According to the musical wisdom of John, Paul, George, and Ringo ... otherwise known as "The Beatles" to us older folks … “All you need is love, love … love is all you need.” Well … that and food … and shelter … and air … and sleep …
Love is literally in the air. You hear that word everywhere. It’s been the subject of plays and novels and poems, debated and discussed by philosophers and artists, intellectuals, and religious scholars throughout the ages. You can’t turn on the TV or a radio without hearing the word “love.”
And yet, there isn’t a more slippery word in the English language. And … in my opinion … more misused. We use it to describe how we feel about everything from pizza and ice cream to our families and friends … to God. We often think of love as some syrupy, sweet, tingly, sentimental, ooey, gooey feeling. The late author and cartoonist James Thurber once wrote: “My pet antipathy is the bright detergent voice of the average American singer, male or female, yelling or crooning in cheap yammer songs about love. Americans are brought up without being able to tell love from sex, lust, Snow White, or Ever After. We think of it as a push-button solution, or an instant cure for discontent and a sure road to happiness … whatever it is. It is,” says Thurber, “nothing of the kind.”
And the Apostle John would wholeheartedly agree. The Biblical definition of love is 1st Corinthians 13:4-8 and the Biblical demonstration of love is John 3:16. Biblical or divine love is a self-sacrificing, caring commitment that shows itself in seeking the highest good for the one being loved.
Got that?
Biblical love is a self-sacrificing, caring, commitment that shows itself in seeking the highest good for the one being loved.
At its heart, Biblical love is a commitment. It is not a commitment without feeling but a caring commitment. Biblical love involves delight … not just duty. This caring commitment is not just an attitude but an action. It shows itself in deeds. These deeds often require self-sacrifice. The ultimate demonstration of that kind of self-sacrificing commitment and love was seen at the cross on Calvary. The goal of this kind of commitment is the highest good of the one being loved … and the highest good for any Christian is to be saved and to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.
In verse 7, John commands us to “love one another” and then gives us the reason for this command: “… because love is from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” Then the Apostle gives us the supreme example of the kind of love that comes from God: “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent His only Son into the world so that we might live through Him” (1st John 4:9) “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” (1st John 4:10). He goes on to show how love for one another is evidence of God’s abiding in us and our abiding in Him in verses 12 through 16 … and then concludes this section of his letter by explaining that our love for one another is evidence that we are mature in our love for God.
“Love is from God.” Humm …. Love is from God. Even unbelievers may demonstrate sacrificial love for others. Unbelieving parents often sacrificially love their children. An unbelieving husband or wife may practice sacrificial love for their mates over the course of their marriage. Unbelieving soldiers may lay down their lives for their comrades. What they may not know … but John knows … and what John want us to know is that these loving deeds stem from God’s common grace … whether they know this or not. Whenever we see genuine Biblical love, it did not originate with that person. It came from God … whether an unbeliever acknowledges it or not or is aware of that fact. God is the ONLY source of love in the universe, amen?
Love is not only “from” God, says John. “God is love.” Every Christian embraces this concept, but it is often misunderstood and taken to unbiblical extremes. Some Christians misconstrue John’s notion that “God is love” to mean that God overlooks or tolerates sin. Some even go so far as to say that God … who is love … would never, could never condemn anyone to such a cruel and unimaginably horrible place as eternal hell.
But the Bible is very clear on this point. God’s love does not negate His holiness or His justice. Nor, conversely, does God’s holiness and justice negate His love. In Chapter 1, verse 5 John states: “… God is light, and in Him there is not darkness at all.” And he describes God as righteous in Chapter 2, verse 29. God’s holiness, God’s righteousness, God’s justice, and God’s love are all parts of God’s nature. No one part negates the other. While it is vital that we affirm and understand that God is love, we must also remember and affirm that God is holy … and that He is righteous and just.
God’s true children display God’s nature. John’s statement is both positive – “… everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” (1st John 4:7) – and negative: “… whoever does not love does not know God” (1st John 4:8). The false teachers were Gnostics who claimed to know God in a secret, deeper sense. But John challenged their claims, saying that they did not know God at all because they did not practice Biblical love. Their teachings and their behaviors simply promoted self, not Christ.
“Beloved,” says John, “since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another” (1st John 4:11). John’s point is that children take on the characteristics of their parents. If we have been born of God, who is love, and we have come to know Him and to follow Him, then we will be acting and growing in Biblical love. “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and His love is perfected in us” (1st John 4:12). The one who does not love Biblically shows that they do not know God … that God does not abide in them.
