Church Vitality: Love

Why Do I Have to Keep Loving?

1 John 4:7-21

ALL AGE TALK

Alvin Straight was a quiet man.

A veteran of World War II and the Korean War, Alvin finally settled in a small midwestern town with his wife and seven children and lived a simple existence.

Alvin’s life was pretty routine…he suffered from impaired vision and he didn’t trust public transportation, so in his later years he spent most of his time in his comfortable Laurens, Iowa home.

But there was one thing that bothered Alvin, a development that led him to do something pretty radical and unusual in July of 1994.

Alvin had a brother named Henry who lived in Wisconsin. Nobody knows quite the reason why, but they experienced a falling out. They didn't speak for almost 10 years.

But in the summer of ’94, Alvin got news that Henry had suffered a stroke and was pretty sick, and he knew it was time to heal the rift.

But how? His eyesight kept him from getting a driver’s license, and there was no way he would ever use public transport, so Alvin did they only thing he thought he could.

That's why on July 5, 1994, Alvin Straight loaded up a 10-foot trailer with gasoline, food, clothes, and camping equipment, hooked it up to his 1966 John Deere riding mower…and headed east.

240 miles east.

The mower’s top speed was five miles an hour, so through rainy weather, tractor breakdowns, and muddy back roads Alvin Straight journeyed…for six weeks…until he arrived at Henry’s front door.

He traveled a great distance and endured difficult times and trials, all to renew and show his love to a brother separated by more than just miles.

I wonder how many of us would be willing to take a journey like Alvin Straight.

How far would you be willing to go…for love?

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The passage we just heard from Luke’s gospel comes from a section often called “The Sermon on the Plain.”

It comes from verse 17 of this chapter where it says, “He went down with them and stood on a level place.”

A plain.

You’ve probably heard of the “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew’s gospel, but the “Sermon on the Plain” isn’t as well known.

There’s actually a lot of overlap in both content and theme in this part of Jesus’ teaching.

The both start off with a series of beatitudes…blessings, like “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”

Luke actually then includes a series of statements on the flip side of the coin, statements of woe like, “Woe to you who are rich…who are well fed and well thought of in your community.”

Not because Jesus necessarily has anything against money…or food…or reputation, but he uses these very public teachings to call attention to the sin that so easily creeps in through our comfort.

When we’re comfortable…our guard can go down, and we can be vulnerable to things like pride…and laziness…and a sense of entitlement.

And Jesus wants to challenge that.

In fact…he wants to challenge a lot of things. That’s part of what he does.

I’m reminded of something that was once said about the journalism industry, obviously something very much at the heart of Dundee.

In the States it was once said of the press and news industry that their job was to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” (REPEAT)

That’s kind of at the heart of what Jesus says and does, especially in Sermons like the one on the mount and on the plain.

In these passages Jesus challenges conventional wisdom. He turns their understanding of God’s law somewhat on its head, and in doing so exposes not just their miscomprehension and misapplication of the law…he exposes the hypocrisy that had crept into the lives of the religious leaders in his day.

And his challenges his followers to do better.

So he looks at this crowd and he lays it all out for them.

“You think you love,” he says.

“You think you love because you love people who love you.”

“Big deal. I’m telling you…you need to take love further. You need to love your enemies. You need to do good to those who hate you. You need to bless those who curse you and you need to pray for those who mistreat you.”

Wow.

That’s a different kind of love. Even for us today….2000 years later…we hear that and we say, “How in the world is that even possible.”

(PAUSE)

As most of you know, we are in the fourth week of a series on church vitality here at Gilfillan.

We are exploring what it means to be the people of God in Dundee in the 21stcentury.

And in this series I’ve already made two proposals:

(SLIDE)

A vital and thriving church is a worshipping church.

And…

A vital and thriving church is a Biblical church.

Well, if you haven’t guessed yet already, what I’m adding to the list today is this:

(ADD TO SLIDE)

A vital and thriving church is a loving church.

Love is central and irreplaceable to who we are as the people of God.

We heard that in the reading from John’s letter:

(SLIDE)

“We love because he first loved us. Whoever 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. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.”

The words sound so simple, but in reality they’re difficult words to live out.

(SEMINARY FRIEND: LOVE IS A VERB)

But if we accept the proposition that love is a verb, we’re opening ourselves to a wonderful truth…and a powerful challenge.

Because we live in a broken world with broken relationships, a busy world with barely enough time for ourselves much less other people.

