Third Time's The Charm: Love Abides

The New Revised Standard Version God Is Love

7 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

13 By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. 15 God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. 16 So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. 17 Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. 19 We love because he first loved us. 20 Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. 21 The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

Introduction

I have a friend who was diagnosed as a teenager with Attention Deficit Disorder.

To know this friend is to know that you probably didn’t need the test.

But one of my favorite stories about this friend is when he will complain about how hard the test was.

It was hard, he’ll tell us, this test to determine if he could pay attention, because the teacher was administering the test, to determine if he could pay attention, next to an open window.

And he swears it was really hard to take this test, to determine if he could pay attention, because there was so much stuff going on just outside the window.

I love my friend dearly, and I don’t mean to make fun.

Because the question for today’s sermon is: are we paying attention?

Bible Breakdown

Repetition is the Key

If you were to go back and listen to the last three scriptures we’ve read together, you’d notice that we’ve actually be reading the same thing over and over again.

God loves us.

We ought to love each other.

Anyone who doesn’t know how to love each other doesn’t yet know God.

A former boss of mine used to say that these guys that wrote the Bible didn’t want to waste parchment.

So any time these writers repeat something, let alone repeat it three times, it must be really important!

So even though we’ve been over this before, I want to drill in on each of these words that John is writing to us here, and see why he feels it’s important for us to hear this particular message three times.

Love

Love is such a sentimental word in our world today, and can get used in so many different ways.

I love my wife, but I also love Chipotle.

I love the Penguins, but I also love my kids.

I love ridiculous Dad jokes, but I also love Jesus.

What the early followers of Jesus did was quite brilliant.

They took an average, run of the mill word, and infused some deeper meaning in to it.

Agape

Agape love is love that values the other above the self.

I think about Agape love all the time when I think about what it is like to raise newborn twins.

Sarah and I used to have a system where we would sleep on the couch, with the boys in their bouncers right by our heads.

That way when they woke up in the middle of the night wanted to be fed, we could just roll over and throw a bottle in their mouths for a few minutes, and hopefully fall right back to sleep ourselves.

My needs in that moment were many:

A decent nights sleep.

My remarkably comfortable bed which was mere steps away.

A day off to go to the beach for some uninterrupted quiet.

But anyone who has ever been a parent knows, you set your needs aside in love to look after the needs of your children.

Agape love is not reserved for parents and children either.

I have seen couples who exhibit tremendous agape love, particularly when one or the other of the couple gets a difficult diagnosis.

I have seen friends who exhibit tremendous agape love, dropping everything at the slightest sign of trouble to be there for each other.

And I have seen a church family, right here in this room, that displays tremendous agape love for each other through the thick and the thin.

Agape love is counter cultural, and I suspect it always will be.

We are brought up to believe only the strong survive.

We are brought up to believe that we win by looking out for number one.

We are brought up to believe, some of us anyway, that the best way to get ahead is to bring others down.

That is not the way of agape love.

And agape love, John would tell us, is the way of Jesus.

Look at Jesus

Jesus Christ set aside his kingly status to take on a human form, and become like us.

Jesus Christ set aside his own dreams and desires, and willingly went to the cross on our behalf.

And when Jesus Christ earned the reward of resurrection to new life, he made sure that we could be raised just. like. him.

It is not enough to remember Jesus’ self-sacrifice, to think about it, or even be moved by it.

We must live it.

We must be a people of agape love to each other.

We can observe all of this, and get a road map to how to live it, because

Jesus is God

And God is love.

Any time we have any question on what love is, how best to love, or how we can embody love in this world, we need only look at Jesus.

This is a love that we already have.

John very astutely noticed that We love because Jesus first loved us.

This is remarkable!

Any sign of love you see in the world,

Anything that makes your heart flutter.

Anything that fills you with love,

Is only there because Jesus Christ first showed us the way of love.

And, this is in the past tense.

Jesus has already loved you.

Jesus has already claimed you.

Jesus has already given you this incredible gift.

You have it

It’s yours!

This love is incredibly powerful!

God’s love doesn’t seek value, it creates it. It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved we have value. (William Sloane Coffin)

What if the way we come to know who we are, and how we are to be valued, didn’t come from.

Our bank accounts

Our job titles

Our family status

Whether or not we were in the right club

Whether or not we had the right friends.

Whether or not we are wildly successful or abject failures

But it came from the fact that Jesus Christ loves us. Full stop.

Now if that’s true, then John has some interesting instructions for us in both of the scriptures we read this morning.

Abide

Meno- Remain

When I’m writing sermons, I have to have a little timer going on my computer.

I take 25 minutes to write, and then I’m given 5 minutes to goof around on YouTube or Facebook or something.

I need this because, maybe a little bit like my friend, I have a hard time focusing on what I’m doing.

I have to be held in place, to keep my focus on what I’m working on, because without the timer I might spend HOURS chasing down an illustration or researching watches or something goofy like that.

The timer helps me remain focused. It helps me abide in the task.

John tells us that we need to abide in Jesus’ love for us.

God gives the love. Our job is to stay in it.

This is quite different from some forms of Christianity that say we have to go out and earn God’s love.

Scripture is quite clear that we are perfectly incapable of doing that.

What this suggests is that we already have God’s love, it’s ours!