We need to hear this and we need to take this to heart in a serious way. There are many Christians who claim to be born again, to have the love of God in them but they do not treat others with love. They do not even make an effort to do so. They are angry, unkind, impatient, abusive in their speech, self-centered in their daily lives, and judgmental of others. They spread malicious gossip with great delight and they are defensive if anyone tries to help them out by pointing out these sins to them. Of such Christians, author and Pastor Martin Lloyd-Jones writes: “Oh, my heart grieves and bleeds for them …; They are pronouncing and proclaiming that they are not born of God. They are outside the life of God … There is no hope for such people,” says Pastor Lloyd-Jones, “unless they repent and turn to Him.”
John says that “God sent His only Son into the world so that we might live through Him” (1st John 4:9). Christianity is not just a matter of a person deciding to stop certain sinful practices and starting to do morally acceptable practices. It is not just a matter of changing from a non-religious person who spends Sunday doing things for themselves to becoming a regular churchgoer. Rather, at its heart, Christianity is a matter of God imparting new life to those who are dead in their sins … and that new life manifests itself in loving behavior. As born-again people who have experienced God’s love and as true children of God who have God’s love abiding in them, we should display His love to this wicked world that crucified His Son. “No man has ever seen God,” says John but the world has surely seen God’s love. “For this is love … not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be a propitiation, an atoning sacrifice for our sins (v. 10).
“Propitiation” means that what Jesus did on the cross satisfied God’s justice and wrath toward our sin. His love didn’t just brush aside our sin because His holiness and justice would have been compromised. Rather, His love moved God to send His own Son, who bore the penalty that we rightly deserved. The initiative was totally with God. He didn’t wait until we showed promise of changing or until we cried out for help. Rather, as the Apostle Paul put it in Romans 5:8: “… God demonstrates His own love towards us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
“Therefore” John concludes, “we ought to love one another.” The word “ought” implies an obligation … a command. That love can be commanded shows that it is not primarily a feeling but rather an action based on our commitment. As I said earlier, love is not devoid of feeling but it is not based on it. We must love others or we are being disobedient to God.
But here’s the problem. Some people are easier to love than others, amen? If everyone were easy to love, we wouldn’t need the Bible or the cross. God wouldn’t have to command us to love one another, would He? But that’s not the case, is it? The world loves those who love them but Jesus commands us to love not only those who love us but those who don’t love us … those who hate and despise us even … as Jesus did.
If I may speak hypothetically … you may have a mate who is self-centered and difficult to live with … don’t look at them right now because you might be surprised to see them looking at you right now. Remember … I said “hypothetically.” John says: “Beloved, if God so loves you, you also ought to love that difficult mate.”
Hypothetically, there may be people in this church whom you do not like. Again, don’t look at them right now. John says: “Beloved, if God so loves you, you ought to love that unlovable person.” When you love like this, says John, then you are allowing the love of God that abides in you to shine forth.
So … how do we do that? How do we love the unlovable? The difficult people in our lives? In our world? We begin by “caring” for them … caring about them. We begin with simple, selfless care. That’s what God is all about. That is what God ultimately is. God is love. The Creator of the universe created you and He created everyone around you. And, as our Creator, He cares about us, His creation. He cares about you. And believe it or not, He cares about the person you don’t care about. So, if I’m going to care about that person that I don’t care about then that care is going to have to come from Someone other than me, amen? “God is love” … remember? “And those who abide in love abide in God,” says John, “and God abides in them” (v. 16).
Here’s where it can get tricky. Love does not mean submitting to the will of others. Real care for others does not always mean doing what the other person wants or demands. It means wise action … or inaction, if need be … on the basis of what is best for the one being loved.
Margaret Hillis, the late Director of the Chicago Symphony Choir, told the story of how she fell into the pond near her home when she was four years old. She nearly drowned. Sinking, she remember thinking that she’d better start doing something and she began flailing her hands and feet. Fortunately, her flailing did the trick and drove her close enough to the shore for her feet to touch bottom. Crawling up on solid ground … already worrying about what her punishment would be when her parents found out … she saw her father sitting on the opposite bank. He had made no move to rescue her … just as he made no move now to either congratulate her or take her to task. “There was a strange comfort in it,” she remembered. “He had let me learn to depend on myself … yet he was there if I needed him. To truly care is do not the easy thing, the applauded thing, the wished thing,” she observed, “but the wise thing … the right thing.”
Love, therefore, is not always soft or indulgent. It can mean gentle acceptance of the fallen but it can also mean driving the money changers out of the Temple courts. And this is not to say that caring always means you have to like a person in order to care for them or take care of them. It’s not like the Good Samaritan in Jesus parable (Luke 10:30-37) “liked” the person he saw lying on the side of the road. He didn’t even know the person. He simply saw an injured man and he took “care” of him.
C.S. Lewis once said: “Thank God He did not command me to like everybody. I may find my children, or my friend, or my colleagues, or the stranger on the way distinctly unlikeable, on certain days given my own tastes and ways. But even if I am turned off by someone,” said Lewis, “I can still care for him or her as a fellow human being. In fact,” he advises, “one of the realities we need to face and remember is that the person who needs our love and care the most may be the one who is particularly unlikable at the moment.”