And through it all the question comes to us from God, the same question I posed to you earlier:

How far are you willing to go for love?

That’s a difficult question, because love itself can often be difficult.

Not just romantic love, but every kind of love is bound to face problems and obstacles.

The love of a parent for a wayward child, or a child for absent parents, the love of one friend hurt by another, or of a caring teacher for a rebellious student, or even a preacher for a difficult audience.

Not that I know anything about that. 😊

That’s the situation an American preacher named Josh McDowell once faced.

He tells how he received an invitation to speak at a large university in South America.

Because of university’s Marxist leanings, no American had been invited to speak there in years.

Big posters of Josh were hung all over campus, announcing his upcoming visit, and as McDowell tells the story:

“The Communist students, trying to influence the other students to stay away from the meeting, had painted ‘CIA Agent’ in red letters across the posters. But it backfired on them. Most of the students had never seen a CIA agent, so they came to the meeting to see what one looked like!”

But it turns out curiosity wasn’t the only thing that brought students to his presentation.

There was also a group of “professional agitators” in the crowd, intent on only one thing: disrupting Josh McDowell’s presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

He goes on to say,

“One after another, these agitators would jump up and throw accusations at me, call me "a filthy pig," and hurl words at me that I didn't even know. Right in front of the audience they twisted me around their little fingers. I couldn't answer them; I didn't even know what they were saying.

After 45 minutes of this heckling, I just felt like crying. I literally wanted to crawl under the carpet. My wife asked me one time, "Honey, what's the darkest situation you've ever been in?"

I said, "It was that one."

Josh McDowell found himself in a position where it was difficult to love.

But he pressed on, his desire to share God’s love with these people surpassing his frustration with an unruly crowd.

Love…real love…can sometimes be very hard.

We face a cynical culture these days, hardened by broken relationships and the cheapening of love by a relentless media onslaught.

We also face brokenness in our own relationships, as we absorb hurt caused by others and the reality that we are all imperfect and capable of sharing great compassion or causing great pain.

And at times you and I are going to find it difficult to love, at times we are not going to feel willing to cross the street, much less travel 240 miles by tractor.

You and I are going to find ourselves asking the question:

Lord, why?

Why do you call us to a love so difficult to live out? To love even our enemies?

If we’re honest with ourselves, there are a lot of things that stand between us and the kind of love we’re find described in Scripture.

Sometimes it’s apathy, sometimes it’s selfishness, sometimes it’s just plain weariness.

Let's face it--love can wear you out.

No matter what the cause, we all face that temptation to just give up.

Why do I need to keep loving?

Life would be so much easier, so much less painful, if I didn’t love at all.

But the not-so-so-simple truth is…that option isn't open to us.

C.S. Lewis once said:

(SLIDE)

“The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love...is Hell.”

As Christians, love, with all its joys and all its hurts...love is something we can't escape.

Time and again we hear the call from the pages of Scripture, in the words from 1 John: “Love one another.”

And when it's hard, we need to be reminded why.

But before we get to that, I think there's one important distinction to make.

We are called to love, even when it's difficult.

But there are some things that doesn't mean.

It doesn't mean we ignore sin, and it doesn't mean we allow ourselves to become victims.

Too many well-meaning Christians, in my opinion, have turned a blind eye to destructive and abusive behavior in the name of “loving at all costs.”

To love someone does not mean we accept everything they do to themselves...or to others…or to us.

Sometimes we are called to set real and significant boundaries, but even in the midst of that we need to wrestle with how we embody the love of God in very painful situations.

Why do I need to keep loving?

Here are just three thoughts to ponder as we continue on our Lenten journey.

First of all, love is a command of our Lord.

When John writes in his epistle, “love one another,” he's not spouting platitudes,

He's echoing the words of Christ himself, which we find in John's gospel, chapter 13.

Here Jesus is speaking to his disciples after the last supper.

Judas has just left to meet with the Pharisees, and Jesus is looking out at the ones who have been closest to him on this journey that's coming to a climax.

And the words he chooses to begin this last teaching opportunity before his betrayal are these:

(SLIDE)

“A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

“As I have loved you...”

No doubt those words took on new meaning for the disciples as the next few hours unfolded.

John reflects on this in our passage:

“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”

Since God so loved us.

Since he was willing to go a great distance to show his love for a sinful,fallen race...

How far was God willing to go for love?

He was willing to come to earth in the form of a tiny child, to put up with the trials of earth and the temptations of satan, to endure the hatred of men and the betrayal of a friend, he was willing to journey, not just to our world, but to a painful death on a Roman cross.

