Opening Prayer

All People That On Earth

Confession

When I Survey

Psalm 22
25
From you comes my praise in the great congregation;
my vows I will pay before those who fear him.
26
The poor shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the LORD.
May your hearts live forever!
27
All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the LORD;
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before him.
28
For dominion belongs to the LORD,
and he rules over the nations.
29
To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down;
before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
and I shall live for him.
30
Posterity will serve him;
future generations will be told about the Lord,
31
and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn,
saying that he has done it.

There Is a Redeemer

Prayer
Lord’s Prayer

1 John 4:7–21

What John Means By Love.

Introduction: Is Love too Easy?

Pastor Graceman is outraged at the “wishy-washy” Gospel of love being preached down the
street by Reverend Toogood. He is determined to let his church members know what a
dangerous path they are heading down if they allow their pure Gospel of grace to be watered
down by the liberal sentiments of love.

Recently Pastor Graceman and Reverend Toogood have been making their differences public
in the monthly faith life column in the regional newspaper.

The issue of debate revolves around whether love is a flaky cop out, or whether love the
greatest and most demanding thing that Jesus confronts us with.
In our day-to-day language love can mean the “feeling of affection” one person has for
another person. It is often associated with the experience of infatuation or “falling in love”. It
can mean showing compassion or unselfish care for another person. Often, in modern usage,
showing love can simply mean accepting another person for who they are – what Christians
sometimes mean when we talk about “unconditional love”.

When we read about love in John’s first letter to the churches we need remind ourselves that
John doesn’t necessarily share our culture’s current understanding of what love is. On the
other hand, what John means by love isn’t so far removed from our some of our common
understandings that we’re completely in foreign territory.

What Is Love?
John writes, “Let us love one another, because love is from God” (1 John 4:7). He is telling us
that human relationships can only experience genuine wholeness if we treat each other with
the same quality of love that God extends to us. The Greek word John uses here and
elsewhere for love is ἀγάπη (āgāpe).

There has been a lot of Christian teaching on love, including CS Lewis in his book the Four
Loves, that attempts to set up a hierarchy of the different kinds of love with agape at the top,
representing divine love in contrast to the lower more everyday, human forms of love. In
actual fact, ἀγάπη (āgāpe) in its various forms usually means something quite similar to what
we mean when we use the English word love. In NT Greek ἀγάπη (āgāpe) can be used to
describe our love for another person or an object based on a sincere appreciation. So I
imagine that such sincere appreciation could be applied to icecream and art as much as to
neighbours or friends. There was, however, a well-considered depth to āgāpe love, as
opposed to eros, which described the emotional experience of sexual attraction.

What is most important for us is that the meaning of “love” and the action of “love” take on a
special new significance in the New Testament.

For John, God’s love is not defined or revealed by the way in which people treat each other.
Genuine love, John tells us, has been revealed among us through the sending of God’s only
Son.

This is one of the points that Pastor Graceman is trying to make; although his congregation
often wish he would do it more kindly. Sometimes Reverend Toogood’s sermons end up
giving the impression, not so much that “God is love”, but rather that “love is God”, and that
any old human expression of love will do. And that is almost the opposite of what John is
writing in his letter.

God Loves Us As a Family

So let’s explore a little deeper John’s understanding of the love that is from God.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and
knows God. (1 John 4:7).

John begins this new section of instruction by addressing us as those who are loved and
cherished by God. We are “beloved” of God. As is so common throughout the New Testament
as a whole John isn’t addressing us as individuals. We are the “agapetoi” which is the plural of
“agapetos”. So while of course God’s love for us is personal, John is emphasising that the
discipleship community as a whole family is focus of God’s love. Our family identity is shaped
by the fact that we are God’s beloved children.
“Beloved” can occasionally refer to a lover, but here it carries a more platonic, familial
meaning. In fact “beloved” is used throughout the New Testament as a way of addressing
each other much the same way we might begin a letter with the words “dear Grandma” or
“dear brother”. This is the case each of the 10 times John uses “beloved” to address his
readers. He uses it deliberately to communicate his genuine sense of affection and care but
also to emphasise God’s love and care for us all as community of discipleship.

