Let us Love...God is Love”

A sermon based upon 1 John 4: 7-21

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership, 

Sunday, October 25th^th, 2020 (Growing In Grace)

What makes the world go ’round?  What makes people ‘tick’?   What makes ‘life’ worth living?  

Recently, I watch a movie about the life of Harriet Tubman, the runaway slave who became one of the leaders of the Underground Railroad.   Early in the story, Harriet had run away from her cruel master and was being pursued by a posse with dogs.  She was surrounded on a bridge over a rushing river.  She knew that to jump could mean that she would drown and die.  When her Slave Master confronted her,  she looked at him, then the water, and she jumped.   To her, in that moment, to have freedom was worth the risk of dying.    She survived, and she eventually brought almost 900 others to freedom too.   She also became the first woman in American military history to lead an armed militia during the Civil War.   For Harriet, to have freedom ‘made her world go around’.  

In our global economy, many people would say that money is what makes the world go ’round.   During the Coronavirus scar, the number one preoccupation of many was what was happening to the stock value.   In other words, what good is ‘freedom’ if you don’t have money to spend to do what you want?  

Others might also say that power is makes the world go ’round.   This is a political year and there’s been a lot of debate and mud-slinging too.  Both political parties have spent millions trying to gain the office of President.   Why do Billionaires try to get elected, and why do people spend much more money that the job will pay to gain their office?   The hunger for power, status, and recognition and status in human DNA.

Another major headline in recent years has been Sex Abuse and the Me-Too Movement.   What we have known for a long time is that Sex sells.  In an attempt to make even more money from it and to have ‘sex appeal’, the result is more sex crimes, more sexual confusion, more pornography and more degradation and corruption of God’s gift for marriage.    Today, pornography is now multi-billion-dollar business. Porn web sites draws over 100 million people into its trash a month.   For much of the world, Sex is what makes the world go around.

However, by studying the New Testament closely, and especially reading this small this book we call First John, you find a whole different understanding.   Taking his que from the teaching of Jesus, John would say that ‘love makes the world’ go around.   Love for God, and then love of Neighbor and to love yourself too.  

Reading this Bible, especially this book of the Bible,  John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, wrote:  “This kind of love is the medicine of life, the never failing remedy for all the evils of a disordered world, and for all the miseries and vices of the human race.  The religion we long to establish in the world, is a religion of love and joy and peace.”  

Makes you almost want to be a Methodist, doesn’t it?   But we already knew this, or should have known it.   For in this very brief New Testament Letter of John written to a very young church, we find some of the most important ‘love’ language in all the New Testament .  We also find one of the most concepts of the entire Bible, repeated twice in today’s text: “God is Love” (4:8,16).

LOVE’S PROSPECT:    EVERYONE WHO LOVES…   (7)     

Let’s start out with the first line of our text, which points to everything I want to say and want you to take home with you today: “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God”. 

We’ve been talking about Spiritual growth and maturity; growing in the grace of the Lord Jesus.   This is what John is discussing.  His point is that when we are ‘born of God’ and when we ‘know God’ we will want to learn to love like God has loved us.   This is the prospect of God’s love.   It has that kind of impact on us.  As this text draws to a conclusion it will also say:  “WE LOVE BECAUSE GOD FIRST LOVED US” (19). 

Love is the goal of all Christian Faith.   We have faith in God so that we can learn to love God, to love others, and to love ourselves.  This is why love is the most important facet of our faith.   This is why John says “God is love”.   But don’t misunderstand.   This doesn’t say ‘Love is God’, as if when you love you can do anything you wish.   No, this text means that ‘God is (like) love’ and true love is God-like. 

John could have also said God is ‘Faith’, or God is ‘Hope’.   Love is what happens when you know God.  Expressing true, faithful, compassionate love is the most important way to understand the nature of God.    The true nature of God is being revealed through the receiving and the giving of love.    

To put it simply: Love points us to God, just as God points us to love.  This is why love is so important in our lives and for the practice of true faith.  If we don’t get love right, then we don’t have the right understanding of God.   Love defines God and God defines love.   And it is so important for us get love right, because when love is missing in a person’s life, all kinds of things can go wrong. 

Don’t we know, by now, more than ever, what kind of things can go wrong in a human beings’ psyche when there is a loss and lack of love shown to them?    Aren’t we seeing it being reflected in our age of gender and sexual confusion?  What we need to understand is all that is going on in our culture today is not a result of willful sin and evil.  There is, of course, some of that going on too, but mainly what we see loose in this world is people being confused, broken, hurt because they have not been loved and do not know that God’s love is the foundation of everything.   When people look at themselves in the mirror and can’t stand who they are, and finally can’t feel secure in their own skin, and don’t know what gender they are what we see mostly see is not someone deciding to rebel against God, but we see someone who is broken because of human brokenness now bringing hurt and harm into their own souls.  

