1 John 4:7-11, 19-21
7Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
19We love because he first loved us. 20Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. 21And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.
Don’t Be a Liar; Love with More than Love-Song Love
I have a music trivia question for you today: What do the Beatles and Taylor Swift have in common? They both have exactly 11 songs with the word “love” in its title. That’s a lot, right? Even for those songs that don’t have “Love” in the title, many more not only mention but also focus on the concept of love. Love is a very common subject for music.
11 songs with “Love” in its title. That’s a lot. But it doesn’t even hold a candle to the 20 times that that same word appears in the 8 verses we read in John’s fist letter earlier today. 20 times in 8 verses! John has a lot to say about love – what it is, what it looks like, what it does, where it comes from – how central and necessary it is for our faith and life as Christians.
Of course there’s a big difference between the kind of love that inspires love songs and the kind of love that we find in the Bible. Love songs are emotional. God’s love, though, is volitional, which means that it is a matter of choice. In love songs, love happens to you. In the Bible, you who and when and how much you love.
Love songs are ethereal and ephemeral, which means that the love they talk about is delicate and fragile and short-lived; the slightest change in the wind could scatter it to smithereens like dandelion seeds. God’s love, though, is indomitable and enduring – no outside force can corrupt or compromise or conquer it; it can and will survive anything.
Love songs are transactional and conditional. If your love isn’t returned, then either it turns into an unhealthy obsession or it dissolves into a memory. God’s love, though, is selfless and one-sided. He continues to love unlovable people even though/when his love goes unrequited.
My question for you is, do we love with love-song love, or do we love with God’s love?
I know a 3-year-old, who shall remain nameless, who, when he’s feeling upset with someone, will say, “I don’t love you.” In the case of this particular 3-year-old, I happen to know that his parents don’t play any Taylor Swift for him. So where does he get this highly emotional form of love from?
It’s born in him. It’s born in all of us. Selfishness is natural. Bitterness and resentment come to us as easily as breathing does. Maybe you’ve had conflict with people you love (or loved. Maybe it was something serious. Maybe it was something silly, like a well-intentioned but poorly-executed joke. Do you act like a 3-year-old and – if only internally – say something like, “I don’t love you anymore”?
If you do then this thing that had once been beautiful and precious is shattered and broken beyond repair – not only because of what that other person did, but because of how you reacted emotionally instead of selflessly and volitionally.
Sometimes we treat love like a Faberge Egg – a delicate, precious thing that is priceless in no small part due to its fragility. And there’s some truth to that. Words hurt. Actions scar. People sin against us and do serious damage not only to our relationship with them, but to our own psyche and the way that we think or feel about ourselves. A loving relationship is fragile and easily broken.
And when it is damaged, the temptation is to react with disbelief and anger and indignation. “We had a good thing going and you ruined it!” It’s so easy to let resentment spread like a cancer throughout our bodies - not only in our hearts but also in our minds and in our mouths, and our feet and our hands. It’s so tempting to seek retribution or give in to the Schadenfreude and shamefully rejoice in any and every bad thing that happens to them.
In other words, we hate them. We block them. We shut off communication with them. We close off our hearts to them. We smother whatever embers of love are left, and instead we breathe life into the bitterness that is waiting in the wings. We hold grudges. Maybe we even seek retribution; we speak ill of them; we poison other people’s perspectives of them.
When this emotional, ethereal, ephemeral version of love gets broken, it can get ugly and quickly.
But that’s never what love was meant to be.
Love is an Otterbox. Love is a fireproof safe. Love is one of those airbag vests that inflates when it senses a fall. But the thing inside the phone case, the fireproof safe – the thing the airbag is protecting – is not your fragile emotional state. It’s your conscious, deliberate goodwill toward that person.
Now, I get it. It’s hard to love other people. But have you ever put that shoe on the other foot? Have you stopped to think how hard it is for God to love you?
