Love One Another
1 John 4v11-12
7th July 2023
1 John 4v11-12
Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also 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.
Over the last two weeks, we've considered the wonderful words of 1 John 4v7-10, where John wrote that God is love and told us that This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. God's perfect in love is our example, and so John says:
1 John 4v11
Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
Does the truth of God's sacrificial love for you touch your heart? Does it fill you with gratitude to God? Are you overwhelmed with awe and wonder at the agape love of God for you? If so, then surely you will want to show to all God's people the same agape love that God showed you. He loves all your brothers and sisters in Christ just as much as He loves you. Since you have received such love from God, surely you want to share that love with all the people that God has made spiritually alive through faith in His atoning sacrifice.
Jesus showed us how God loves. Jesus loved lepers and tax collectors, prostitutes and Pharisees. God loves sinful and broken people, no matter how sinful or broken they are. So should we. God forgives everybody who asks Him. So should we. God welcomes everybody who comes to Him, as they are, with all their funny ideas and negative attitudes. So should we. God shows patience and kindness to all who ask for His help. So should we. As individual Christians and as churches, we should love the marginalised, the lonely, the damaged, as Jesus loves them.
Jesus gave us the parable of the good Samaritan to teach us that we should love people who are not like us, people who can't give much back, people whom others ignore, people who don't fit into our mould.
Many of us have had our lives transformed because we found a community of God's people who accepted us, and included us, and tolerated us, and forgave us, when we were still a mess. I'm one of them. Let's show the same love to others.
1 John 4v12
No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and
his love is made complete in us.
If you've received God's agape love, this love that you never deserved, that sets you free from sin and condemnation, that welcomes you in, that makes you spiritually alive and adopts you as God's child, then you will want other people to discover this love.
None of us has seen God the Father, but the Holy Spirit has made us aware of His sacrificial love. Our neighbours haven't seen God. They may not even believe that God exists. But you and I have an opportunity to help them to understand enough that they begin to seek God for themselves, and find Him, and be born again, as we have.
We can help our neighbours to experience God by loving each other. The church is not a building or a series of meetings. The church is a community. The church is God's family. And like any family, the church is called to live together, and for each other, to love each other as God has loved us.
And as we truly, genuinely love each other with God's agape love, God lives in us.
You may say that if you're a Christian then God lives in you already by His Holy Spirit. That's true. But God lives in Christians that have a sacrificial, willing, unselfish, open-hearted, welcoming love for each other, more completely than He lives in lukewarm, judgemental or exclusive Christians. And if we love other Christians with God's agape love, the church becomes a beautiful, growing community, and our neighbours see it, and some of them begin to seek God for themselves, and find Him.
God's desire is for Christians to be filled with His love for each other. In this way, John says, His love is made complete in us. God's love has always been infinite but some infinite things are bigger than others *. Some infinite things grow. And God's desire is that His love continues to expand, filling the heart of every child of God, so that they become part of the process by which more people becoming children of God.
If we will truly love all God's children with the Father's love, this will happen.
* For example, there are infinitely many even whole numbers (2, 4, 6, 8...) but there are twice as many whole numbers (1, 2, 3, 4...).