We also see this loss of love in in people who don’t know what sex is about.   We see this loss of true love in people who hurt themselves and who hurt others irreparably, which is too dark for us to mention in a polite, family-oriented way.   The point I’m making is not to judge or condemn people for their confusion, but to try to understand what is behind a large part of this.   When love goes wrong, when people don’t feel loved, when families don’t love as they should, when communities don’t create compassionate structures, when churches don’t live and preach love, as they should, then most everything else in life can go wrong  too.  

For when we miss the experience of real, meaningful love something will always go missing in our lives.  Without love, we can wander aimlessly until we find a way to fill that empty void within.  And it is only true, unconditional, compassionate and divinely inspired love that can fill the broken human spirit with what we need most of all.

While we can miss out on a lot of things---we can be poor, we can have physical challenges, or we have other problems.  But we can still recover and have a purposeful and meaningful life in spite of these kinds of problems.   But without love, as Paul said , we are nothing.  Without love, we have nothing, because love is everything.  Love is, as John Lennon wrote, ‘all we really need.’

When I was a teen, I was a late bloomer when it came to liking the Beatles.  And there was only one 45 single that I ever owned by them, and I played it over and over again:  “All You Need Is Love!   Love is all you need.”  I really liked the message of that song.  The message matched what I believed, even if the Beatles didn’t mean it exactly that way.   But again, what kind of love do we all really need?   Can we name it?   Can we say what love is and what love looks like?

For sure, love is the most important relational agenda of every person, every family and every church.  I don’t think we’ll find many who disagree.   But again, what is this love that is ‘all we need’?   That’s what need to try to define first.   

Love is most important in life.

The pre-occupation with love in this small letter is not an accident, nor is it incidental.  It’s very intentional.  John explains in his opening how the church is on the front line of what it means to ‘touch’ or experience the truth of Jesus first-hand in some concrete and experiential ways.   We get can reach out and touch Jesus through the genuine, relational, and loving fellowship we have with each other in the body of Christ.

Isn’t that how we all get to know love in our lives?  We don’t learn about love from a book, but through a parent, a family, a friend, a church or a community.    John Powell talks about the importance of receiving love.    In his book Why I’m Afraid Love?,  he spoke of how we all learn about love through our earliest experiences in life.   Most every character trait we will ever have is already formed by the time we are seven years old.  Nothing new really comes to us after that. 

Powell’s point is this:   Everything that turns out (or doesn’t) in our adult lives is shaped by the love we experience in our childhood.  This is why we must not only love and bless the children with love, we must give them love so that love continues to flow throughout all the relationships in our culture.  The rest of their lives is based on the loving experience they have in their young lives and what they do and don’t do later in life will be based upon the love they knew or didn’t know at a very young age.

Love also important for the church.    The one single human institution that is most responsible for both modeling and creating the atmosphere for becoming a loving loving families and relationships is the church.   If we in the church mess up showing and sharing love, how will the world know what love and what love means?  We have to get love right.  This is why John is so emphatic about love as the mark of true knowledge of God.  Whoever loves, knows God.  Whoever doesn’t love, doesn’t know God.  John says that the gospel truth is as simple as that.   

I’m so glad I grew up in a loving home, and in most cases a loving church.  But I’ll have to also admit my family wasn’t perfect, nor was the church or churches I knew.   Both were very human places, full of great potential and sometimes containing problems and challenges.   But in both home and church it was the continuing and constant commitment to love each other, even when we couldn’t do it very well, that got us through even the worst and most difficult times.  

What I learned in those difficult times is that when you have a genuine promise and commitment to love; even when you share misunderstandings and disagreements, you will still get through even the most challenging times.  But if you don’t have a commitment to loving and caring about each other, about listening to each other and trying to understand, even the best of families and the best of churches can fall apart and can be difficult to recover from the hurt and the pain.

I can think of several situations when I was both and or knew about churches struggling to get through a lack of love.   A couple of those churches have never fully recovered from the brokenness and lost of trust they experienced.   And so often, or should I say most often, in those churches the issues were trivial,  but the situations became hurtful, even dire, mostly because people would not stay together and do the challenging, difficult, but also very rewarding work of love.

Love always takes work; in a family, in a marriage, and in a church too.  For you see, the church functions very much like a family.  The difference is, however, that a church family is voluntary, and you can walk away from it when things get tough.   That’s unfortunate too, because the greatest growth and maturity comes when we have to stay together, work together and pray together whether we agree with each other or not.

