1 John 4:7-16

 

I.                   In the early 1970's, it was the time of the Vietnam War, the anti-draft movement, with unrest across college campuses, and some of you may remember the Angela Davis protest made in the Riverside Presbyterian Church in New York City. I was in my first church in rural eastern Pennsylvania, the tiny community of Nottingham. There was a young man who had returned from serving in Vietnam and he went into the house-building business with his older brother-in-law. This young veteran I became very good friends. Though George came from a very strong church family, he had lost his faith.  Or maybe he had never quite found it.  He went to many of the other churches in our community.  He and I drove 90 miles down to Washington DC to Fourth Presbyterian quite often to attend the active young adults fellowship. George went to Bible studies.  And he confessed to me, “I have tried everything, but I just cannot find God.” We sat together in his grandparents’ yard, and I said to him, “Maybe you are looking to hard. Why don’t you slow down and let God find you. Just ask God to come to you, and then wait, be patient.”

 

A.               “God is love.” 

1.                  I think it was the first Bible verse my mother taught me to memorize. It should be the first verse every child memorizes.

2.                  Writes Ralph Moody in “The Interpretation Commentary, ”That God is love is not an exhaustive description of God but a statement of how God manifests himself to us.”

a.                  just a momentary glimpse into one facet of God’s person.

3.                  That alone, says 1 John–the essence of love–is more than we can handle with each other in our faith community.

4.                  Who is God?  How does God reveal himself, or God’s self, to us?

a.                  Is not this the whole story of the Bible?

5.                  On the first page of Genesi, as well as in the last two chapters of Revelation, the picture of God is perfect and complete. 

a.                  In all the rest of the pages between Genesis and Revelation, we see only a tiny glimpse of God. Each time it is more than we can comprehend; it overwhelms us.

b.                  Paul in his love chapter in 1 Corinthians says one day we will not need a mirror but see God ”face to face.” For “I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.”

6.                  If you should examine each event in the Bible in which God’s person is revealed to us, I believe there is ONE aspect of God, ONE piece of the divine persona, we are allowed to see.

a.                  In the Garden, when God confronts Adam & Eve, what is that one

                                      quality of self God chooses to reveal? .....

                                         (1)   It is that God cannot tolerate sin, cannot tolerate anything that you and I allow to come before God in our life, anything that shuts the door on us seeing God.

                                         (2)   From there we move toward forgiveness and restoration of our brokenness with God.

                      7.    As Moses faces the burning bush, what is he allowed to see of God? ...

                               a.     that God is holy.

                      8.    On Mount Sinai when God comes down to Moses in a cloud and fire; also with the 3 disciples at Jesus’ Transfiguration, what does God reveal?

                               a.     God’s glory.

                      9.    In the whole life of Jesus, what is the great scandal of God that is

                             revealed and the people find it unacceptable?

                               a.     that “‘I and the Father are one.’” (John 10;30)

                                     b.        “‘The Father is in me and I am in the Father. “‘ whoever has seen me has seen the Father’” (John 10:38, 14:9).

 

B.                  There is a follow-up question to each revelation of God’s person and this is always: How shall we respond to this God?

1.                  It is always an ethical question.

2.                  It is a question of belief,

3.                  It is a question of obedience,

4.                  It is a question of serving God by serving others.

a.                  So says 1 John and every other biblical writer.

                     5.     And it is a question of love.

                               a.     “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and whoever loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God; for God is love.’”

b.                  We might say that love is the only interpretation of the gospel and the death and resurrection of Jesus.

                      6.    And it must be an incarnational, Christological question grounded in Jesus who is the perfect manifestation of his Father.

                               a.     What is a “manifestation?”

                               b.     It is something clearly visible to the eye that was previously hidden, whose meaning is apparent, not difficult to understand.

 

II.                 “Love is of God”:This is the basic premise of the Christian faith.” Without love, there is no Christianity and there can be no church.

A.                 John’s discussion of love is contextual.

1.                  When he uses the word love, or says “love is of God,” there are always surrounding sentences connecting such abstract statements to the practical life of living out our Christianity in the church,

a.                  we who are sinners every day

b.                  we who must love a church member every day

c.                  Says John Calvin in his exegesis of this passage, “The love of God is testified to us by many ...proofs” in our lives.

2.                  This passage in 1 John is considered to be a more powerful discussion of love than 1 Corinthians 13 because it is so contextual, where John’s focus is always on the intimate life of the Christian church.”

3.                  The tension, the reservation, the limitation you and I feel with when we demand a emphasis on the right worship,

a.                  the right Bible interpretation,

b.                  the right rules,

c.                  even the right definition of true faith–

(1)              The Scots Confession of 1560, defined the true church as the true preaching of the Word of God... the right

administration of the sacraments... and ecclesiastical discipline uprightly administered.” 

                                          (2)  I checked to see if Knox and his friends said of love... and there it was on the very last line of that section (3.19), the only interpretation that “we admit to...in the plain Word of God” is the rule of love.”

 

                   B.       The rule of love has  become the#1 rule for the interpretation of  

                                Scripture for Reformed Presbyterians.

                             1.       How difficult it must have been for those people in the 16

^th century

                                         to talk of the rule of love when they were being hunted down and  

                                         put to death.   (page 2)

                               2.     Last week in my devotions with our “Mission Yearbook of Prayer,”

                                         the entry for Saturday, June 20, had to do with the country of

                                         France.  In 1730, a 15 year-old Huguenot girl from Bouchet-de-

                                         Pransles was taken from her home to the Tower of Constance in

                                         another town on the Mediterranean.

