Sunday, April 30, 2007

Andrew G. Pittman
Sunday Morning
April 29, 2007

This Is Love
1 John 4: 7-12.

I. Introduction.
One of the worst feelings that a person could experience is the feeling one has after discovering that they have been robbed. The feeling of knowing that their personal property or their place of security has been violated. I have only experienced this feeling a few times.
The time that I will never forget was the time that my car was stolen in Jackson, MS while I was refereeing a high school soccer game. (I shared some of this story with you a few weeks ago.) I was supposed to referee two soccer games that night, but one of the teams had to forfeit the second game. Shauna had come by to see me and was there to see me try to find my car.
She asked me, “Where is your car?” I answered, “It’s over there on the other side of that bus.” We walked over to it together and it was gone. I stood in the parking place looking all around the dark parking lot wondering if I had parked somewhere else. Then I started pointing at the ground saying, “I parked it right here. I parked it right here. I don’t understand. It should be right here.”
When we finally got the car back, it had been ransacked. All of my belongings had been removed, including the clothes that I had worn and changed out of the day I had been refereeing. In their place, the thief left his clothes.
Someone had taken what belonged to me and used it for wrong purposes, as if it had been his own. He took a part of my life that was significant, that actually meant something to me and changed it to the point that I could no longer use it, or even recognize it. And to top it off, the car was no longer driveable to me. We were faced with a situation of having to spend a lot of time and money just to reclaim what had once been my car.
Did you know that the same thing has happened in the church? We have been robbed of something that was once very significant to us.
Now, I’m not talking about TV’s, VCR’s, or any other kind of church property. I’m not even talking about money.
Every church in America has been robbed of its distinctively Christian language. The one word that I have in mind this morning is the word “LOVE.”
Our culture has so distorted and altered the meaning of the word “LOVE” that we can no longer use it, or even recognize it as being our word. The world has taken something that was at one time very significant to the church and used it for their purposes. It’s like getting into your own car and finding someone else’s clothes in it. You can’t even recognize it as your own car. But it is now time that we spend the time and the effort to recapture our word “LOVE.”

Read 1 John 4: 7 – 12.


II. Love Comes from God.
In defining love as a distinctively Christian word, we must begin in the Bible. This passage is one of the 2 most frequently used passages in the New Testament on love. It helps us to define what love is.
John began this pass by telling us that love must come from God. This is significant because it describes love as coming from the divine sphere. LOVE is not from the worldly sphere, rather it comes from God. Perfect love comes from above, not from below…Therefore, any love that comes from below must be imperfect, corrupt…Or, it must be based on the Love that comes from above.
Then, in the next verse, John tells us that God himself is love…God doesn’t only give love…God is love…Therefore, God has demonstrated Love to us by giving us nothing short of himself. This is significant for at least 2 reasons:
1) It describes God as being personal…Since we understand Love as a personal act, then God must be a person & must be concerned with relationships as priority.
2) It places the foundation for Christian ethics in the very nature of God himself…Christians are called to act & live according to God’s nature.
However, we still don’t have a working definition of LOVE. Until we define what Love is, we will not be able to understand John’s point. So what is LOVE?
My favorite def of Love is from a book on personal evangelism by Oscar Thompson Concentric Circles of Concern. Oscar Thompson defines love as “meeting needs.” In other words, if we love someone, it will be expressed by actively meeting their needs. But, does this definition fit with our Scripture?

Read v. 10
Here we see John’s definition of Love. Notice that v. 10 does not say “this is God’s love.” Instead, this verse is a description of true love or perfect love. Any love that originates within us as humans, cannot be perfect love. Perfect love always originates with God. Perfect love can be described by 3 ideas taken directly from v. 10:
1) Perfect love is always action, not feeling.
This is one place where the world has corrupted our understanding of Love. We can use Love in such a cavalier way that we can say things like, “I love hamburgers.” But perfect Love is always expressed in action Jesus did not say, “Greater love has no one than this that one have great affection for a friend.” Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this that one lay down his or her very life for their friends.”
2) Perfect love is always self-sacrificial.
Again, the world has corrupted us in this area. We are taught that love is a feeling that is based on the way someone makes us feel about ourselves. The world’s love is about receiving something enjoyable and / or fulfilling from the object of our love. But, perfect love has been revealed to us in the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus. When God took the initiative to act on our behalf, he did so by making a personal sacrifice. Perfect love was not and is not based on how the lover feels.