LOVE’S PERFECTION:        BY THIS WE KNOW…  13      

Do you know why it’s so important for humans to do the challenging, but rewarding work of love?   Our text points to this.   Doing the hard work of love pays off.  It pays great dividends.   John says love makes us complete in everything we have the potential to become.  This is he means he says that ‘love is perfected in us’ (12).  What kind of ‘perfection’ is this?

Self-Assurance comes from love.

Love gives us confidence, makes us sure about who we are, who we belong to, and what matters most in life.   As John writes in this text, when we love, we gain the certainty and the assurance that we need to know that we are indeed, children of God.

We see this same kind of assurance developing in children who grow up in stable, strong, loving families, don’t we?   When a child knows they are loved they come to believe they can be, do, and accomplish most anything.  Great feelings of confidence and self-assurance remain a part of their whole childhood and adult life all because when they were most vulnerable, they knew, beyond any doubt that they were love and are loved, unconditionally, without any hesitation.

Spiritual assurance and maturity come from love too.

In order to love, as John says in this letter, a Christian must receive love.  We love because God first loved us.  And when we know love. We can love and will love others.  ‘Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God’ (7).   We know God because of God’s love, and we know love, because of God’s love for us: “God’s love was revealed in this way…God sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins….God loved us this much (9-10).   It is based on this ‘revelation of love’ in Jesus on the cross, that love can be ‘perfected in us’ (12), John says.  

We can’t see God, but we can and do see what God does for us.  WHAT HAS GOD DONE FOR US?:   God loves us.  Jesus died to reveal that love, so that we can come to trust in God’s love in Jesus and so that God can live in us, and love can grow be ‘perfected’ in us as we love others (12).   And God’s love is about growing up, reaching maturity and being made ‘perfect’ or ‘complete’...John says.   When we love we ‘know that we abide in him and he in us’ (4:13). 

 This is the self-assurance and the spiritual assurance that God’s love gives: ‘God abides in those who confess that Jesus in the Son of God...’ (4:15).   This is where it perfection and maturity in love starts and is headed: 

----We ‘confess Jesus’ so that ‘we believe the love God has for us...God is love (16-17).  

-----When we ‘believe’ and trust in the love God has for us, through Jesus, then we know God abides in us, and we can sure of God’s love and we can abide in that ‘love’ (16).  

Here’s again is the full progression of emotional, spiritual, and relational growth and maturity:  God loves. 

We see that love revealed in Jesus. 

We receive that love and abide in that love,

and then this love abides in us, so that we love God and we love those we are with.  

This is how we grow in love and this is how love makes us grow as people and in God.  Without love there is no perfection, no maturity, and no growth.

The retired Presbyterian pastor, Ernest Campbell, told about a Woman who went to a pet store to purchase a parrot. She took her new pet home but returned the next day complaining that the parrot has not said a word.

"Does it have a mirror?" asked the storekeeper. "Parrots are more talkative when they can see themselves." So, she bought a mirror.

The next day she was back, announcing that the bird still wasn't speaking. "What about a ladder?" the storekeeper. "Parrots like to walk up and down ladders." She bought the bird a ladder and went home. Next day, she was back. Still no talk.

The storekeeper suggested a little swing for the cage. She bought one of those, but still no talk.

The next day she returned to the store to announce that the bird had died. The storekeeper said, "I'm terribly sorry to hear that. Did the bird every say anything before it died?"

"Yes," said the lady. "It said, “Don't they sell any food down there at the pet store?"'

Love is our human soul food.  If we don’t have love.  We don’t grow and we die spiritually, emotionally, and perhaps physically too.   That’s why love makes life go around.  That’s the merry-go-round of love.  Don’t try to live or leave home without it?   Without love, you’ll become nothing.  Life will be worth nothing.  You will have no hope, no faith, and of course, no love.   Without love you will be eternally, finally, and fully lost.  Without love, you have kinds of stuff, but you will still die.

LOVE’S POWER:   PERFECT LOVE CASTS OUT FEAR  (18)

The best line, outside of ‘God is Love’, is what John concludes about growing in love, when he says, “THERE IS NO FEAR IN LOVE…BUT PERFECT LOVE CASTS OUT FEAR...WHOEVER FEARS HAS NOT REACHED PERFECTION.”

When it comes to spiritual growth, growing in grace, and maturing in both body, spirit and soul, you have to ‘overcome fear’ and the way you overcome ‘fear’ is to mature, grow, and develop life through love.   Love gives us the power to realize our full potential; Life’s prospect is realized with love.   Love also gives us the power to reach our perfection and maturity in love.   And finally, love’s power is what gives us the power to overcome out greatest ‘fear’.   When we are loved, we don’t have to fear God, we don’t have to fear others, and we don’t have to fear ‘fear itself’.  Perfect love casts out fear!  

