Rediscover Love
1 John 4:7-16
Good morning. Please turn in your Bibles to 1 John 4. While you are finding 1 John, let me tell you a story.
There were once two old farmers. Their farms shared a property line, and for generations their families had lived next to one another. Both farms benefitted from a freshwater spring that lay on the property line, providing water for both their fields.
One day, the farmers got a letter from the county surveyors office. It informed them that there had been an error in the way the property line had been drawn, and the spring actually lay entirely within the property of one of the farmers.
And so a bitter feud began. The farmer that now owned the spring dug an irrigation ditch along the property line, rerouting the spring creating a barrier that couldn’t be crossed. But foolishly, he spent so much money on digging the ditch that he didn’t have enough to hire workers to bring in the harvest.
The other farmer decided to fight. Day after day he spent hours in town, meeting with lawyers, researching property law, filing suits. His fields lay neglected, and he spent all his money on the legal battle.
One day, a carpenter came through the area looking for work. He knocked on the door of the second farmer, and the farmer said, “Well, if he’s going to try to divide us up with that ditch, then I might as well finish the job. I don’t even want to have to look at him!” So he asked the carpenter to build a fence all the way across the property, a nice, big, tall fence.
The carpenter said, “Well, if you’ve got the wood, I can do the work.” So the farmer showed him the wood that was stacked up in his barn, and the carpenter went to work.
Well, the carpenter soon found that there wasn’t enough wood to build the kind of barrier the farmer had in mind. But when the carpenter pointed this out to the farmer, the farmer said, “Well, I can’t afford anymore wood. Every spare dollar I’ve got is going to the lawyers. Just do what you can with the wood I’ve got.” And he left to go back to town to file another lawsuit.
That farmer came driving back down the dirt road to his home, but when he looked across the field, he didn’t see any fence going up. Instead of the barrier he’d wanted, he saw that the carpenter had built a bridge across the ditch. And no sooner had he pulled into his driveway than here came his neighbor came walking toward him with his hand outstretched. “You’re a better man than I am, to make the first move and build that bridge” he said. “Can you forgive me? I realized that God’s the one that put the spring there. We’re the ones that drew the lines.” The first farmer promised to re-route the irrigation ditch so his neighbors field could be watered. In turn, the second farmer sent his sons across the bridge to help his neighbor bring in the harvest.
All because a carpenter built a bridge instead of a wall.
As a quick recap, this is the season of Advent, a word that means “coming” or “arrival.” and the season is marked by expectation, waiting, anticipation, and longing. Advent is not just an extension of Christmas—it is a rediscovery of Christmas. It’s meant to remind us of how the Jews were longing for the coming of the Messiah. Advent offers us the opportunity to celebrate His birth, and to reflect on what it means that Jesus came in to the world.
So our Advent series is called Rediscover Christmas. We’ve talked about how Christ gives us hope in our uncertainties. How he brings us peace in our struggles and joy in our discouragements. And today, we are going to look at how Jesus brings us love despite our differences, and how the story of Christmas is really the story of the gospel.
So if you’ve found 1 John, I’d like us to read 1 John 4:7-16. If you are physically able, please stand to honor the reading of God’s Word.
7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 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. 10 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. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
13 By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. 16 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.
This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Be seated, and let’s pray…
As we’ve journeyed through Advent, we have been looking at different people in the Nativity story. We have dug into the experience or process usually of one individual, but today I’d like to take a little different approach. I’d like to look at all the people in the biblical account of Christ’s birth. When we do, we realize that the birth of Christ brings together a wide variety of people across many different divides and contrasts. And that is the first point: Love unites people.
Love unites generations. If we walk through the story in order, we start with Zechariah and Elizabeth and Mary and Joseph—the old and the young. After Jesus was born, the young couple was united with two more senior adults, Simeon and Anna. Love unites generations.
Love also unites genders. Women are featured very prominently in the story of Jesus’ birth. Matthew actually begins his gospel with a genealogy of Jesus, and, stunningly for a Jewish writer of the day, includes the names of five women in the genealogy: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary. Much of Luke’s gospel tells the story from the point of view of women, from Elizabeth and Mary sharing pregnancy stories with one another to Mary “treasuring all these things in her heart.” Not to mention that Joseph was about to break off the engagement with Mary until the angel talked him out of it. Love unites genders.
Love unites cultures. Matthew 2 tells us that “wise men from the east” came to Jerusalem to worship Jesus. What was “the east?” We’re not entirely sure. Most think they came from Persia, but others think they may have come all the way from China. But more importantly, they are Gentiles, not Jews, and their inclusion in Jesus’s birth story echoes the radical idea that Christ the Messiah brings salvation and restoration to all people, not just the Jews. And isn’t it interesting that Matthew, the most Jewish gospel, is the one that tells this part of the story, while Luke, a Gentile, tells the part of the story about the infant Jesus presented at the Temple? Love unites cultures.
Love unites classes. You have wealthy wise men and lowly shepherds. Shepherds, who were considered such the bottom rung of social classes that their testimony wasn’t even allowed in court, were among the first to get the news of the Messiah’s birth. You have Mary and Joseph, who, when they present Jesus in the temple can’t afford the customary sacrifice of a lamb, and instead make the poor person’s substitute of a pair of doves or two pigeons. Love unites classes.
Finally, love unites all creation. Shepherds and angels come together: beings of earth and beings of heaven, the physical and the spiritual. Creation itself gets into the act. A star guides the wise men, and stable animals witness the birth of the Messiah. Love unites creation.