This word, “beloved” is same used to describe the family relationship between God and Jesus.
When Jesus is baptised in the Gospel’s according to Mark, Matthew and Luke; a voice comes
from heaven saying, “This is my son”, or “you are my son, the Beloved”. “The one who is dear
to me.” (Matt 3:17, Mark 1:11, Luke 3:22).

There is however an important distinction to make between our identity as God’s children
and Jesus’ identity as God’s son; and it is important for the next point we’re going to explore
about God’s love. If we turn to an earlier reference in 1 John 3:2 John also addresses us as the
“beloved” and again uses the language of family; “Beloved, we are God’s children now.” Here
and elsewhere John uses the word (teknon) children to describe us. He never uses that word
to describe Jesus. Instead he uses the word (huios) Son, and he always reserves the word Son
for Jesus alone.

In the opening of John’s Gospel this distinction is made even clearer when in 1:14 John says
that in Jesus we see the “glory as of a father’s only son”. The word translated as “only son”
(monogenēs) indicates that Jesus is in a unique class. John uses exactly the same expression at
this point in his letter as he emphasizes the nature of God’s love. Jesus is the unique Son who
reveals God’s love, a love without which we cannot belong to the family of God (1 John 4:8).

Love is needed to Be Family

Leo Tolstoy began the beautiful tragedy of Anna Karenina with the words, “Happy families
are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Beginning with Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel, the Bible tells many stories of unhappy
families. Unhappy families are not generally known for the love they show to one another. In
fact earlier in his letter John uses the unhappy family story of Cain and Abel to illustrate the
danger of being motivated by hate rather than love. John tells us that division and
disharmony are sure a sign that God’s love is absent or lacking in our lives. (1 John 3:12) and
he even warns us, “Whoever does not love abides in death.” (1 John 3:14).

God’s love enters our world into the midst of an unhappy and divided human family in order
to bring restoration and renewed relationship. This is why what John writes about Jesus in
verses 9 and 10 is so important. First of all, in verse 9 that “God sent his only Son into the
world so that we might live through him.” In this passage we can hear a clear echo of the
Gospel according to John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that
everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

In sending Jesus into the world God had a clear mission in mind – that of bringing life and
renewal (the eternal kind of life) into the divided human family. God’s love is a love that is
willing to go where it is not going to be recognised, where it is not going to accepted in order
to bring good to others. This kind of love is far from sentimental; for Jesus the love of God was
costly because it cost him his life in order to overcome the sinful hardness of the human
heart.

Sometimes it takes an accident or a tragedy to wake us up out of our complacency and self-
absorption. In Leo Tolstoy’s story it is the death of Anna Karenina that shows up the
selfishness and hardness of the world around her. In God’s plan of restoration the depth and
authenticity of Christ’s love is revealed most fully on the cross. God’s sacrificial love exposes
our sin and has the power to overcome our sin. John describes Jesus’ sacrifice in verse 10 as
atoning.

10 Inthis is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning
sacrifice for our sins. (1 Jn 4:10)

Atonement is an ancient word. In the English language its meaning is expressed by breaking
the word into syllables: at-one-ment. Atonement describes the sacrificial means in the Old
Testament that breaks the chains of guilt and estrangement that have resulted from violating
God’s will for our lives. The cross is the moment at which Jesus, in his sacrifice, becomes at-
one with us in our sin, and draws us back into relationship with God.

Why Jesus died, we are told in John 11:52 “to gather into one the dispersed children of God.”

Love, in other words, has been redefined by the sacrificial life and death of Jesus himself.
God’s love is the love that exposes our lack of love and our selfishness. God’s love is the love
that has the power to save and bring us into the family of God’s children.

Concluding Thoughts

These facet of love for the Christian life are interlocking. That is they can’t be understood or
lived without reference to each other.

Toogood leaps straight to love sometimes without so much of a backward glance to how
God’s love has been revealed to us in Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. Growing in love require
time for us to contemplate our lives in the light of God’s redemptive love, even when that love
exposes our own selfishness.

On the other hand, Graceman often sounds as though God’s judgement is more important
than God’s love – when actually God’s love is what exposes and judges our selfishness and sin.
Graceman also makes it seem as through doctrine is more important than action – and this
perhaps exposes a need within him to experience God’s love personally and to risk
expressing love to others.

John tells us that God’s desire for the church is to be a family that abides in God’s love and
expresses God’s love.