How does love give us the power to ‘cast out fear’?   Again it goes back to this word ‘perfect’ and ‘perfection’.  It’s not just any kind of love that casts out fear.  It’s perfect love   What does perfect love mean?  It’s doesn’t mean love that doesn’t have struggles, flaws, or problems.  Three times in this text he speaks of the ‘perfection’ of love (12, 17, 18), but this word ‘perfection’ doesn’t mean what we might think it means.   The word in Greek simple means to be ‘complete’.   The power of love is what enables you to grow spiritually, grow emotionally.  To be ‘perfect’ means you are becoming the mature as the person God gave you the potential to be.

So, understanding what this word ‘perfect’ means, we can now fully understand what John is saying about ‘perfect love’.   We could also say, ‘perfecting love’.   What John means in all this passage is that we only show growth, maturity and progress in life, when we are growing and becoming complete in love.  

Thus, growing up in life is not simply about knowing stuff, doing stuff, experiencing stuff, or having stuff; but growing up and maturing in life is about reaching ‘perfection in love’ (18).   And the biggest step is emotional maturity is to overcome our fears; about life, about others, about death, and about God.   It is growing, perfecting love that is the power in our life that ‘casts out’ our fear’.   Without love you can’t move forward in life, in love, or in faith.   Without love you get stuck and you can have nothing.  But with love, you can become everything God has given you life to become.

But remember, as we conclude, John is especially challenging the young church with this message about becoming mature in and through love.   He is reminding them that  God’s love is only being ‘perfected’ in us when we ‘love one another’ as God loves us.   We, who have received love, must show love, so that love can be made mature in us, and God’s love can be known and received by others.  

I mentioned John Powell’s book,  “Why I Am Afraid to Love?”  Near the end of the book he tells the story of an American Jewish and Communist Philosopher, Mike Gold.  When Communistic hopes came into disrepute in this country, he wrote a book, “A Jew Without Knowing It”.   In that book, Gold described his childhood in New York City.

He tells how his mother always gave him clear instructions never to wander beyond four certain streets.  She could not tell him it was a Jewish ghetto.  She could not tell him he had the wrong kind of blood in his veins.  Children do not understand prejudice.  Prejudice is a poison that must gradually seep into a person’s blood stream and heart.

In telling his story, Mike Gold told how one day, his curiosity got to him and lured him beyond the four streets, outside his ghetto.  And like his mother feared he was accosted by a group of older boys who asked him a puzzling question:  “Hey, kid, are you a kike?” 

“I don’t know.”  He had never heard the word before.   The older boys came back with a paraphrase of their question.

“Are you a Christ-killer?”  

Again, the small boy responded, “I don’t know.”  He had never heard that word either.

So the older boys asked him where he lived, and trained like most small boys to recite their address in the case of being lost, Mike Gold told them where he lived.

“So you are a Christ-killer.  Well, you’re in Christian territory and we are Christians.  We’re going to teach you a lesson.  We’re going to teach you to stay where you belong!”

And so they beat the little boy, bloodied his face, tore his clothes and sent him home with this jeering litany:  “We are Christians and you killed Christ!  Stay where you belong!   We are Christians, and you killed Christ… Stay…!

When he arrived home, Mike Gold was asked by his frightened mother: “What happened to you, Mike?”

Again, he could only answer, “I don’t know.”

And so the mother washed the blood from his face of her little boy and put him into fresh clothes and took him into her lap as she sat in a rocker, and tried to soothe him.  Mike Gold recalled much later in life that he raised his small battered lips to the ear of his mother and asked:  “Mama, who is Christ?”

Mike Gold died in 1967.  His last meals were taken at a Catholic Charity house in New York City, run by Catholic worker, Dorothy Day.   She once said of him: “Mike Gold eats every day at the table of Christ, but he will probably never accept him because of the day he first heard his name.”  And so he died. (Why Am I Afraid to Love, Powell, p. 115-117).

One thing the story of Mike Gold constantly says to me is that the only way to share, preach and live the true gospel; the good news of Jesus is to be Christ-like through being God’s love to another person.  When ‘love’ isn’t real, or love is practiced, and when ‘hate’ is practiced instead of love,  the real ‘Christ-killer’ isn’t the person who doesn’t know, or doesn’t believe in God or in Jesus, the real ‘Christ-killer’ is the person who does not have or show love.  

The only good news in this story about Mike Gold, is that about 100 years ago, Christians were hating Jews.   Now, I hope we’ve moved beyond this.  But there are still come other people who need love too.   We need to exchange our hate for love for them too, and overcome fear, so that we love.   For it’s not just John who commands love, it’s also Jesus, the Lord of Love himself, who says: “By this, shall people know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.”     Amen.