Here are the notes and discussion questions from yesterday:
What are the blockers that stop us loving one another?
1 John is written to a church riddled with doubts. False teachers have been active (2:26) teaching and leading people to leave the church and follow them. Leaving the rest of the church confused and bewildered. Are we saved or not? Do we have the truth or not? Did Jesus come, was he the Messiah, was he God made flesh? How do we know if we are saved or not? What does following Jesus look like? What should we believe? What does that look like lived out? Do Christians sin? Does it matter? How should we react when we do? What should a church look like?
John writes to clear up confusion and strengthen the weak and battered. He explains that false teachers were always coming, that naturally light and darkness cannot co-exist together so those influenced by false teachers left the church. He explains that following Jesus means living distinctively from the world, being different. And as John strengths the weak, comforts the doubting, and teaches the confused. The truth of the gospel isn’t rebuilding individual it is actively rebuilding a community.
As he does so we see some distinctive marks of the Church, not just this church but every church, our Church. A church that is distinctive from the culture around it, a church which is built on knowing Jesus as the Messiah and having experienced God’s love in Jesus by the Spirit loves one another. Truth and love are the two pillars upon which John seeks to rebuild this church. Truth about who Jesus is and how that calls us to live alive in the truth. And love for others seen in 1001 little everyday actions and reactions.
We are going to focus tonight on love, how we as a church are called to love each other and how we can grow in this love, and express this love to others.
Twice in these verses (7, 11)John calls the church to love one another. But notice something he isn’t calling them to do something he isn’t. How does he start both verses? “Dear friends,” the word he actually uses means dearly loved, or beloved. John isn’t saying you need to do it, John writes to a people he loves to encourage them to love one another just as he loves them. John models this love. It’s one of the contrasts the Bible makes again and again between false teachers who don’t love anyone but themselves and are out for what they can get and genuine bible teachers who love and serve as Christ did.
But we need to stop and ask what is this love? When we talk about love we instantly filter it through social lenses – family love, romantic love and so on. What love is this?
The word used comes from the root word ‘agape’, and it’s a distinctly Christian love. It is the love which God has for his Son and his people which is active, and it’s the love which God’s people return to him and show to one another. It isn’t an emotion, though it isn’t emotional less. But it isn’t a love that depends upon how we feel, it’s not to be a love flickers on and off depending on how I feel. It is a love which is determined, decisive, active and takes the initiative.
But how do we love like that? John begins by showing the church and us how we are loved.
See how you are loved
John doesn’t tell us to love and then explain the consequences if we fail to. What John does is tell us to love and then show us how loved we have been. In effect he’s trying to light a fire and uses two sources of fuel to set our hearts on fire with love.
a. God loved us(7-8)
This sort of love is distinctive and comes from God. God is love, God in Trinity has always loved, there has never been a time when God did not love, when the Father didn’t love the Son and the Spirit, and the Son love the Father and the Spirit, and the Spirit love the Father and the Son. God has always loved from eternity past to eternity future, love lies at the very core of his being, it is perfect it delights in the truth, in justice, in righteousness, in relationship.
And wanting to share that love and joy is what led Father, Son and Spirit to act in creation. God isn’t stingy, God didn’t need us to make himself complete, or because he wanted to be loved a little more. God is love and so he created to share love and so that he could give away of himself, to invite us to share in his love, to taste it, to enjoy it, and pass it on.
Do you see how you are loved! God is love! And we are able to love others this way because we know this love because we know God. In fact says John if we don’t love its the key indicator that we don’t love God, because you can’t know God and not know love. If you think you know God and yet don’t love then you only know a God of your imagination! Not the God of Trinity, of the bible, of love.
b. God’s love displayed (9-10)
But God doesn’t just write his love in creation around us and leave us to discover it for ourselves. God shows his love in God the one and only Son becoming human, coming into the world. God’s love is seen in the Father sending, and the Son coming, and the Spirit working as Jesus draws that first breath filling his lungs, as he cries when he experienced pain and sickness, when he wept as his heart broke at death, sickness, illness, rejection, fear. Every moment of Jesus life is God’s shout of God’s love.
