A girl gave a photo to a boy she was dating with this inscription on the back. “Dear Johnny, the last two weeks have been the best of my whole life. I will love you as long as the stars shine and until the oceans run dry. Love Susan. p.s. If we break up I want this picture back.”
We know instinctively what real love isn’t, but it can be a little slippery to define what real love is. But that’s what I want to try to do this morning, by looking at this passage of Scripture in which the beloved disciple gives us some insight into what real love looks like.
Real Love is Counter Cultural
11This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. 12Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous. 13Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you. 14We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. 15Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him.
Remember those commercials with the punch line “That’s not natural?” I’m thinking along those same lines here about genuine love. This is why love has to be commanded. It runs contrary to our fallen nature and to our society. Oh our society “loves.” Jesus talks about that, He says that even sinners love (agape!) those that love them. Even the world loves as long as you make me happy. The love we’re commanded to have though is counter cultural.
Cain is offered up as an example of the natural state of fallen man. His brother does what is right before God, becomes an irritation to him and he whacks him. John says, don’t be surprised if the world hates you too. If you really are living a counter cultural life, a life of love, a life like Jesus, you’ll be a stench to those who aren’t living that life. You’re a goody-two-shoes. Why, you’re just trying to make them look like heathens.
Still we are commanded to have a counter cultural love. In fact to not have love the kind of sacrificial, active love we’re going to talk about in a few minutes, is to hate and to hate is the same as to murder. It’s very black and white here. There’s no room for cool distance from a brother or a sister you don’t particularly care for. It’s wholehearted sacrificial love, or it’s hate and murder.
I’d say that’s a counter cultural idea.
Real Love is Sacrificial
16This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. 17If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?
You want to know what love looks like? Look no further than the cross of Christ, John tells us. This is how we know what love is. Jesus died for us.
Romans 5:7-8 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
If this is our demonstration of real love, gone then is any excuse that I will love when I decide my brother or sister has become deserving of it. No rather for my love to be genuine I sacrifice my rights in favor of those who in my estimation are unlovely—in particular within the church.
Love is forgiving a debt you have a right to demand be paid. Love is sharing with others not just out of your abundance, but out of what you really need yourself—whether that be money, time or sweet corn.
Real Love is Action
18Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.
Real love looks less like two beautiful Hollywood stars arm in arm on the beach and looks more like a room on the cancer ward where a loving husband reassures his bride ravaged by disease that she’s still the most beautiful girl in the world to him.
Love looks less like big donations made publicly to have a wing of the hospital named for the donor and more like an anonymous hero laboring by the sweat of her brow in the shadows.
Love looks less like gushing letters promising unending devotion and more like a spouse hurt, betrayed and confused, deciding to forgive and work things out.
Love is accepting others as less than perfect, but still choosing to think the best rather than assume the worst.
Real love is not some giddy feeling I get when I think about a special person, real love is a decision to place someone’s welfare above my own when I don’t feel particularly warm and fuzzy about them.
Real Love is Evidence of Transformation
14We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers.
19This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence 20whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.
This is how I know I have experienced God’s transforming power, this is how I know I’m saved and how I have peace about eternal matters: When I look at my life I see in evidence counter cultural, sacrificial, active love.
When I have a juicy bit of information about the person being talked about and I suppress the desire to add it, I know God is at work on me. Conversely, if I don’t suppress it, then I have reason to question if I’ve really been transformed.
When I give not a second thought to giving to a brother or sister in need, simply because they need it and not because I’ll get credit, I know God’s at work in me.
When I swallow my pride and go to someone to ask forgiveness for a long ago slight or feud, then I know God is at work in me.
And when I see God at work in me, I have evidence for myself of my salvation and my eternal destiny.
CONCLUSION
Irish-born Amy Carmichael lived a life that was a textbook example of the kind of love we’ve been talking about. Amy was sure God was calling her to be a missionary. But when she applied to China Inland Mission, she was rejected. She was told she was too frail for the stressful demands of missionary life. But Amy wouldn’t take no for an answer. She found another organization that was willing to send her and soon set sail for Japan. eventually she ended up in South India, where she would serve as a missionary for the rest of her life.
In India, Amy encountered practices that both shocked and grieved her. Children were being forced into prostitution as a part of religious rituals. Amy made it her goal to rescue as many as she could from this fate.
When Amy was in her 60s, she fell and broke a leg. She also injured her spine, which left her bedridden for the rest of her life. But that didn’t end her work. She seized the opportunity to write. It was during this time that Amy wrote If. The booklet came in response to a young member of the Fellowship who wasn’t grasping the gospel. This troubled Amy. She wondered if it was because she had failed to demonstrate Christ’s love through her actions. Those thoughts kept her awake all night. By morning, she had written what would become a tool for many wanting to understand the meaning of "Calvary love."
I found an excerpt of that booklet which I present to you this morning pretty much as I found it at the Christianity Today website. I’d like to invite you to read along with me and I’d like to use this as a tool for self examination. You’ll notice before each line I’ve given you a check block. As we read through I’d like to ask you to invite the Holy Spirit to convict you of three of these that represent areas you need the Lord to work on in your life, and then keep this sheet in your Bible and make it a part of your devotions for the next week or so, pray over these things, ask the Lord to change you from the inside out.
Now, let’s lay some ground rules up front. I confess as I was reading through this I was wanting to check blocks for other people. Do you know what I’m talking about? So as we read through, ask the Lord to help you look inside and don’t be reaching over to make checks on you neighbor’s paper.
From “If” by Amy Carmichael
• If I have not compassion on my fellowservant, even as my Lord had pity on me, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
• If I can easily discuss the shortcomings and the sins of any; if I can speak in a casual way even of a child’s misdoings, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
• If I can enjoy a joke at the expense of another; if I can in any way slight another in conversation, or even in thought, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
• If I can write an unkind letter, speak an unkind word, think an unkind thought without grief and shame, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
• If I put my own good name before the other’s highest good, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
• If I myself dominate myself, if my thoughts revolve around myself, if I am so occupied with myself I rarely have "a heart at leisure from itself," then I know nothing of Calvary love.
• If I cannot in honest happiness take the second place (or twentieth); if I cannot take the first without making a fuss about my unworthiness, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
• If I do not give a friend "the benefit of the doubt," but put the worst construction instead of the best on what is said or done, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
• If I take offense easily; if I am content to continue in a cool unfriendliness, though friendship be possible, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
• If a sudden jar can cause me to speak an impatient, unloving word, then I know nothing of Calvary love. For a cup brimful of sweet water cannot spill even one drop of bitter water, however suddenly jolted.
• If I say, "Yes, I forgive, but I cannot forget," as though the God, who twice a day washes all the sands on all the shores of all the world, could not wash such memories from my mind, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
• If souls can suffer alongside, and I hardly know it, because the spirit of discernment is not in me, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
• If the praise of man elates me and his blame depresses me; if I cannot rest under misunderstanding without defending myself; if I love to be loved more than to love, to be served more than to serve, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
• If in the fellowship of service I seek to attach a friend to myself, so that others are caused to feel unwanted; if my friendships do not draw others deeper in, but are ungenerous, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
That which I know not, teach Thou me, O Lord, my God.
