Sermon by Dr. Jeremiah
October 30, 2005

"Caring for One Another"
I John 4:7-21

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic American novel, The Scarlet Letter, there is a stark contrast between two of the main characters. Hester Prynne is a woman who fell into sin, for which she was sentenced to wear a scarlet "A" for "adulterer" on the front of her clothing. Her antagonist, Roger Chillingsworth, is the picture of the religious man, upright and moral. He says all the right things about God. You’d expect that your sympathy as a reader would gravitate toward him as a godly man. But that’s not the case. Consistent with his last name, there is a coldness about Chillingsworth’s drive for vengeance that turns you against him and toward the warmer, more humble and human Hester.

People have a natural dislike for those who say they love God but are cold toward other people. Our passage today says God has essentially the same attitude, a disgust toward the person who says he or she loves God, but there’s nothing in their interactions with other people that shows any evidence of love at all. Jim Boice was the Pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. He was an outstanding Bible scholar and preacher who was a good friend. He’s had a great influence on me in my ministry. Jim wrote that the passage we just read is most important to evangelical, Bible-believing Christians like us. He wrote, "We must recognize that it is possible for Christians to be very orthodox and faithful in what they believe, yet in their behavior and actions, have very little love for others." There’s a warning in this passage. For example, verse 8: "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." And then verses 20 and 21: "If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And He has given us this commandment: Whoever loves God must also love his brother." Loving God and loving others are not two separate activities. They’re synonymous, one and the same. This is a consistent emphasis in God’s Word. Jesus tells us in Matthew 25:31-46 that when we do acts of love for the people around us, like clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, and visiting the sick and imprisoned, it is like we are doing it for Him. Loving Christ and loving others are one and the same. Today I’d like us to look at how God loves and our capacity to love in the same way.

First, from verse 10, "This is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins" we can learn three important truths about how God loves us in Jesus Christ, and how we are to love others. First, God cared enough to initiate, to take the first step in the love relationship. It was not the case that we loved God and wanted to show Him that we loved Him. No, we didn’t love Him at all. In sin, we rebelled against God, hated Him. Why? Because we want to be God, we want to be Lord, we want to be in charge. We hated God. In spite of that, He cares for us so much that He took the first step in showing His love for us. As Romans 5:8 says, "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." I think the fact that God didn’t wait for us to get our lives straightened out before loving us may be the hardest part of God’s love. The belief is so engrained in us that in order to be loved, we must be lovable, we must say and do the right thing, the good thing in order to be loved. But God’s love doesn’t works this way. In love, He took the first step. Being the initiator involves a lot more risk because the one you are reaching out to can reject you. That’s the risk God took with you and me in Jesus Christ.

Second, God’s love is active. There’s a feeling called love that is nice, "warm fuzzies," sentimental. I read where "sentimental" was defined as "feeling without responsibility." It’s easy to be sentimental, to feel a "high" or a "low" and yet take no responsibility, not act on it. God’s love isn’t like that. His love acts. In love, He sent His Son. James tells us how essential action is to truly show love: "What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such a faith save him? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?" (James 2:14-16) Jesus emphasized the importance of action over words in the parable in which a father told his two sons to go out to work in the vineyard. The first said, "I won’t go," but then later he did go and work. The second said, "I’ll go," but then didn’t follow through. Jesus said it was the first son who did what God wanted (Matthew 21:28-32). And so it is that saying good, loving things is not enough. God’s love is words followed up with actions.

Third, God’s love pays the price, it sacrifices. Not only did God the Father send Jesus, He sent Jesus to die, to be the "atoning sacrifice" for our sins. For a loving relationship between us and the holy God to be possible, something had to be done about the sin that separated us from Him. Sin demands the price of death (Romans 6:23), and God was willing to pay that price through His only Son. This is God’s love. It initiates, it acts, it sacrifices for the person loved!

Our second point is that because you are loved by God in Jesus Christ, you have the capacity to love others as God loves you. That capacity is described in verses 12-16, where we find what God had in mind when He came up with His great plan of salvation. He was not satisfied simply to tell us that He loves us. He was not satisfied to even show us that He loves us. No, the glory of it all is that God loves us so much that He’s determined to come into our lives and live in us. Look at how often it’s noted in these five verses: "If we love one another, God lives in us." Because He has given us the Holy Spirit, "we know we live in God and God lives in us." "If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God." "Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him." If you enjoy a personal relationship with God in Jesus Christ, God is alive in you, and His life most dramatically affects you in your love for Him and for others. A large quantity of radioactive material was stolen from a hospital. When the hospital administrator notified the police, he said, "Please warn the thief that he is carrying death with him. As long as he keeps that material, its radiation is affecting him disastrously." Any person who possesses God must be affected by His presence. Not in a disastrous, deadly way, but in a loving, life-changing way. In Jesus Christ, you possess God, and God is love.

Some thoughts as we close: We live in a post-Christian era. Jesus Christ, the church, Christianity are either attacked as hateful and irrelevant to modern life, or are simply not taken seriously by an increasing number of people in our culture and world. Having been pushed to the sidelines, to the periphery of culture, one response would be for us to get good and angry and do a lot of yelling, "Hey, we’re over here! Listen to us, we have something important to say!" Or it would be easy to move into a mindset of "us versus them." We’ll retreat into a safe and comfortable protective cocoon and watch as the world goes straight to hell. Of course, there’s nothing God-honoring about those responses. In two weeks we’re holding a conference that says we’re not going to do that. Christ is building His church, and He’s called us to be part of that great work, whether it’s in a pre-Christian world, a pro-Christian world, an anti-Christian world, or post-Christian world. Yet, in a post-Christian culture, how are men, women, boys, and girls who do not yet know God going to get to know Him? Look again at what verse 12 says: "No one has ever seen God; but if we love each other, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us." God reveals Himself through the lives of His followers. People cannot see God, but they can see us. If we love others as God loves us, our love reveals who God is to a needy world. The love of God displayed in His people, His church, you and me is the strongest argument that God has in the world. This is a vase given to me by a young Chinese woman I baptized a number of years ago. When she gave me this gift she said, "I had heard for years about Jesus Christ and God’s love for me, but it was only after I came to this church that I saw Christians love each other and love me. That’s what made me want to become a Christian." The strongest argument for Jesus Christ God has in the world is His love on display in His people, in you and me. That argument can change lives, it can change communities, it can change the world!