LOVE...

1 John 4

This new series of messages was shared at some meetings in school and has been in my heart and on my mind for a long time at least. I am calling the series, “The Greatest of These Is Love.” What I would like to do this time is give you about ten reasons why I believe this is what we should focus on for the foreseeable future in our witnessing and worship. I’ll begin with the more biblical and theological reasons and move to the more experiential and personal.

1. God Is Love
1 John 4:8 says, “The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” And 1 John 4:16 says, “We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” This is a massive claim. And we will have to come back to it in time to unpack it more fully. But it seems like the deepest starting place I could think of for a series of messages on love. God is love. In a word I think it means something like: God’s absolute fullness of life and truth and beauty and goodness and all other perfections is such that he is not only self-sufficient, but also, in his very nature, overflowing. God is so absolute, so perfect, so complete, so full, so inexhaustibly resourceful, so joyful, that he is by nature a Giver, a Worker for others, a Helper, a Protector. What it means to be God is to be full enough always to overflow and never to need—never murmur, never pout. God is love. The implications of this for the way we live are big.

2. Loving Each Other Is Like Loving God
One time a lawyer asked Jesus (Matthew 22:36), “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” In other words, tell us what is the most important commandment of all the hundreds of Old Testament commandments? Jesus answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and foremost commandment.” But then the lawyer got more than he bargained for. Jesus didn’t stop. He said (in Matthew 22:39), “The second is like it [an utterly key phrase for us now!], “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The second reason for a series of messages on love is that Jesus said loving each other is like loving God. The two commandments are inseparable. We need to study that too. But for now just marvel at it, and let it motivate you to be engaged with this quest we are setting out on. The great commandment is: Love God with all you are. The commandment to love your neighbor is “like it.”

3. Love of Neighbor Fulfills the Law
In the very next verse, Matthew 22:40, Jesus says, “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.” Everything else hangs on these commands of love. Whatever else there is in the Christian faith and in the life of obedience, it all hangs on this. But even more amazing is what Paul says in Romans 13:8–10, “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. (9) For this, ‘You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,’ and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ (10) Love does no wrong to a neighbor; love therefore is the fulfillment of the law.” Here Paul is willing to say that love of neighbor is a fulfilling of the law—he doesn’t mention loving God. We will need to ask why. But the point here is that love between humans is so crucial that Paul says, when it really happens, it is the fulfilling of all God’s teachings.

4. Faith Expresses Itself Through Love
In Galatians 5:6 Paul says, “In Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love.” “Faith working through love.” What this verse means is that love is the way faith expresses itself and proves in life that it is real. Without love faith is dead. This is what James meant when he wrote, “Faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself” (James 2:17). So the works of love are the evidence of living faith. Without them a church is dead and a heart is dead. Here’s the way John put it in 1 John 3:14, “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love abides in death.” Where love is absent faith is dead and we are dead—no matter whatever else is happening.

5. Love for Each Other Is the Badge of Christianity
In John 13:34–35 Jesus says, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. (35) By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” I personally like it when people put fish symbols on their cars and wear crosses and put “Hope in God” signs in house windows—but if you ask Jesus: what’s the mark of a Christian that will set them off and help the world know that they are your disciples, his answer would be—his answer was—”By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Love for each other in the church is the badge of Christianity.
In the book of Acts Luke is eager to show that one of the first effects of salvation and community life in Christ is practical, costly care for one another. Acts 2:45: “They began selling their property and possessions, and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need.” In other words, meeting needs in the church was more important than personal possession. This is very God-like. Recall He is so full and content that He is by nature LOVE—giving, caring, helping, supporting, protecting. Love among Christians is the mark of Christ in the church. By this will all men know that you are my disciples.

6. The Goal of Our Instruction Is Love
In 1 Timothy 1:5 Paul tells us what he aims at in all his teaching: “The goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.” In all his teaching, and all his late night instruction, and all his study with the books and the parchments the aim was love. Yes, from a pure heart, and yes, from sincere faith in Christ (no love without it!), but still the aim of it all was a loving church. And that means the aim of all my preaching and the aim of all your study and reading and discussing must be love.
The last four reasons become more contemporary and contextual and experiential and urgent and personal.

7. Torch the Glacier of Coldness and Hate
In Matthew 24:9–12 Jesus gave a description of what the last times would be like. He described them in terms of hate and love. He said,

They will deliver you to tribulation, and will kill you, and you will be hated by all nations on account of My name. And at that time many will fall away and will deliver up one another and hate one another. [So there will be hatred from the outside and hatred on the inside of the church.] And many false prophets will arise, and will mislead many. And because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will grow cold.

So it feels to me like there is a kind of end time urgency to this series of messages. Hate will be multiplied from the outside against the church. Hate will increase inside the church as one betrays another to the authorities. And love, everywhere, will grow cold.
Now with all my heart I believe this dire prediction does not have to be your destiny, or the destiny of this church—or even this city. That it is going to be true far and wide does not mean it has to be true for any particular person or church. But if it is not to be, we must know the forces against us. It will be like a spiritual glacier moving over the world and the church. Love will survive and thrive where we consciously torch the glacier with the power of Christ and the Holy Spirit with a view to loving each other rather than hating each other. It will be an uphill battle, against many forces. May God give us grace, partly through these messages, to torch the glacier of coldness and hate.

8. Show the World Another Way to Relate
Our nation is permeated with a spirit of varying degrees of hatred and rancor and mean-spiritedness. It ranges from Nazi-like skinheads declaring open hatred for Jews and any non-whites, to children killing their parents, to gangs dealing almost entirely in a tone and atmosphere of anger, to radio talk-shows that capitalize on people’s unseemly love for cutting cleverness, to politicians who know that the soundbite is not long enough for a fair consideration of the alternative view, and who, therefore, choose the most emotionally loaded phrase to demonize and undermine not only the viewpoint of the other side, but also the character of its proponent. Every day the newspaper documents a nation of hate and meanness.
Which more and more brings to mind the words of the Scripture (2 Timothy 3:1–5):

But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God; holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; and avoid such men as these.

9. Differences Are Golden Opportunities for Love
Inside the church we have differences that call for deep and real and relentless love toward one another.
It is in the midst of difference that we have our golden opportunity. When everything is going well, and we are all standing around a nice little circle, there is not much to be seen by the world. But when we come to the place where there is a real difference and we exhibit uncompromisable principles but at the same time observable love, then there is something that the world can see, something they can use to judge that these really are Christians and Jesus has indeed been sent by the Father.

10. I Long Personally to Grow in Love
Finally, the tenth reason for a series of messages on love is that I long personally to grow in love. I take heart from the apostle Paul that love is not an all-or-nothing affair. It is something you can grow in. So he prays in Philippians 1:9, “I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment.” That’s what I want, as I get older.
I am keenly aware that no man on his deathbed ever looked up into the eyes of his family and friends and said, “I wish I’d spent more time at the office.”  I ask for your prayers and I ask for your patience.