3) Perfect love benefits other people.
It was not enough that Jesus died. In order for his self-sacrificial action to reveal perfect love, it had to benefit other people. And it did! We read in the Bible that Jesus’ death on the cross was God’s way of providing the means to reconcile humanity to God. Because of God’s perfect love, our sins were atoned for when Jesus died on the cross.

Therefore, perfect love is Action, not feelings; it is self-sacrificial, not self-serving; and it is for the benefit of others, not ourselves.

Perfect love then calls us to express 2 different kinds of love: to love Christians and to love the world


III. Love Calls Us to Love Christians.
I just finished reading a book entitled Breakout Churches: Discovering How Your Church Can Make the Leap. The book identifies 13 churches across the United States that were able to move from being good churches to becoming great churches. Thirteen churches were studied, and each church was compared to 3 other churches that did not make the leap. There were a total of 52 churches involved. In these 52 churches, the research team identified 172 conflicts that were taking place. Out of these 172 conflicts, the source of 171 was Christians not getting along with Christians. Only one conflict out of 172 was caused by non-Christians…

Read v. 11.

In this verse, John told his church & us today that our response to the divine love is to love one another. This refers to Christians loving Christians. The Greek employs a type of conditional sentence that affirms the reality of the condition mentioned. In other words, we could translate the word “if” as “since.” “Since God loved us, we also ought to love one another.”
We can “Love one another” only because God has revealed what perfect love is. However, we are faced with a problem. Our motives are so corrupt that even our best efforts at loving others can be self-serving. Therefore, we are forced to rely on a power and strength beyond us to enable us to love perfectly as God has first loved us.
Here is where faith enters in. If we separate loving actions toward others from faith in God through Christ, then we practice nothing more than concern for humanity…humanism…Salvation by Works… BUT…If we connect loving actions with our faith in God through Christ, then God gives us the Holy Spirit., who is the power of love to practice God’s kind of love toward each other. We can say this because we know that Perfect Love can only originate from God.





IV. Love Calls Us to Love the World.

Read v. 12
For a long time, I found v. 12 to be strange…It didn’t seem to fit the pass. I couldn’t figure out why John would introduce a new theme at the end of his paragraph. Why would he write about the invisibility of God? And why here?
I think John is trying to emphasize the Christian’s individual responsibility in the world. If God is perfect love revealed in the act of self-sacrifice on the cross on our behalf, and if we are only capable of truly loving as a result of the power of God within us, then loving the world is the way we as Christians can show the world who God is.
Love is the actualization of God in the world. In other words, when we love the world, we make God real. When we do not love, God remains abstract and invisible. And God was neither abstract nor invisible to John. In his theology, God is love: active, self-sacrificing and benefiting others.


V. Conclusion.
I know this will be a very silly story, but I think you can get the point. Imagine that you are sitting on the end of a pier fishing. It’s a beautiful day, and the fish are biting. You are having one of your best days of fishing you have ever had in your life.
Then, all of a sudden, someone else shows up. You don’t really want to share your fishing spot, but it looks like you don’t have a choice. But, this man doesn’t want to fish. He just wants to tell you that he loves you.
The man walks out to the end of the pier and gets your attention. He says, “I love you so much that I will jump off this pier, into the water and drown myself.” Is that what Love is? No. Love is active, self-sacrificial and benefits others. This man was active and self-sacrificing, but no one was benefited by what he did.
Now, imagine the story another way. What if you were actually in the water struggling to swim. You don’t think you will be able to make it back to the pier. Then, another person jumps into the water to save you. In the course of saving your life, this man drowns. Is that what Love is? Yes. Love is active, self-sacrificial and benefits someone else.

It is time that we reclaim our language from the thieves of this world. It is time to stop allowing non-believers to define for us what love is supposed to be.