requires knowing Him. That is true in any love relationship, isn’t it? The more we get to know someone, the better we are able to love him or her and that is particularly true when it comes to our relationship with God. The more time we spend in His Word and in prayer getting to know Him, the more we understand the depth and magnitude of His love for us. And that allows us to love Him even more deeply.
• In verses 13 through 16, John focuses on the idea of God abiding in us and we abiding in Him. We’re going to explore what that means in more depth next week, but for now, let me just say that the word “abide”, which means to “remain” or “dwell”, focuses on a relationship in which one party remains under the others sphere of influence of the other. In practical terms, we do that the same way we get to know God better – by spending time in His Word and in prayer.
• But above everything else in this passage, John focuses on the most important thing we can do to demonstrate our love for Him. And that is to be a conduit for His love, by giving away the gift of love…
• To others
John is really clear here. It is impossible to love God, whom we have not seen, if we don’t love our brothers and sisters whom we have seen. The very best evidence of the depth of our love for God is always going to be the extent to which we love each other.
And as we know, that is not always an easy thing to do. But if we’ll consider that we are merely conduits through whom God wants to let His love flow to others through us, then we can obey the command that John gives here. That command is actually just a restatement of the same command that Jesus gave to His disciples to “love one another” because that is how others would know they were His disciples.
There are obviously innumerable ways for us to pass on God’s love to others, but let me suggest just one practical way that you can do that in the next few weeks. Will you invite an unchurched family member, friend, neighbor or co-worker to join you at our service on Christmas Eve? A number of recent surveys all show that the unchurched are more likely to attend church during the week of Christmas than any other time of year. One study found that 63% of Americans think that Christmas should include a visit to church. So the fact is that it is more likely than not that someone you invite to come with you on Christmas Eve will actually accept your invitation. And I can assure you that when they come, they are going to learn about God’s love for them and have an opportunity to receive that gift of love.
There is nothing wrong with Christmas songs about sleigh rides and mistletoe and cuddling by a fire. But let’s make sure this morning that we don’t miss the real love story this Christmas – the story of a God who loves us so much that He acted on that sacrificial love by sending His only Son to this earth. That is the love that changes everything.
[Prayer]
For further help…
Discussion Questions
1, Can you explain the idea of “propitiation” (v. 10) in your own words?
2. In verse 14, John writes that “the Father has sent his Son to be Savior of the world.” Does that mean that everyone is saved? Support your answer using this passage.
3. How would you respond to someone who says “I love God, but I hate the church”?
4. It is not easy to love “unlovable” people. How can considering God’s love for us help us do that better?
5. Write down the name of an “unlovable” person that God has brought into your life – could be a family member, friend, co-worker, neighbor. Pray and ask God to reveal what action you could take to love that person this week and then do it.
