A sermon by Pastor Noel Anderson at First Presbyterian Church of Upland
TEXT: 1 JOHN 4: 7-12 CEB
7 Dear friends, let's love each other, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is born from God and knows God. 8 The person who doesn't love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how the love of God is revealed to us: God has sent his only Son into the world so that we can live through him. 10 This is love: it is not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as the sacrifice that deals with our sins. 11 Dear friends, if God loved us this way, we also ought to love each other. 12 No one has ever seen God. If we love each other, God remains in us and his love is made perfect in us. †
LOVE & LOVE UNLIMITED
Yes, we know it’s all about love. Love is the core value of the Christian heart and practice. More than that, our text says, “God is Love,” but with the word love referring to everything from casual sex to the grace of God, we need to ask what kind of love is God?
Most agnostics and/or ex-believers love to quote this passage, but I suspect when they affirm that God is love, what they’re thinking is “Love is God,” which is not the same thing.
When the Bible says God is love, it isn’t an invitation to discard the personhood of the Trinity in favor of something abstract like human love. God is love—he is the source of all love and love is not a trait among other traits in his being, but the core characteristic of God’s nature and being. To say that love is God is to say that our small, flawed notions and experience of earthly loves somehow amount to divine status is absurd at best, idolatrous at worst.
Furthermore, God is not LUV—sentimental warm fuzzy-ism as expressed in Hallmark cards, Precious Moments figurines, and the Lifetime network—also popularized in the 60s with added hallucinogens.
The Bible tells us that God’s love is agapé love—self-emptying, self-sacrificial love—seen most evidently in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This is a higher love than the high luv of the 60s.
If God is love, we must be prepared to take love far more seriously. God is holy, so when we think of love we must remember that love is holiness. There is nothing higher or holier than the love that God is.
Love is righteousness, though we don’t tend to think of it in that way. Love is justice in the same sense.
LOVE & THE VIRTUES
Love is always mentioned in the New Testament lists we’ve covered in this series, but that is a flaw, for love is not a virtue among other virtues, but rather it stands before and after all the virtues. Love is found within all the gifts of the Spirit we’ve discussed in this series:
joy
peace
patience
kindness
goodness
gentleness
self-control
All of these gifts define Christian character, and though we may see these as separate gifts, like islands in the sea, beneath the surface they all radiate from the one love which fuels them.
As in a prism which begins with a beam of white light and splays into all the colors of the rainbow, so love is manifest in all the gifts with all their differences.
As we seek to become more Christlike disciples of Jesus, it is not necessary that we mount campaigns to develop each of these virtues and spiritual gifts.
When we love, we manifest all the virtues.
LOVING OUR WAY FORWARD
How we love may feel like it is not particularly within our personal control, but it is. Yes, we fall to some loves more easily than others, but when our hearts are oriented as they are designed by God to be, loving and loving broadly become effortless.
Scripture calls us to three basic loves:
- 1.Love God [above all, before all, with whole heart, soul, mind, and strength].
- 2.Love others [our neighbors]
- 3.Love yourself [as an essential prerequisite to loving others].
I learned these at the YMCA Camp Lackey as a nine-year-old, put into the brilliant, little formula of JOY:
Jesus first
Others second
Yourself third
That’s basic, but if we want to play in the major leagues of Christian discipleship, we must add one more:
- 1.Love Your Enemies
“It’s hard to love my enemies!” I hear. Join the club. By enemies, we ought not to think about geo-political enemies—like North Koreans or Iranians—but rather the people in our own circles whom we find very difficult to love.
We judge; we can’t help it. Others who are any source of pain to us are our enemies. Others who rub us the wrong way, insult us, get on our nerves, betray us, disappoint us—these are our “enemies” whom we must learn to love.
“No, no!” you say, “Give me North Koreans! Give me Iranians! Anyone but my cousin Louie who is driving me to my wits’ end!” Yep, that’s your enemy to love.
It may feel impossible, but that is why we have commandment number one: to love God first, foremostly, with our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength. Loving God is the necessary prerequisite to loving our enemies.
“But I do love God; I just can’t deal with Louie!”
No matter who our Louie is, our task is the same: to love and to forgive without conditions or boundaries.
It works like this:
- 1.God loves Louie (your enemy).
- 2.Think about #1 and dwell on it a bit.
- 3.God loves Louie more than you can possibly fathom or imagine.
- 4.If you don’t stand with Louie, you stand against God’s love.
- 5.If God is for Louie, how can you oppose Louie without opposing God?
- 6.If God stands with Louie in love, your grudge will become that which distances you from God.
- 7.If you love God with any heart at all, you will love those whom God loves, and stand with God in loving them.
- 8.That includes Louie (sorry!).
BETTER THAN CHURCH
My first call to ministry was in Dallas, Texas. I visited the Hard Rock Café and was stunned by what I saw. In large letters around a stained glass window—very much like a church, I thought—were the words:
LOVE ALL SERVE ALL
It turns out that this is the Hard Rock Café’s motto, logo, and mission statement. “What?” I thought, “at the Hard Rock Café? That should be our logo!” Thirty-four years later, I still feel it: it should be the logo of our church and every church.
Finally, as we prepare to come to the table, it may help to remember exactly how powerfully God’s love affects us and our ideas. We live most of our lives in forms of competition and evaluation. We seek competence and excellence and do so by measuring ourselves against others, but we do so at our own peril, because we are all connected by God’s love.
We may appear to be separate—appear to one another as separate islands—but in reality, we are all kin, all connected, and all equally recipients of God’s love.
This table offers us an invitation into that love which is God. Our only prerequisite is our willingness to receive. Jesus says, “Take. Eat.” It is almost like a command, so eager is the Lord’s love to have us reconciled. The invitation is for us to enter that love, to follow, to eat and be fed for lives of unlimited, extraordinary love.
That is the life that looks like Jesus, never moreso than when we get around to loving our enemies, because that is how God loved (and loves) us.
While we were yet sinners, God’s love in the form of Jesus came and offered grace for our sins.
Take. Eat. Receive. Love all, serve all. †