John points out a problem that was not unique to the Christians living 2,000 years ago. He says:
Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar.[1]
Imagine how disingenuous that looks to God. It’s like carving, “I love you,” into the side of his car with your key. You might think you’re making this grand gesture of your love to the Lord, but you’re destroying something else that he loves. In the same way, if you say that you love God, but you express hatred – in attitude or action – toward your neighbour, you’re destroying something else that he loves, e.g. your neighbour’s well-being, the relationship he wants you to have with each other.
You can’t pretend that by coming to church on Sunday, it doesn’t matter what you do – or don’t do – on every other day of the week. You can’t pretend that because you’re working on your spiritual life, your earthly life doesn’t matter. It’s all one! Love reveals itself, not by what it says but by what it does. If your neighbour feels no warmth or light from you, then it’s a sign that something is dead somewhere inside of you.
If it’s hard to love other people when they hurt us, imagine how hard it is for God to love you.
But that’s exactly what God does. He loves you. He loved you first. He showed you what true love looks like by putting it into action. He sent his Son for you, to be a ransom for you.
John uses an interesting word here. It’s only used twice in the entire Bible and the other time was just a few verses earlier. It’s a strange word, but it shares the same root as the word God uses for mercy.
You know what mercy is, don’t you? Mercy is what I would cry in desperation when my brother was beating the living snot out of me for being a living snot to him. Mercy is what the police officer gives you when he doesn’t write you a speeding ticket even though he caught you going 15km/hr over the speed limit. Mercy is not giving someone the punishment that they deserve for their behaviour.
And do you know how God accomplished that mercy for the first several millennia of the world? Substitutionary sacrifice. A lamb or a bull or a dove would symbolically take your place and symbolically suffer the punishment for your sins by paying for them with its life. It would be sacrificed, i.e. killed, offered on the altar to appease God’s justice. But those sacrifices were just symbols, band-aids, temporary stop-gap measures.
Jesus, on the other hand, was the real deal. There was nothing symbolic about his sacrifice. He was your substitute. He took your place on the cross and suffered the penalty for your sin, so that you would be cleansed of it.
That’s the love of God for you. That’s what real love looks like. It’s not emotional, ethereal or ephemeral. It’s volitional, indomitable and enduring. It was a conscious decision. It couldn’t be swayed or compromised or conquered by adversity, anger or apathy. It was strong enough to survive our sin and endure into eternity. It’s a love that is self-sacrificing, i.e. that is willing to suffer inconvenience and even pain to bring benefit and blessing to you.
This love wasn’t easy. It wasn’t cheap. It cost God a great deal, but he was willing to give it because that’s what love is and does.
And that’s why John starts this section the way he does:
Dear friends [re: Beloved], let us love one another, for love comes from God.[2]
Love for one another is not a demand God makes of you to earn his love for you. Love is the condition you live in. Beloved is your status in his eyes. Love gives you confidence for life in heaven and purpose for life on earth – because God loves you, love one another.
It’s hard, but it’s simple at the same time. And, in many cases, it’s something you’re doing already. It’s something I’ve seen in that unnamed 3-year-old. If godly love is the willingness to inconvenience yourself to bring benefit to someone else, then love among Christians is a child sharing his snack or his toys even though it means that he won’t be able to enjoy them himself.
Love among Christians is not only staying in a marriage that has long since progressed past its honeymoon period, but being committed to be kind and compassionate and caring to the person who has the closest access to your heart (and sometimes hurts you more than anyone else could).
Love among Christians is giving up your holidays or a job opportunity or the years you meant to spend in restful retirement so that you can take care of your aging parents or assist in raising your children’s children.
Love among Christians is cheerfully spending your hard-earned income on school and sports and social activities for your spouse or children (without complaining about what it’s cost you – the rounds of golf you don’t get to play, the hobbies you put on hold, etc…)
You ask John, Paul, Ringo and George – you ask Taylor – what love is, and they’ll tell you one thing. God will tell you another. He’ll point you to his Son as proof of how selfless, volitional, indomitable and enduring true love really is. God didn’t just tell us that he is love. He showed his love by what he did for us. And he calls you to do the same. If you love him – because you love him who loved you first – love one another. Amen.
[1] 1 John 4:20
[2] 1 John 4:7