Dear friends, since God so loved us,
we ought to love one another.
No one has ever seen God ;
but if we love one another,
God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”
1 John 4:10-12
Greeting & Opening prayer
Introduction Few words have been misused & misunderstood as the word love. In everyday speech it can mean everything from lust, sex, liking, affection, fondness or the matchless love of God. The Bible speaks of love, in fact, many kinds of love. We’ll look at those words and then turn to the epistle of John in which he portrays love in action.
(a) There is love in the sense of friendship or fondness. A longer form of the word was brotherly love or Philadelphia. The love that existed between David & Jonathan was an example. David mourned for Jonathan in these words : “ I grieve for you ; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.” (2 Samuel 1:19) Friendship is right and good provided it is according to God’s will but James (4:4) tells us that friendship with the world is hatred toward God and anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. This underlines the importance of choosing the right friends.
(b) Eros or sexual love. The Song of Solomon also called the Song of Songs has been taken to mean the love of God or the love of Jesus, and most certainly he is in the words of Charles Wesley “pure, unbounded love”, but I think that the Hebrew writer was talking about the love of a man for a woman and a woman for a man. We hear the phrases “the fairest of ten thousand,”(5:10), “the rose of Sharon” and the “lily of the valley” and we spiritualise them. Of course, the marvellous love of God is prefigured in the Old Testament, but it has much to say of married love and its place in God’s plan.” May your fountain be blessed , and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. A loving doe , and a graceful deer. ” I’ll let you read on from there. It’s Proverbs 5:19. God is not against sex. He invented it. That’s EROS . “Certainly it can be misused, but that is certainly not God’s intention . We remember Adam in the garden of Eden fresh from the hands of the Creator. The Lord God had said, “ It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. He had already created “the beasts of the field and the birds of the air “ but for Adam no suitable helper was found” ( Genesis 2: 20.) You remember what happened next. A footnote in the New International Version says that God took “part of the man’s side” and formed a woman, a being who was like man but somehow different. Adam’s reaction could be ’ “ Wow, this is more like it ! She shall be called woman for she was taken out of man. There was no unisex in the Garden of Eden. To borrow a French expression, Adam could have said , “Vive la difference !” And out of that special relationship between husband and wife comes another kind of love that is blessed by God. There’s a Greek word for it, but we’ll call it family love. The King James Version calls it natural affection. And Paul, in describing the godlessness of the last days, predicts that those days will be characterized by the absence of that kind of love. He writes to Timothy about these terrible times. “People will be selfish, greedy, boastful, and conceited; they will be insulting , disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, and irreligious ; they will be unkind, merciless, slanderers, violent and fierce; they will hate the good ... they will love pleasure more than (they love ) God.” ( 2 Timothy 3: 2-4) Does that sound familiar ? And it’s an apt description of our day, people without natural affection. Family love has its origin in God’s love & is a reflection of his perfect love.
The Bible has much to say about these different forms of love but in our passage for today, John gets to the source of all of them. It is what Charles Wesley called love divine all loves excelling, He even described God as “pure unbounded love.”
So let’s look at these verses & try, at least in some small way to plumb the depths of God’s marvellous love: “This is love not that we loved God. . Now certainly it is great that we should love God, but it is something that in ourselves we are incapable of doing. The really important thing is that God first loved us. That’s truly amazing, for in ourselves there is nothing lovely about us. The great theologian Karl Barth was once asked what was the most profound truth that he had learned in all his careful study of the Scriptures. He replied simply “ Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so.” That’s what Nicodemus, a teacher of the people discovered as he came to Jesus by night. It was then he heard what has become the best known verse in the Bible : “ For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” And that’s the very same message that John has for us in our text. It is not so much that we loved God., but that he loved us. And more than that he proved his love: he sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. ” ( 1 John 4:10-12)
Paul called the way of love the more excellent way & then gives us 1 Corinthians 13, that beautiful love chapter. Read it through & then replace the word love with the name Jesus. If this is a portrait of love, then it is obvious who sat for the portrait. Read it once more & this time replace the word “love” with your own name. If we do this we see what a great gulf exists between our love at the best of times & his most excellent love.
Charles Wesley, among countless others like you & me, had experienced that love. It prompted him to write these lines:
Joy of heaven to earth come down.
Fix in us thy humble dwelling,
All thy faithful mercies crown.
Jesus, thou art all compassion,
Pure unbounded love thou art.
Visit us with thy salvation,
Enter every trembling heart.
Come, Almighty to deliver.
Let us all thy grace receive.
Suddenly return and never,
Never more thy temples leave.
