Sermon Tone Analysis

Quick recap: if you were with us last week hopefully you remember what we left with as step one of loving our neighbors.

If you were with us, you should be able to tell me what step one loving our neighbors is.

If you can’t tell me that, then I’m afraid I didn’t do a very good job last week of explaining it.

Who can tell us? […] Learn their names.

Last week we said that you cannot convey love for someone if you cannot call them by name.

it’s simple, right?

No great skill or experience is needed to ask someone what their name is.

For some of us it may be a little bit of a skill to remember people’s names; but given that we’re putting so much importance upon this as a critical step in loving our neighbors, I’d say it’s a good skill to learn.

We took just one step toward loving our neighbors last week by talking about the importance of names.

But as I said, we’re also going to see over the next two weeks how loving God and loving our neighbors are bound together as one.

This week look with me at what the apostle John has to say about this.

Do you notice the theme here?

If you had to pick out just one word from this passage to summarize the theme, can you pick one?

I hope it’s obvious.

It’s not too hard to figure this one out.

This passage is about God’s love for us and our love for others.

From Nice to Love

In our culture we have a few wrong ideas about what it means to love someone else.

Sure, our culture has problems with pornography that have twisted our understanding of romance and intimacy.

But today I am talking about something even much more basic than that.

I am talking about the kind of love that we profess to have for one another as Christians, the kind of love that the Apostle John is talking about in this passage today.

We have a few wrong ideas about that kind of love too.

Throughout the years I have had to tell my children more times than I can count to play nice with each other.

I think it was something that I was told repeatedly as a child as well.

In fact, I bet that every single one of us here has had some kind of instruction in our upbringing to be nice to other people.

At some point it seems to me that the prevalence of niceness has confused us.

Nice is not the same as love.

There is a difference.

Sometimes—without meaning to—we lose sight of that, and somewhere in the back of our minds we tell ourselves that as long as we are nice to other people then we are showing love to other people.

So, we read words like we see here today in the Bible telling us to love one another, and maybe our immediate application of this command is to think that as long as I am nice to other people then I got that one nailed.

Except that nice and love are not the same thing.

Let’s be very specific by what our culture means when we use the word nice.

Nice is a behavior that is polite, cordial, agreeable, considerate, non-offensive.

But those things by themselves fall short of love.

They are not the same thing.

It is interesting to me that this country has a president currently who challenges our sense of niceness.

He often speaks and tweets words that are rude and insulting and offensive.

And I wonder if—in part—his appeal with some voters comes from those who may be getting sick and tired of everyone insisting on niceness all the time.

And so, it would be especially helpful for understanding this command to love one another for us to understand the difference between love and nice.

God is love.

The apostle John makes this one simple statement.

But this one phrase—God is love—carries huge theological importance.

We need to stop here for a few minutes and consider together what it means when we say that God is love.

We should not move on any further to consider what it means to truly love our neighbors without framing it in the context of God’s love.

Let’s think about this.

There are so many things we can say about the connection between God and love.

We can say that God is loving—that he demonstrates love as one of his qualities or characteristics.

We can say that God helps us to know what love is—that he is a teacher of love from whom we learn what it means to truly love.

But neither of these statements fully captures what John is conveying when he says in today’s passage that God is love.

For the apostle John, to say that God is love is to say that perfect love is inseparably tied to absolutely everything that God ever does.

In this way it is not enough to simply say that God is loving.

Such a statement leaves room for the possibility that there might then be some things that God does that are NOT loving.

It’s true for us, right?

You and I can be loving people—that is, we can have moments in our lives when we show and demonstrate love.

But you and I also have moments in life when we do NOT show and demonstrate love.

God, on the other hand, always shows and demonstrates perfect love in everything he does.

So, he is more than a loving God; God is perfect love.

This may be somewhat hard for us to always understand, especially when we consider that God is also perfectly just and perfectly righteous.

His perfect love and mercy holds in balance with his perfect justice and righteousness.

We cannot always understand God’s love that way—a love that demands accountability for sin, for violating his perfect holiness.

And so, sometimes it just seems like God is not very nice.

But he is always loving.

Those are not the same things.

Jesus was not always nice.

He was not always polite.

He was not always agreeable.

He was not always cordial.

There were times when he intentionally offended others.

Yet, even though Jesus was not always nice, he was always loving.

Therefore, you and I cannot simply be nice to other people and continue claiming that our niceness counts as loving others.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me.

I am not giving free permission here to say that nice is a bad thing.

If go around being impolite, mean, offensive bullies all the time, then it makes things much harder for us to be loving.

All we are saying here is that there is MORE to love than nice behavior.

Because when you think about it, I can demonstrate nice behavior without being loving.

I can put on a show of all the politeness, I can be agreeable and cordial, I can behave in a non-offensive manner, and I can do all of that with people that I really don’t love at all.

Are you seeing the difference now?

Love is more than niceness.

When I was young and would fight with my sisters, one of my parents would say to me, “apologize to your sister for hitting her.” Fine.

I’m sorry.

When we are seven it’s pretty where our genuine attitudes are leaning.

As we get older we become much better at pretending niceness when we don’t really mean it.

Love is more than nice.

From Obligation to Invitation

Let’s move on and talk then about what it means for us to love our neighbors, in light of God’s love for us.

Today’s passage makes it very clear that these things are connected.

We want to see and understand this connection because our love for neighbors depends on God’s love for us.

In other words, we can learn something about the way God wants us to love one another by considering the ways that God loves us.

Perhaps the most important thing we can understand about God’s love that will help us to better love others is to see that God’s love is freely given.

Yes, God is love.

But there is nothing that obligates God to show his love to us.

We have done absolutely nothing to earn or deserve God’s love.

Every year at Christmas it seems that many people go through the routine of sending out Christmas cards.

I don’t know about you, but it seems like my routine for Christmas cards involves making a list of everyone who sent me a card last year.

I got a card from so-and-so last year, now I have to add them to my list to send a card this year.

Now I’m obligated to return a card.

It becomes an obligation.

I have to do it because of what they have done for me.

God’s love is not an obligation.

God does not look over a list he keeps on his phone of everyone who goes to church, and everyone who tithes, and everyone who volunteers for ministry, and then give out selective amounts of love based on some kind of obligation for all that we’ve done for him.