The cast of characters God assembled for the arrival of His Son on earth is far from the expectations any of us would have imagined. And probably even farther from the expectations of the people of that time, who lived and breathed within that culture and its divisions. To us, it may seem like a ragtag bunch. To them, it was downright blasphemous that the Messiah would be so lowly and associated with the full spectrum of unclean humanity and creation.
But that’s what the love of Christ does. It builds bridges between people that would otherwise be divided by age, or gender, or social class, or culture, or religion. Could Jesus have united any more divisions simply by being born? Hardly. He pretty much covered them all. Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28 that in Christ,
28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave[a] nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Why could such a simple birth do so much to bring people together? Jesus can do that because, point number two:
Love is embodied in Christ.
The Bible talks about love in many places. God is love and the Bible is His love story for all humanity. From Creation, God made people and shared time with them in the garden as companions and children. When sin entered the world, bringing death and brokenness and separation from such a close companionship with God, He continued to work and covenant with humans. Through generations and generations, He worked His plans and promised a Messiah to make a way to restore His relationship with humanity. That way is Jesus, who is described as the groom and the church as His bride. This relationship with God that He brings us into is a relationship of love. It is a reunion with love itself.
John the apostle eloquently describes the love of God in the fourth chapter of his letter 1 John. In fact, these nine verses talk about love more than any other section of the Bible. We read it at the beginning of the message, but its worth reading again. This time, let’s count how many times John (the beloved disciple, by the way) uses the word love or loves.
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. (1 John 4:7-12, NIV)
There is a line in verse 10 that I want to camp out on for a minute. God sent his son to be the “atoning sacrifice” for our sins. In the ESV, the word is propitiation. It means a payment for or satisfaction of. Jesus came to cover our sin. To pay our debt.
God is love. God personifies it. Love is His nature, and He has shown it to us by sending Jesus. When we come to Jesus, giving Him our lives, we are restored to love. We are fulfilled in love. We live in Him, and He lives in us. We can count on God’s love; it won’t let us down. It fills us and fuels us. It calls us and enables us to love each other. And that brings us to our third point.
Love defines Christians.
Jesus brought this reconnection and restoration to love Himself when He entered the world. Near the end of His earthly ministry, as He is gathered with His twelve disciples for their last Passover meal together, He tells them:
A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:34-35, NIV)
As Jesus teaches His disciples, He wants to make sure that they love like He does. And here’s the most important part: How will people know that they are followers of Jesus? By the love they show to other people. You’ve heard this before. How will people know we are Christians? By our love.
Love is what defines us. It marks us and characterizes us. At least it should. The Church hasn’t always done so great a job of this. We as the church body don’t always do a great job of this. But we must also look at ourselves too. Of course, none of us is perfect, as individuals or as a collective Church. But each of us can certainly find opportunities in this Christmas season and in our current cultural climate to allow God’s love to flow through us to others.
The fourth century theologian Jerome told the story of the Apostle John, who lived in Ephesus until extreme old age. His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words. During individual gatherings he usually said nothing but, "Little children, love one another." The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, "Teacher, why do you always say this?" He replied with a line worthy of John: "Because it is the Lord's commandment and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient."
On that note, we move to our final point.
Love restores what is broken.
These are such divided times. Can I just be real? Years from now, if my grandchildren ask me what was so bad about 2020, I don’t think my answer is going to be about coronavirus. I think when I look back on the dumpster fire that was 2020, I will think that the worst part of it was the division. Division between black people and white people. Division between red states and blue states. Division between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers. Division between people who wear a mask and people who don’t. Even division between people who love Beth Moore Bible studies and people who hate Beth Moore tweets.
It seems our culture, our nation, our world, our people have multiplied the ways to divide us. It seems the “us” and “thems” have been running very high as of late. But it’s actually nothing new. There has been us versus them since the Tower of Babel.
It’s why Jesus’s teaching was so radical. Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43-44, NIV). Throughout His ministry He continuously reached across the chasm of separation and exclusion. He befriended hated tax collectors, and even invited one, Matthew, to follow as one of His twelve disciples. He taught that if a despised Roman soldier forced them to carry his pack for a mile to carry it two miles instead.
He spoke with the Samaritan woman at the well, which broke a couple societal taboos at once. (Jews did not associate with Samaritans, and Jewish men especially did not talk with women like this in public.) One of Jesus’s most famous parables made the hero of the story a Samaritan.
Jesus was constantly seeking to bring people together, to cross the borders, to tear down the barriers, to reach out above the disagreements. And He did it through love. 1 John 4:18 says “There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear. Love overcomes the fear of the other, who may not look like us or sound like us or share the same perspective or experience as us.
Have you ever thought about how completely and totally different we are from God? We might be made in His image, but left on our own, we have absolutely nothing in common with God. He is eternal. We are mortal. He is Spirit. We are flesh. He is holy. And we are sinful. And our sins separate us from Him.
But turn with me to 2 Corinthians 5, and let’s read how Christ came and closed the gap between Holy God and sinful man:
14 For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; 15 and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.
16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.[a] The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling[b] the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Did you catch that last part? God made Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin for us. God made Him like us so that He could make us like Him.
It’s like this. Remember the story I told at the beginning of the message, about the carpenter and the two farmers? The carpenter used the wood and the nails the farmer gave him to build a bridge between two enemies.
It took a carpenter to build a bridge. And guess what? It still does. You see, we were enemies with God because of our sin.
I don’t think its an accident that Jesus worked in a carpenter shop until he began His public ministry. And when God’s people turned against Him, He was given a cross of wood by the Roman soldiers. His feet and hands were nailed to that cross.
And Jesus used that wood and those nails to build a bridge between two enemies. This morning, if you would like to cross that bridge and be reconciled to God, you can do that. Let’s pray.