Love cares and love bears.
It bears big time. Love hangs in there. Love stays faithful … no matter what … for better or for worse. To love in this way is to suffer one another, just as God suffers our mistakes, our failures, our sins.
Let’s say I offend you. In fact, I doubt there isn’t a soul here this morning that I haven’t offended in some way or other at some point during the time that I’ve been here … amen? So … let’s say that I offend you through some carelessness or bad temper, or whatever … somehow I’ve offended you. The result? An injustice has been done and our relationship has been violated. What can be done about it? Well, you can, quite understandably, react by punishing me with your anger and rejection. You can strike out and hurt me back. But the end result is that we both lose. I lose you and your friendship. You lose me and my friendship. We both lose a relationship … and who knows what we could have gained from that relationship down the road. But we’ll never know if you or I severe the relationship.
Or … you can bear the hurt and go on caring about me. To trust ourselves to the love of God that we see exemplified and lived out by Jesus is to believe that this is the way God deals with us. He bears with us. He puts up with us. He cares for us. And the redemptive thing for us to do is to bear with one another in love because the caring that wins in the long run is that care that bears … amen?
Love cares … love bears … and love shares.
Love that cares hangs in there … and if you care and if you bear, sooner or later you are going to share in the pain and suffering of others. It’s inevitable. Several years ago the Columbus dispatch ran a story about Frank and Mary. Frank was hospitalized and doing very poorly. His wife, Mary, never left his side. Sitting in a chair by his bedside, she tended to his needs as best she could. “I’m thirsty,” said Frank. Mary lifted the straw to his lips as he pulled his oxygen mask aside. The medicine was making him sick. She fetched the basin, wrapped a firm arm around his spasm-wracked shoulders and mopped sweat from his forehead. So, in the end, love comes down to this … a squeeze of the hand that says “I’m here, no matter how long the struggle.” “Water?” she whispers lovingly, “you need water? Here, drink. Let me straighten your pillow.” Now who is hurting most in this picture? Hard to say, isn’t it? But that is what love is all about … sharing the highs, the lows, the victories, the defeats, the excitement, the boredom, the joy, the sorrow. Over-indulged … addicted to our own pleasure and comfort … inclined to believe in and seek easy answers … we have little tolerance for the pain and struggles of others. Little patience for the hard way of real love … Biblical love.
“No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and His love is perfected in us” (v. 12). While it is true that people see the love of God in us and receive the love of God from us through our actions as individual Christians, there is an equally important way for God to show His love to the world … and that’s through His church … the Body of Believers … for it is through the church that people get to “see” God.
How does God make Himself visible today? Through us here at Canton First United Methodist Church. That’s a pretty awesome and intense responsibility, my brothers and sisters … one that we all should take seriously and whole-heartedly.
If the church is the body of Christ here on earth … if the church is “Emmanuel” … God with us … God incarnate … then the Church must reflect His character. The supernatural love of God for sinners like us is made more credible when unbelievers see it reflected in the life of His children. Remember … love is a family characteristic. Therefore, people should be able to see Christ’s love in His church … amen? We should experience Christ’s love as we love each other. Our world … which is very cynical when it comes to the Church … needs to see down-to-earth, real, practical Christian love at work within God’s Church. Remember … the love we have for each other in the Church does not come from our shallow, self-centered, pitiful love but from the love of God that abides in us and abides in this church.
This church is the nearest way that anyone can get to actually seeing the invisible God, which raises the difficult, painful question: “What do people see when they come this church?” Do they see the loving, caring heart of God? Do they see a God who is patient, kind, and gracious? Do they see a God who does not tolerate sin because of what it does to His children? Do they see a church that is committed to being a channel of God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s righteous, God’s justice? Do they see the body of believers caring for each other, bearing with each other, and sharing in each other’s lives?
What the world sees of God is what we reveal to them … not just through our words but through our actions. Are we loving and gracious like our Heavenly Father? Are we kind in our dealings with our fellow members in this church? How are we dealing with the sin in our lives and the sin in our church? Are we committed to our own little plans and schemes or to the causes of God? Will they see a church divided? People only loving those they deem loveable or worthy of their love or membership into their exclusive little circle of friends? Will they see a church that is judgmental? Full of jealousies and petty squabbles?
Jerome, one of the early church fathers, said that when the Apostle John was in his extreme old age, he was so weak that he had to be carried into the church meetings. At the end of every meeting, he would be helped to his feet to give a word of exhortation to the church. Invariably, he would repeat: “Little children, let us love one another.” The disciples began to grow weary of the same words every time and they finally asked him why he always said the same thing over and over. He replied: “Because it is the Lord’s commandment, and if this only is done, it is enough.”
You and this church are the nearest anyone can get to seeing the invisible God!
Let us pray:
