“Love is Known in Action”
1 John 3:16-24
This is Mother’s Day and our New Testament Lesson is about loving one another in action rather than just words.
I don’t know about you, but my mother gave me the greatest gift a mother could give—she gave me her faith.
Did she talk about her faith?
How couldn’t she?
But did she live it?
The best I have ever seen someone live it.
And how did she live it?
She took food to grieving families in our church and in our neighborhood.
She visited the sick and homebound.
She prayed and prayed and prayed.
She didn’t judge, but accepted and loved people as they are.
If someone was lonely and needed a friend, she befriended them.
We had a lot of lonely people at our house for dinner, for holidays—you name it.
And one of the most impressive things for me was the way she visited a woman who had been paralyzed in a car accident, the same day and time every single week for nearly 40 years straight.
If you are a mother, I pray you will give your child your faith—by what you do for them and for others.
The same goes for fathers but we can talk about that in June.
“Dear children,” John writes, “let us not love with words or speech but with actions and truth.”
When I was in college I had this friend who was a great person, but who didn’t always do what he said he was going to do.
If you asked him to meet you for dinner at six, he would show up at 6:45.
If you asked him to help you move, he’d forget.
If you needed something he would swear he would come through for you, but he never quite did.
The last straw came when another friend needed a ride to the airport.
He showed up an hour late and the other friend missed his plane.
After that, we all agreed that while we cared deeply for our friend, we couldn’t trust him to do what he said he was going to do.
We’ve all heard the expression, “Talk is cheap.”
The flip side of that is “actions are priceless.”
And that’s one of the things the writer of 1st John is trying to get across to us this morning.
1st John is a letter written not to people he was hoping to convert to Christianity; it was written to people who already believed.
It’s a letter telling them how they are to live their Christian faith.
John writes: “We know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.
And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.
If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?
Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.”
Again, in other words, talk is cheap.
Actions mean everything.
The whole idea behind the New Testament is that God’s love is made real to us in Jesus Christ and in the way He lives and loves—even loving us to death and beyond!
This is powerful stuff, this kind of love.
It’s not a “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine” kind of thing.
This love is poured out no matter the cost.
It demands nothing in return, but it does get noticed none-the-less.
It gets noticed, not for the sake of getting noticed, if that makes any sense.
This is the kind of love that was practiced by Mother Teresa, by St. Augustine, and by countless missionaries and servant leaders…and—yes—mothers and ordinary disciples like you and me down through the centuries.
(pause)
John says we ought to lay down our lives for one another.
What does that mean?
We may never be called to give up our physical lives for someone else, but it might happen.
But we are all called to put our own wants aside in order to do what we can to help meet the needs of others, to share their burden, to seek to alleviate pain and suffering where we can.
This is beautiful—this is love.
It means looking at our glass as always full enough to share, as being happy with enough and not hoarding our time, our talents or our possessions.
To lay down our lives for one another means that as we live in community we work at the hard parts of being together.
It may mean we “shut up and put up with something” for the good of the whole.
It might mean taking the back seat and letting someone else drive for a while.
It means we don’t pack up our little red wagons and go home at the first sign of discord, or if the music doesn’t exactly fit our taste or if the preacher doesn’t always say exactly what we want to hear.
John asks us how those who have been given so much can see a brother or sister who needs help and turn their back on them.
He asks how we can see the example of Jesus Who loved us so much that He gave everything for us, and then turn our backs on those who need the same kind of love.
John tells us that this is the measure of the Christian life: not what we say, but how we act or live.
Now, of course, we don’t always get it right.
None of us do.
John Wesley, who defined Christian Perfection as having a habitual love for God and neighbor, admitted that he had not achieved this perfection in his lifetime.
He had gotten glimpses of it; but he had not achieved it.
We might have the best of intentions, but when the rubber meets the road, it’s hard isn’t it?
When we actually have to give up our time to volunteer for the food pantry, or show up for a meeting or a work day, or visit someone who is sick, we may sometimes be tempted to find other things to do.
When we are asked to open up our checkbooks and help out, we might rationalize that we really would rather use that money for something else, something for ourselves.
And when that friend comes to us needing someone to lean on, we might make excuses as to why we can’t get together.
But, it is during these times that we experience that “twing”—that experience where our hearts condemn us… “because we know God is greater than our hearts,” and we belong to God.
We know we are not being our best self, or who we really want to be, or who we are re-created to be through God’s Spirit living in us.
And so we pray for forgiveness and resolve to do better.
And while none of us is perfect, we try.
And that’s noble, to try and make sure your actions reflect who you say you are.
And for us, as Christians, that means being intentional in making sure our actions reflect, as best they can, the love of Christ Who first loved us.
But have you ever noticed that there are a number of people who don’t trust Christians?
And I get it.
When I was growing up in the 80’s it seemed like every other month there was another television evangelist being hauled out of their house in handcuffs, or tearfully confessing to something on the evening news.
Even as a kid I knew that some Christians did one thing while saying another.
