Text: 1 John 4:16-21
Focus: Love, Advent 3
Function: to help us embrace Christian love
16So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. 17Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. 18There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. 19We love because he first loved us. 20Those who say, “I love God,” and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. 21The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.
Welcome back to our Advent as we prepare for the coming of Jesus Christ, the hope of the world.
We are following the advent themes, Hope, Peace, Love and Joy this year. Today we focus on Love.
Those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.
I was asked by a friend of mine a few weeks ago about my position on universal restoration. I know, it is theological jargon. He was a preacher.
I admitted to my friend that I believed that in the end, the love of God will win out and all of God’s children will be reunited with God in heaven.
He believes that God will allow people to suffer torment. And although the Old Testament never mentions hell there was popular literature around during the time of Jesus about the vengeance of God against the Roman occupation that included images of retribution in hell. And some of that got picked up in the New Testament scriptures. We have to remember that when the Bible speaks symbolically, a literal interpretation is not being faithful to the teachings of Jesus or the power of the Spirit inside the preacher.
Anyway, all of that is to say that Jesus doesn’t teach about hell, instead He is helping the Jewish people cope with the desperate circumstances the Roman occupation has caused them.
So, my friend asked me, if you don’t believe in hell, what difference does it make in how people live and what do you preach about?
I told him that I preach this, Love your neighbor as yourself, no matter who that person is. A prisoner, a refugee, a Muslim, Gay, straight, queer, Christian, atheist, jew, black, white, male female, rich and poor, love them all.
But he pressed me about leaving out the passages about judgment.
And I told him that my understanding of a vengeful God was inconsistent with the fact that the God we worship has described God’s own self as LOVE.
God is love. God IS love.
Thru out the scriptures we read about God describing us as God’s Children. God describes Gods own self as a loving Father. God describes God’s self as a nurturing Mother. And God describes us as the children that God dearly loves. I love my children. I get the love a parent has for a child.
And I will always forgive my child. The worse thing that I can imagine is for my child to be cut off from me for eternity in a place of torment at worse, and a place of utter darkness without love, at best.
So, if God is love. Let us look at the power of God inside of us when we manifest the love of God for others. There are several promises in this passage.
The first one to mention is boldness on the day of judgment. Again, my boldness comes from my absolute belief in God’s loving nature of forgiveness for me. And if it isn’t big enough for the worse person I can imagine, then it isn’t big enough for me. Otherwise, I am filled with pride thinking I deserve salvation and others deserve condemnation. We are called to love others. And when we practice that love, it gives us a sense of boldness, or peace when we think of the possibility of judgment.
The text says that love is a reaction to God. We love because God first loved us. It is a natural response to love to give it back.
I believe that this in the power of the Holy Spirit. Remember, when we choose to abide in Love, when we choose to react with love instead of hatred, bitterness or strife, we are abiding in love and in God.
I believe that the promise of God is this, the fact of God’s universal love sets us free from the fear of God’s judgment. When we love, we are perfected, completed, we become mature in God’s love.
Why do people fear God’s judgment? Because we in our human nature want revenge for the wrongs committed against us.
But we believe that God placed God’s wrath on Jesus on the cross. For a moment, the Jesus felt rejected as He bore the sins of the world.
And Jesus gave us one final, all encompassing commandment. Love one another. He called it the New Commandment.
Listen to John in John 14: 34I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
And he gives us a promise with that new commandment: Look at 1 Peter 4:8Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins.
It isn’t that God doesn’t care about justice. The concept of hell is that there is a God who will exact revenge on evil doers. And that comforts us when we have been the victims of evil. I have often said that hell would be loving response of a just God on behalf of the victims.
The thing is this. God’s response to evil was the cross of Christ and sin itself was crucified on that cross in order to purchase our redemption.
God doesn’t need to get revenge. We are the one who feel it. And the image of the cross and all the wickedness that mankind can perform, one person to another is exemplified there in that torture,
When we accept Christ into our hearts, we join the path of love and forgiveness. It is another way of living.
This passage and today;e theme is about love. I would be remiss to leave the sermon there without mentioning love’s relationship to the racism that we still experience and are called to root out of our lives.
I have shared in the past with this congregation about how when I first came back to Christ after backsliding for a little while, For some reason, while I wasn’t a practicing Christian, I developed a prejudice toward Jewish people.
But God changed my heart. The first church I attended after coming back to Christ had several Jewish believers in it. And I noticed a strange attraction to them.
I knew that this miracle of a change of heart was the reaction to Jesus loving me through the power of His Holy Spirit inside of me.
I felt it. So, the passage about God’s love gives us a warning against the hypocrisy of racism. He says, the one who says they love God and then says they hate their brother is a liar. Apparently, because God’s Spirit is now inside of us, we are compelled by God’s Spirit to love others.
I mentioned that I backslid for a while. I lost faith in the Church during my teenage years and the civil rights era.
The neighborhood my church was located in was becoming integrated and the Church decided to move because they didn’t believe they could effectively worship with black people.
I had been a passionate Christian and was raised singing the song; “Red and yellow, black or white, they are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.” We had missionary conferences where it was okay to go to them, but it wasn’t okay for them to come to us.
I left the faith because of the hypocrisy. And now I forgive them for their sin against God. Because love covers a multitude of sins.
As I have mentioned the phrase from Galatians 3:
There is neither Jew or Greek, Male or Female, Slave or free, but all are one in Christ.
They all quoted that when they were baptized as a statement that the Christian faith was one of universal love instead of racial mistrust and fear. They started a different kind of kingdom. The Kingdom of God. And when they were baptized they confessed that there is no preferred race: Jew or Greek, no preferred gender: male or female and no prfeferred class: Slave or free.
Unfortunately, White Supremacy has still infiltrated the Church and it is important, I believe, if we are going to build the kingdom of God, that we act like the family of God and extend our welcome to everyone because everyone is our neighbor.
Love covers a multitude of sins and we are called to practice love, not just feel it.
Love and forgiveness gives us power over sin and evil. If we react with God’s love, we are walking in God’s will and when the heavenly reward is passed out, we will have something to gain by living sacrificially in love for others.
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