Thee we would be always blessing,
John tells us that God sent his son as “an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” What does that means ? Well, the sacrifices offered in the Old Testament involved providing an innocent victim to die for the guilty sinner. At first glance, that doesn’t seem fair, but it’s the only way that we can be made right before God. The King James Version used the word “propitiation. “ What does that mean ? Theologians and translators have struggled to come up with a word that could explain it. They reasoned that God’s desire is that we be “at one” with him. They put the two words together and came up with the word “atone”, They really didn’t invent the concept. God did the deed. He atoned for our sins. Paul put it this way in Ephesians 2:14- 15: “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier , the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man - Today’s English Version translates it as “one new people” -thus making peace.” Although we object that it doesn’t seem fair that an innocent
victim should die for the guilty, we must ask what the alternative is .We cannot make it right by ourselves . The Bible calls our righteousness nothing but filthy rags. We cannot be good enough. The only way out is to accept that fact, to confess our sins and to accept what God has done for us.
We all remember Peter’s shameful denial of his Lord, in spite of the fact that he had boasted that he would never forsake Jesus but would even die for him. Well, after the fact he felt tremendous remorse. The Scriptures tell us that he went out & wept bitterly. We have all known the feeling. We had an opportunity to witness for him & we blew it & we feel terrible. But our Lord comes to us in compassion, he extends new grace and we are restored in his love. So it was with Peter. He denied that he even knew Jesus three times & three times Jesus has him re-affirm that love with the question , “Simon, son of John do you love me. ? ” I think that there’s another reason that Jesus asks him the sane question three times, but we have to do a little probing. The passage is found in John 21:15-19. We read in verse 17 that Peter was grieved, or one translation says “ he became sad” that Jesus had asked the same question three time. I believe that it’s more than a reminder of Peter’s three fold denial. The clue is found in the fact that in the Greek two different words are used for love. The New International Version makes a distinction. In verse 15 Jesus asks “Simon son of John, do you truly love me ? Peter’s response is simply “you know that I love you. ” Then Jesus asks the same question and receives the same response from Peter. Only on the third time does Jesus use the same word that Peter uses. There must be a reason why the two words are used & my guess is that two different words were also used in the Aramaic they were actually speaking. The Amplified New Testaments attempts to draw out this distinction. Here’s how it is paraphrased. beginning at verse 15:
When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter:
Simon son of John do you love me more than these others do ? with reasoning, intentional devotion, as one loves the Father ? He said to him, Yes, Lord; You know that I love you - that I have deep, instinctive personal affection for You as a close friend ... He said to him, Feed my lambs. Again, he said for the second time, Simon son of John do you love me ? with reasoning, intentional devotion, as one loves the Father ? He said to him, Yes, Lord; You know that I love you - that I have deep, instinctive personal affection for You as a close friend ... He said to him Shepherd or tend my sheep He said to him the third time, Simon son of John , do you love me do you have deep, instinctive personal affection for me as a close friend ... Peter was grieved that he should ask him the third time He said to him, Yes, Lord; You know that I love you - that I have deep, instinctive personal affection for You as a close friend Jesus said to him, Feed my sheep. I believe that Peter understood full well the word that Jesus used & why he was asking him to affirm that love. He had learned from bitter experience not to promise anything more than what he was prepared to deliver. He fully understood his own limitations. He only knew that he loved his Lord & wanted to serve him. In this same encounter with Jesus, he was curious about what would happen to John. Jesus replies to this query with the words, “ If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you ? You must follow me.” Jesus had already talked about the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Tradition has it that he was crucified upside down. Whatever the case may be, we know that it is no longer the burly fisherman who is in control, but one who is so in love with Jesus that he is prepared to live for him & if necessary die for him. He would have agreed with Isaac Watts who, many centuries later would vow, “were the whole realm of nature mine, that were a present far too small: Love so amazing, so divine, demand my soul, my live my all.”
CONCLUSION What then, can we learn from this passage ? We acknowledge that it is great to love God, and that there should follow from that love, powerful & real love for one another, but that the really exciting thing is that God first loved us. We have noted the responses of Peter , Isaac Watts & Charles Wesley. What about us ? What is our response to his great love ? Let us pray Father, we thank you that you are pure unbounded love. Yours is a love excelling all other loves. We pray for our world that desperately needs to know your love. More than that, we need to know & to show more of your love. Help us to appreciate more the gifts of love that you have bestowed upon us, the gift of romantic, love, married love, family love. May ours be a love that is sacrificial, that goes the second mile. May it exemplify in some small way, your great sacrifice in which you gave your one and only Son, that whoever believes in him, should not perish but have everlasting life. May your love shine upon us this very hour, we ask in Jesus’ Name. Amen. BENEDICTION “ May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it.” 1 Thessalonians 5:23, 24
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