A lot of people think Christians are hypocrites.
And the truth is that we are.
We are not because we are Christians, but because we are human.
None of us is always the person we want to be.
But our job as Christ-followers is to try.
I mean, look how often the disciples messed things up.
But they kept getting back up on their feet and following, trying to keep up with Jesus.
And Jesus was patient with them.
We are saints, but sinners.
And when we fall down, which we will more than we want to admit, it’s a great opportunity to gain humility, and become even more in love with Christ—Who loves and died for a sinner such as me!
And, that is one way we grow.
But again, to grow we have to try.
We have to try to be the people we say we are on Sunday mornings.
And we have to be real.
And being real includes loving not with words or speech but with actions.
Ideally, a church should be the kind of community, that is in no way perfect, but where without us saying a word about what we believe, people will know we are Christians.
As the song says, “They will know we are Christians by our love.”
It doesn’t say, “They will know we are Christians because we say so.”
Christians are not called to be “holier than Thou,” but rather “humble slaves.”
We are called to serve and we are called to love, without some hidden agenda…habitually…
We also don’t exist primarily for ourselves, but for others.
Whenever someone asks a favor of our church or thanks us for doing something, I try to say: “It’s our privilege.
We are here for our community; not the other way around.”
We are to measure who we are as a church by asking ourselves what we have done for our neighbors, and for those whose lives depend on seeing and experiencing the love of Christ lived out in the flesh.
There are so many young people who see a church building and their stomach turns because they think we are in town to judge them.
But that is the last thing we should be here for.
We need to judge ourselves…
…continually….
…constantly…
…and love others!
Many people, these days, think the church is a hate group.
And yet the most important thing—the center of it all—the cream between the two halves of the chocolate cookie say: “This is [God’s] command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us.”
Go a few verses back before where we started reading today and John says: “This is the message you have heard from the beginning: We should love one another…
…We know we have passed from death to life because we love each other.
Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know no murderer has eternal life residing in him.”
Do you or I hate anyone?
I mean think about it…
…do we?
Let’s be honest.
And if we find that we do, let us repent…
…let us fall on our face like the tax collector in Jesus’ parable, beat our breasts and cry out: “God forgive me a sinner!!!”
That’s what it’s about.
It’s not about being perfect, it’s about moving forward.
It’s about admitting that we are human and in need of Christ.
The world has plenty of Christians.
What it needs are followers of Christ!
And so, the Scripture is asking us this morning: “How are we going to be people not of word and speech, but of truth and action?”
How are we going to be the people that our world needs us to be, that our families need us to be, that WE need us to be?
God has a great plan for each and every one of us here today.
And God has brought us together not just for worship, but for service.
The love of Christ may have gotten us here today, but God doesn’t want our Christian journeys to end in the pew.
God has great things in-store.
I’ve heard it put this way: “The journey every week starts here.
Think of this sanctuary as your launching pad.
Here we say and sing the words of our faith—the faith that Christ has freely given us, perhaps the faith passed down to us from our mothers, our fathers our grandparents or some other saint or saints.
And when we leave here we go out into a world that needs us to pass the faith on to them through our actions.”
It’s a world that needs followers of Christ, not Christians in name only.
The good news is that we are not in this alone.
We are a community of people who want to do just that!
We want to be people of action.
We want to love God and neighbor in tangible ways.
But we need everyone of us on board.
We are all part of God’s great call on this church, all a piece of the divine puzzle—all equally important!
How exciting is that?
God is doing great things through this Church.
We have only just begun.
We have a Preschool which has gone from Zero to overflowing in just over a year.
We have a food pantry that gave away 160,000 pounds of food in 2021 and will give away much more than that in 2022.
We have a brand-new ministry preparing bags of food to be given out to the growing number of homeless camps in our city.
We have a small but very faithful group of people who drive down to the middle of it all and cook and serve breakfast early in the morning the first Sunday of each month at the Community Kitchen.
We have new small groups which are meeting and growing.
We are offering, through the Holston Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, Free Camp in the Community for a week this summer—it’s a way to reach out to our community with the love of Christ.
And there is so much more.
This place is alive and jumping!!!
It’s an exciting place to be.
Yes, God is doing great things and we are on a precipice where we are poised for God to do much, much, much greater things than these.
But we must jump right in.
We must try.
We aren’t gonna do things perfectly, but will we do the best we can?
We must love with action!
John says that “this is how we know we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence.”
And who doesn’t need rest for their hearts?
My fellow saints, God loves us pure and simple, flaws and all, and it is this amazing grace that frees us to love others.
And this knowledge of God’s love and grace, if we allow it, can so fill us that we are able to pour ourselves out for others without worrying that there won’t be enough love left for ourselves or anything else.
And you know…
…this love is highly infectious.
Once we truly experience and live into the love of God in Jesus Christ, we are compelled to spread it however imperfectly, not so much by what we say but by what we do.
And how freeing is that?
Praise God.
Amen.