We are just so very easily distracted, aren’t we?

We are just so easily knocked off track.

We all too easily fall in to bad habits.

Lovers Less Wild

When I was first getting in to cycling, I realized that this is a crazy expensive hobby!

And having a bit of Scottish heritage in here, I can have some frugal tendencies.

So instead of buying the right gear, I saved money and bought the cheap gear.

And in so doing, I learned the economics of cheap stuff.

It might be less expensive up front, but it’s junk.

So you’ll buy the wrong thing about a thousand times, when it would have been better to buy the right thing once.

We do this with Jesus’ love for us.

Jesus love means that we’ll have to love one another, and that’s expensive.

So we settle for cheaper loves.

We settle for the cheaper love of drugs or alcohol.

We settle for the cheaper love of accumulating wealth.

We settle for the cheaper love of cheap and emotion-less sex.

We settle for anything that we can get our hands on.

These loves ask less of us, but they give us much less in return.

Worse yet, they pull us away from remaining in Christ’s love.

Opposites

Another way we can understand a complex word like Agape is to study its opposite.

John really helps us out here.

Because truth be told, I think a lot of us have a wrong idea about what the opposite of love really is.

“Well, I don’t hate anybody!”

Whenever we talk about the Christian life, particularly what it means to try to live a sin-free life, I’m always shocked by how low the bar seems to be for some people.

“Well, I’m a pretty good person!”

“I’ve never killed anybody!”

…that’s the bar?

But there’s another one right behind it.

When we talk about living in love, I’m shocked by how many Christians will say something like

“I don’t hate anybody!”

The assumption there is that hate is the opposite of love.

And I am willing to bet if I took my camera out there in the world and asked folks what the opposite of love is, hate would come back as the #1 result, wouldn’t it?

But that’s not what John is saying here.

There is no fear in love.

Fear is the opposite of love

This is particularly true when we are considering agape love specifically.

To fear is to look out for my own interest, right?

I’m afraid of needles because I know they’re going to hurt me.

I’m afraid of snakes because some of those suckers bite with poison and that’s going to hurt me.

I’m afraid of public speaking because I don’t want to look foolish.

Fear is all about self-preservation.

So if agape love is about valuing the other person higher than we value ourselves, then fear has absolutely no place in love.

It’s love’s polar opposite.

And that leads us to a rather interesting question this morning, doesn’t it?

Who are we afraid of?

It doesn’t take too long at all to see that our country has a pretty short supply of love toward each other.

And people who think that shouldn’t be have a lot of interesting solutions to throw out there.

Don’t hate as much.

See the good in someone you disagree with.

Focus on what unites us and not on what divides us.

I think the solution to our love deficiency in this culture is to ask a question of ourselves, and to do some solid interior work:

Who are we afraid of?

And why?

I cannot fully and perfectly love someone in the opposite political party if I’m afraid they’re out to get me.

I cannot fully and perfectly love someone who doesn’t look like me if I’m afraid they’re out to wreck my way of life.

I cannot fully and perfectly love someone who my chosen news media spends untold hours and resources devoted to making me fear.

Or maybe even more detrimentally:

I cannot fully and perfectly love a God I’m afraid is going to send me to hell if I slip up.

I cannot fully and perfectly love a God that I’m afraid is going to get me.

I cannot fully and perfectly love a God that is built upon the idea of punishment.

That kind of God, the kind of God that people are afraid of?

John doesn’t want anything to do with that kind of God.

We can’t love God if we’re afraid.

We can’t love our brothers and sisters if we’re afraid.

We can’t claim to love God if we don’t love our brothers and sisters.

Application

Say it again

I have this weird memory.

I can almost without fail tell you what episode and season a line from the West Wing, my favorite television show of all time.

But at least three times this week, I walked in to my kitchen and completely forgot why I was in there.

We are easily some of the most forgetful people in the world, aren’t we?

I wonder what it looks like for us to carry around this reminder.

John feels the need to tell us the exact same lesson three times:

God loves us.

Therefore, we should love each other.

Love, so you can love.

This week, find some sort of way to remind yourself of God’s love.

Pray in the morning.

Read a favorite scripture

Put a sticky note on your mirror.

Whatever it takes, spend sometime reminding yourself that God loves you through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And then remember that what is required of you is to remain in that love.

Face our fears

I think I’ve mentioned a few times that I’m afraid of needles.

This year in particular, I’ve had to get three shots that I normally would have totally put off.

When I went for the flu shot, I was so nervous I was straight up flop sweating in the waiting room of Rite Aid.

My heart was pounding so loud I think the pharmacist could hear it.

And I sat down in the chair, closed my eyes, and waited for...

“Ok we’re done!”

I didn’t even feel it.

Not like, I didn’t feel it too much.

I didn’t feel it at all.

All that fear, all that pent up energy, all that worry.

All wasted.

Who are we afraid of?

Who are we giving too much of our fear?

Who are we giving too much of our energy?

Who are we giving too much of our worry?

Face your fears this week.

Reach out to someone it’s hard to love.

Strike up a conversation with someone who might disagree with you.

Put yourself in a situation you might be a bit uncomfortable with.

And most of all, make sure that you know God is not someone to be afraid of.

There is no fear in love,

And God surely loves you.

Let’s go love the world.