                                             The tower, which also served as a lightouse, had been  

                                         converted to a women’s prison. The girl was Marie Durand, her

                                         crime was to have a brother who was a Protestant pastor. 

      The upper room of the tower where the women were

imprisoned was kept very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer. Considered heretics, these women were tortured by the authorities.They were not all Christians. But Marie Durand’s faith

served as an inspiration for all these women. She persuaded the authorities to allow them to have a book of Psalms from which she would read aloud every evening. The women were released 37 years later.         

 

                   B.       The first Epistle of John also raises a question of whether anything

                                   we do can ever be perfect, or made perfect.

                             1.       In our church life we strive toward such a goal in our love toward

                                         God as well as our neighbors.

                                      a.       Is there such a thing as “a good Christian?”

                                      b.       A truly tough question for you or me to try and answer!

                             2.       Certainly, the problem in John’s church with the members who

                                      thought they were the only proper church was “a too narrow     interpretation of perfection as sinlessness.”

                                      a.       I am reminded of a girl friend I had many years ago who was

                                                a new pastor of two small rural churches in southern Kansas.

                                                She told me that she had one member who objected strongly

                                                    to the weekly confession of sin in the Sunday bulletin. This

                                                    woman told her pastor, “I have made it a life long effort to

                                                    eliminate sin from my life, and I am not guilty of all those

                                                    sins you keep putting in the confession of sin. So I just don’t

                                                    say them.” (Maybe she was guilty of being unloving.)

                             3.       Again from John Calvin’s commentary on 1 John: he defines “God’s

                                         love perfected in us,” that “it is abundantly poured forth and really

                                         bestowed and is complete in every respect.”

                                      a.       Calvin reminds you and me that this term “perfect” describes

                                                    not us, but how God goes about loving you and me with his

                                                    perfection.

 

                   B.       A condition of forgiveness and perfection is mutual love.

                             1.       Mutual love is a three-way street: between God, me, you!

                             2.       And it is not about me, it is about God, because that is where love

                                         originates: “In this is love, not that we loved him, but that God loved us

                                                 first.”

                             3.       Just as the gifts of the Holy Spirit, love and forgiveness are not for

                                         me to keep as a private possession, but to pass on and to share for

                                         the building up of the church, that we may grow in every way into

                                         perfection, and in love, into him who is the head of the church, into

                                         Christ Jesus our head.

                                      a.       That from Ephesians 4.

 

III.              IF GOD’s Nature defines love, Does it likewise follow that God does not exist  outside of love?      (page 3)

A.                 Another tough question! Dare you or I attempt to answer the question, we who are finite and incomplete?

1.                  This is something John Calvin declared only “God’s secret counsel” knows.

 

B.                  First, we review how one corner or edge of God’s nature defines love:

1.                  If love originates with God, then that explains everything God does for and to us.

a.       God sent his only son that we might live through him.

2.                  Love is not a feeling, not an act, not something we do, but is who we are, how we live in relationship on that 3-way street with God, self and neighbor.   

a.       Remember, love is the Elmer’s Glue that holds us together.

                               b.     If I love God, then it is my nature to also love myself, forgive

                                      myself, nurture myself in the presence of other lovely Christians.

                      3.    Love does not mean sinlessness or perfection. Love is a journey toward God, and forgiveness is the fuel that allow us to move forward.

                               a.     for as we love one another, his love is perfected in us.

                      4.    There is no fear in love. 

                               a.     Perfected love casts out fear and exposes it as only temporary.

                      5.    We believe the love God has for us. You and I know this is the basis of our Christian joy and hope.

                      6.    We abide in God: our lives cannot exist apart from God’s love.

                               a.     Again from the Scots’ Confession, the opening preamble: “We confess and acknowledge one God alone, to whom alone we must cleave, whom alone we must serve, whom only we must worship, and in whom alone we put our trust.”

                      7.    And finally, when we love one another, even though no one has ever seen God, others will see God in us. I believe that.

                               a.     Someone gave me a card with a saying on it.  “I looked for myself

                                      and I could not find myself. I looked for my God, and I could not

                                      find God. I looked for my brother, and I found all three.”

                                               

         C.       Does God exist as ruler of the cosmos apart from love, Does God order the heavens and the earth as some impersonal “deus machina”? 

                     1.     Does it make sense to talk of God’s immutable Law without love, God as

                             Judge without love?

                               a.     How do you make sense of a sermon like Jonathan Edwards’ sermon in 1741, “Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God”? 

                    2.      I believe this is almost like trying to talk about God as not being “person,” as being impersonal, which is to deny that everything God created was in order to make love possible and then to make be able to love God created humankind.

a.       God’s universe and cosmos, the whole meaning of order, is senseless without God’s prior love.  

b.       If I were writing the Gospel of John, I would start out in chapter 1

                                      by saying, In the beginning was love, and Love was with God...all

                                      things were made through God’s love, and without love was not

                                      anything made...

                               c.     Well, isn’t that almost what the first letter of John does say?

                    3.      Sometimes we talk about living in a world in which there is no love. Dare we ask, where is God? The manifested truth is: this is God’s world and it is so full of love– the evidence of his loving, forgiving, redeeming presence.