And then (10) God the Son, back torn and bloodied, rejected, hated, spit dribbling down his head and beard mixing with blood and dust, hangs on a cross. By the Spirit offering himself to his Father crying out “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Taking our sin, making us right with God, showing us his love not as some grand romantic gesture but as the most costly, but necessary, rescue ever.
God’s love is concrete, it’s his character, and is displayed in history, you can’t ever doubt it for long, at the cross God has shown once and for all decisively that he loves and the length to which his love would go. The empty cross strands as an eternal declaration of God’s love. That’s why when someone is struggling to see that God loves for them we supremely need to teach them the gospel, help them rediscover the wonder of the cross and the empty tomb for themselves, just as John does here.
John writes to this bruised and battered, confused and conflicted church and says you are loved. Don’t doubt it, look at God and his character, look at the cross. Feed, and feast on the love of God.
The most amazing thing of all: Called to love as God loves (7,11,12)
Having piled the fuel on the fire, or set up the banqueting table for this church to feast on. John shows them and us perhaps the most amazing thing of all. When the church meets together it’s never ordinary, it is never mundane, but always extraordinary. (12) “No-one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”
Isn’t that a mind boggling statement? If we love each other as God has loved us two things happen; God is made visible through us to the world and his love is perfected and completed in us together. As we love one another like this, as we forgive, serve, and give of ourselves for others, as we live self-sacrificially, graciously, mercifully the unseen God lives in us and is seen.
As we love one another in the local church it’s as if the circuit board of God’s love is made complete and the neon lights can come on displaying God’s love to the world and beyond. And the church was designed by God for just that to happen, God’s love reaches its goal as united in the truth of the gospel and filled by the Spirit we love each other like this.
But notice that it is conditional, “if we love like this...” It is possible to meet together and fall short of this. In fact in a church bruised and battered, feeling raw and sore then this is a real challenge isn’t it? There’s George whose best friend has left the church having been lead away by false teaching, unsure if he wants to open up to run the risk of getting that hurt again. There’s Sam who feels so guilty that everyone knows she nearly lost her faith and was almost led away and isn’t sure she wants to open up in case she is judged and rejected. There’s the Smith family who actually think they may just be better off doing family devotions everyday than being with this church of basket cases, there is just too much rawness, won’t it just be too hard love such broken people. And finally, John who is unsure whether to stay because there are so many doctrinal truths that need the foundations relaying, so much confusion, wouldn’t he be better somewhere else?
But John says see how, just as you are, you are loved, just feast on the love God has for you, kneel again in amazement at the cross, know that God loves you and cares for you. Know that he isn’t done with you. Be amazed, have your heart warmed and fed by the sheer scale, cost and majesty of God’s love and out of the overflow you will love others.
So how do we love like this?
a. See God rightly – we must fight in a culture that sees God as killjoy, as boring, as harsh and judgemental, or senile and irrelevant, to see God as he really is. We must fight in a national church context where there is so much legalism and so many misunderstandings about God’s holiness and love to know God as he really is. If we don’t see and know God as loving we won’t joyfully live and love others, because God will never be more than a tyrant and his love will never thrill and warm and overfill our hearts.
In CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters a senior demon writes to a junior demon: “One must face the fact that all the talk about his [God’s] love for man and His service being perfect freedom, is not mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with lots of loathsome little replica’s of Himself – creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like his own, not because he has absorbed them but because their will freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over.”
That’s why the bible must be taught in a way that leads us back again and again to the truth of the gospel.
b. We can’t manufacture this love only catch it – This is God’s love spilling out of our hearts to others, that means we can’t simply whip ourselves up to love like this. Instead as we feed on the love of God for us we will then be enabled to love others. As we understand how unlovely we were and yet how loved, how we broke God’s heart and yet he healed ours we will be able to love and forgive others even when they have broken our hearts. And it is maximising the flow of this gospel of grace in the church that will enable us to love.
c. This is a community love – You can’t love yourself like this, you can only love others like this. That means we need to commit to be together, not just in the good times but the hard. We need others to love actively, to serve, to grow alongside of, who will love us enough to want to see Christ formed in us as a community together.
Discussion Questions:
What does not loving others say about us? How can we help one another love?
Think really practically about our context, how can we better love one another?
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