That's how far God was willing to go for love.

That's why this command to love is such a tough one, because the love we're commanded to is far more than simply caring for others, appreciating them, and hoping the best for them.

The kind of love we're called to is a love that reflects the love God showed

for us:

We have received a sacrificial love. A costly love. A radical and even dangerous love.

And we are called to show a sacrificial, costly, radical, even dangerous love.

It’s not an option. It's a command.

Pastor John Ortberg put it this way:

(SLIDE)

“If we are serious about loving God, we must begin with people, all people.”

It's a hard road to walk, but no harder than the road to Calvary.

As we following in the footsteps of Jesus this Lenten season, we do well to remember that “we love...because He first loved us.”

Love is a command.

And yes, sometimes it’s a command we don’t want to fulfill.

When someone insults us. When someone hurts us.

When someone is in our midst who we don’t trust, don’t feel safe around…or even just don’t like…

…we are still called to love.

And when that happens, we’re not left on our own to just figure out how to do it.

As Christians we are given the indwelling Spirit of God, who is at work making us more and more like Him.

The New Living Translation puts verse 15 of our passage like this:

(SLIDE)

“All who proclaim that Jesus is the Son of God have God living in them, and they live in God.”

Friends, do we really grasp what that means for us?

When it's difficult to love, when we feel we just can't do it, that's when we need to remember that this command to love isn't something we're asked to do on our own.

Love is a fruit of the Spirit, it's not something we can just stir up within ourselves, it comes out of our experience of love given by God.

The Apostle Paul uses a wonderful image for this in Romans when he writes:

(SLIDE)

“God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.”

That's the love that now resides at the core of our being, and enables us to keep loving even when we don't think we can.

One author put it like this:

(SLIDE)

“It's one thing to love those who love us, Jesus says in Luke 6:32. But what good is that? Anybody loves people who love them. It's when we have to love those who do not love us or who claim to love us but are not treating us in love that God is asking of us what seems to be the impossible. But He has promised to give us the power to love.”

Those words were written by Elizabeth Eliot, who knows what it means to love those it seems impossible to love.

You may not be familiar with her story, but it is a powerful one.

In 1956 her husband Jim was killed in Ecuador by members of a remote tribe in Ecuador.

They had gone there to be a missionaries, to share God’s love with these far-off people.

And yet Elisabeth stayed. She continued to work with them and love them.

God enabled her to love and share the gospel with the very same people who had killed her husband.

She was willing to go a long way to show love, not just a journey through distant countries, but through grief and pain.

Friends, when we exhaust our capacity to love, God has a chance to show his inexhaustible love through us.

If we will open ourselves to the work of His Spirit, residing in the core of our being.

When we do, something amazing happens.

Transformation happens.

There's a fascinating thought that unfolds throughout this passage we've looked at from 1 John.

This idea that love is the Spirit's work in us, that we need to rely on Him to enable us to love in ways we otherwise couldn't…in essence we're saying that to live in God is to live in love.

But John points out that the reverse is also true, when he says, “Whoever lives in love...lives in God.”

“If we love one another,” he writes, “God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”

There is a change effected in us as we express God's love.

We become more like Him.

Why should I keep loving?

Because to keep loving is to keep growing.

We stop loving, and our growth is stifled.

John puts it as bluntly as can be:

(SLIDE)

“Whoever 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.”

If we truly want to be like Jesus...we need to find new and deeper ways to love.

But the transformation love brings isn't only inside of us.

You remember the story of Josh McDowell, struggling to share Christ's love in a hostile environment?

Hear how he tells the end of the story:

“By this time I was ready to give up. Every time I even mentioned the name of Jesus they laughed. I thought, "God, why aren't you doing something.? Why?" Well, I wasn't walking by faith. You see, God works when it brings the greatest honor and glory to His name, not to ours.

Finally, God started to work. The secretary of the Revolutionary Student Movement stood up, and everyone else became silent. I figured she must be someone important.

She was quite an outspoken woman, and I didn't know what to expect. But this is what she said. "Mr. McDowell, if I become a Christian tonight, will God give me the love for people that you have shown for us?"

That night 58 people came to faith in Christ.

Sometimes love is difficult.

But sometimes love is the only thing standing between someone you know and a life-changing encounter with God.

Why should we keep loving?

Christ has called us to, it's what we were created for…and it's the only power that can bring real change in this world.

The question for us is,

How far are you willing to go for love?

“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” Amen.