Blessed Assurance Pt 4 – God is love
Readings: 1 John 4. 1-21
In the New Testament there are 4 declarations about God’s nature, 3 of which are recorded by John. In chapter 4 of the Gospel which bears his name he records Jesus saying that ‘God is Spirit’. In the opening of this letter he says that ‘God is light’. And the writer to the Hebrews quotes Deuteronomy that our God ‘is a consuming fire’. So we’re left with the 4th and probably most famous of the declarations in our reading today ‘God is love’. And it’s this and what it means for us that I want to focus on.
God is love. It’s a truly astonishing statement. God is love. What it means is that love isn’t one thing God does among others; he loves, he rules, he judges. Nor is it one attribute among many; he is loving, he is just, he is righteous. Rather the statement that God is love means that all activity is loving activity; he rules in love, he judges in love. It means that his attributes are rooted in love; his justice is out of love, his righteousness, in other words his Holy goodness and perfection, is rooted in love.
God isn’t just loving, he is love. He is the very source of love, if we were to trace love back to its origins we’d find ourselves before God. It’s part of why the Trinity is such a joyful doctrine. If God were singular, a lonely old man in the sky, he couldn’t be love, that couldn’t be who he is for there was nothing for him to love until he created something to love. But because God is Trinity it means he has, from eternity past to everlasting ages to come, been a Father loving his Son in the joy of the Holy Spirit.
So God is the origin of love. And as John continues he makes another startling declaration; he writes that God the Son come to us as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. In other words: Jesus is the manifestation of love. If you want to see love in action, if you want to see love himself at work you need look no further than Jesus.
The word atonement is a very religious sounding word but it’s actually a word Christians made up to try to express what this means, it’s literally ‘at-one-ment’ to make us one. Jesus has come as sacrifice for our sins so that we can be made one with God once more. That’s love says John. That’s love in action. Sacrifice to restore and heal, sacrifice to rescue the beloved.
As the origin of love, the very source of love, God is at the root of all our love, Christian and non-Christian alike. As we love we reflect God’s nature. But for the Christian it goes further. Because the way we are to love, the way we love one another is in response to having seen God’s love for us in action ‘Since God so loved us, so we ought to love one another’. And here John combines both a moral aspect of Christian faith, that we are to love one another, with a core doctrine of Christian faith, that in Jesus God has come among us to die for our sins. Those two things tied up together are vital for Christian life.
For if we love people, but don’t believe in Jesus, we’re the same as the rest of the world, muddling along in the echoes of God’s love but with no-where to root it. Love becomes subjective, we decide what is loving, what love should look like, and often we can easily be rather selfish about love; if you really loved me then… you’d let me do this or have this.
On the other hand if we declare we believe in Jesus but don’t love others, then we are no different to the angels who fell with Satan. They believe all this stuff about Jesus, but they don’t know it for themselves, haven’t responded to it. We need not just head knowledge about God, but to know him for ourselves, to experience his love for ourselves. As the 18th century puritan Jonathan Edwards famously put it ‘There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet and having a sense of its sweetness’. It’s the experience of it for ourselves which changes us.
Let’s circle back to that first one because love must be rooted in truth, in the truth of the Gospel and of God’s commands. Because I think that’s the aspect which are so at risk of losing in our current era. Love must be rooted in truth.
In chapter 3 as John is writing in his second section on love he says that we must love in spirit and in truth. We need to love in spirit, right down to the core of our being, but that love must also be true, real love and rooted in reality. At the start of our reading we heard him warning the believers about those who will lead them astray, who do not truly believe in Jesus as God come to us in the flesh. He doesn’t say to have this same love for them as we share with our fellow Christians, instead he warns them to keep away.
In our love for one another we must not neglect truth. For love should not avoid the truth. Indeed in that most famous passage about love, 1 Corinthians 13, Paul writes that love rejoices in the truth. We know this intuitively don’t we. Love that isn’t rooted in truth is a poor reflection of true love, it hides behind platitudes and falsehoods, and once those are uncovered we find that perhaps it wasn’t true, full bodied love after all.
But in our present era we’re nervous about that, we want to make love synonymous with affirmation, it feels safer that way. If you love me you’ll let me do whatever makes me happy. The Bible tells us that isn’t love, it’s a dangerous pale imitation of it. Imagine this, a child is crawling towards an open plug socket armed with a fork. We know it’s not loving to let that scenario play out, we remove the fork and take the child away from the socket, even as they protest, even as the cry and scream, they might think it will make them happy, we know it’s dangerous.
Equally we say if you love me you’ll let me believe whatever I want. But if we raised a child like this, believing whatever they want, they’d be in no real state to survive in the world. No, true love is rooted in reality, in the facts of our world, and sometimes that means we cannot affirm things. Love challenges, it gently corrects.
Christian faith means we believe things about sex, about the sanctity of life, about Jesus’ claim to be the only way to heaven, and much more. God tells us things about these in his word. Yet so often we’re tempted to gloss it over because it wouldn’t be loving to challenge one another on these things, and I’m talking about fellow Christians here, not the wider world. Yet it’s not loving to ignore our failings, it’s not loving to let people believe things which aren’t true. It’ll lead us into a mess.
Now just telling the truth doesn’t mean we’re doing so lovingly. You can be self-righteous and condescending and controlling and tell the truth. That isn’t to be us. Our motivation in rooting our love in truth is always to win the person, to want what is truly best for them.
And we’re to do it humbly, as a fellow fallen messy human to another. The reason we correct and challenge one another isn’t because we have all the answers worked out, there’s a reason I used images relating to children a few moments ago, we’re children of a Father who has told us what is right, we’re rooting ourselves not in our own ideas, but in what he has told us. We’re to love one another in truth, and we’re to truly love one another, that’s how we’re to love.
We see this in God’s love for us don’t we. In Jesus we see how 2 of the other declarations about God fit with the declaration that God is love. For God is also light, and he is fire. He cannot overlook nor permit our sins, our wrongdoing, that wouldn’t be loving. As John Stott says ‘Far from condoning sin, His love has found a way to expose it (because He is light) and to consume it (because He is fire) without destroying the sinner, but rather saving us’.
As John concludes this section he reminds us of the command we are given ‘love God, love people’ a single command. For our love for our fellow believers is the evidence of God’s love at work in us, evidence of our love for God. And our love for God is the source of our love for one another. If we try to love off our own backs it will be faltering, hesitant, it won’t be rooted in anything so we’ll end up in all sorts of mess as we try to work out what is loving. Instead we love because God first loved us.
My brothers and sisters, there is so much more I could say but I shall leave it as that, why do we love one another? Because God is love, he is it’s very source and origin, so if we claim to know God we should reflect him. Because God loves us, and reveals that love in Jesus, coming to sacrifice himself so that we can be made one with God once more, and so in response we are to love our fellow believers for whom he has also died. And because in loving one another in truth his love is perfected in us as he dwells in us.
So let us love one another, in response to what God has done, and in the power of his Spirit.
Amen.