"love Is Not A Concept"

“Love is Not a Concept”

1 John 4:7-21

Last week I finished reading a best-selling novel written by Barbara Kingsolver called “Demon Copperhead.”

It’s set in the mountains of Southern Appalachia and starts when the protagonist, a boy named Damon who comes to be called Demon is born.

Born to a single teenage drug-addicted mother in a single-wide trailer he starts out with the cards stacked against him.

After his mother dies of an overdose, he finds himself in the foster care system at age eleven.

Many of the foster care parents were only concerned with getting a monthly check for being a foster parent and didn’t care a bit about the children.

Demon ended up doing almost slave labor on a farm, working in a trash dump fronted for a meth lab, and trying to survive on his own despite the cruelty of his foster parents.

Clair started reading the book immediately after I finished it, and I remarked to her how I can’t imagine growing up without the sense of security and stability which comes from having caring, responsible parents where you never have to question your worth nor fear for your security.

I don’t know if I could have survived without that, and yet that is the reality of so many children and adults in this world.

What would it feel like never to have been loved, not even by a mom and dad?

How could you cope?

How could you, yourself, even know what love is without having experienced it?

(pause)

In our Scripture passage for this morning, John talks about the love of God, which is so different from what many people experience in our world.

It’s a love so unique that the early Christians took an old colorless Greek word that was hardly used and adopted it—giving it new and rich meaning.

That word is agape, it’s love that gives without expecting a return, sacrificially.

It is unconditional and exists even when we don’t do anything to deserve it.

And it’s a love that searches for us like a shepherd looking for a lost sheep and a woman searching for a priceless coin.

It’s a love that cares for us beyond imagination, it’s a love that yearns for us and won’t rest until we are found.

And when it finds us and wraps its arms around us, it throws a party so big that everyone around—even the angels in heaven—are invited to celebrate.

The Bible tells us that this Agape Love, this searching, yearning, unconditional love, is non-other than God Himself—the Creator of the Universe and all that is in it.

And when we come to experience this amazing love for ourselves, it changes us, it takes hold of us, and it won’t let us go—even though, in our lost and sinful state, we often try and run away from it.

But once we have experienced it, try as we might, we can’t get away.

Once God is allowed to get His loving arms around us, He never gives up His embrace.

We can turn away from Him, but He never turns from us.

John has been embraced by this love, transformed by this love, and filled with this love.

And so, he is able to write with great confidence, “Love comes from God…

…This is how God showed his love among us: He send his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him…

…we love because he first loved us.”

It almost seems too good to be true.

In this vast and often ugly and cruel world, where people do such awful things to one another and where terrible calamities strike, could it be true?

Could it be real?

Is it really possible to live in this love and this love in us to the point where we can “know and rely on the love God has for us”?

Could it be true?

Is it possible?

Sometimes it is easier to feel unloveable than loved.

I’ve shared the following story with you before, but it begs to be repeated.

One day in college, I was walking across campus when I happened along an older woman who was in one of my classes and attended the same campus Bible study as I.

We got to talking, and when we did, the topic turned to God and heaven and hell.

The woman surprised me when she said, “I believe in Jesus, and I believe in heaven, and it will be a wonderful place, but I won’t be there.”

When I asked why she felt this way, her answer was, “I’m not good enough.”

It turns out that as a young girl her father sexually abused her and repeatedly told her by his words and his actions that she was no good, that she was unloveable, that no one would ever love her, she didn’t measure up.