"love In Action"

“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.