Is Christianity a set of doctrines to be believed? Does being a Christian mean living by certain spiritual and moral guidelines? Is Christianity about keeping company with other believers? Yes, Christianity includes these and other aspects, but reducing biblical Christianity to a belief and behavior system, much less a buddy system would be like reducing a marriage to mere sexual fidelity, financial provision, or companionship. Every spouse expects these things in a marriage, but no spouse is satisfied with only these things. Just as in marriage, there’s this thing called love that must permeate every aspect of our Christian lives, if not we might appear to be good religious people, yet lack a real relationship with God.
Love isn’t easy, but for Christians it’s essential to who we are. Everyone in this room struggles in one way or another to love some person or another. So, at the end of the service today, if you’re struggling to love, I want to pray for you!
In 1 John the apostle echoes Jesus by insisting upon loving one another as a principle activity of the church. He roots his instruction to love in the church’s identity as God’s “Beloved.” Last week we also noted that love is not a good feeling moving at random but actually has a starting point—a starting Person—as John says in v. 7, “let us love one another, for love is from God.” We saw that those who love have been born of God and know God, and that those who don’t love other believers can’t know God because “God is love.” Finally I noted Jesus’ rebuke of the Ephesian church in Rev. 2, “I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first,” and His warning that He would remove their witness as a church if they didn’t repent and do the love they did at first.
Today John takes us into the heights and depths of God’s love in vv. 9-12 and forces us to grapple with the personal and sacrificial nature of that love in the Person and work of Jesus Christ. It isn’t good enough for Christians to just be kindly affectioned towards one another or to merely seek each other’s good because of some karma-like ‘what goes around comes around’ notion. Our every attitude and act as Christians portrays Christ; so we can either love one another and portray Him as loving or fail to love one another and portray Him as something else—something other than loving.
Here’s how this text breaks down. First of all, in vv. 9-10 John describes how much God loves us and how He’s gone about showing that love to us. We’ll call this ‘Initiation.’ Secondly, in v. 11 John reasons, on the basis of God’s love, that we in the body of Christ ought to love one another. We’ll call this ‘Imitation.’ Finally, in v. 12 he concludes that even though no one has ever seen God in the totality of His infinite being, when we love one another we can be assured that God’s presence and essence are in us. We’ll call this ‘Inhabitation.’ So we have God’s initiation of love, our imitation of His love, and God’s inhabitation of the loving fellowship of Christians. Let’s start with a closer look at initiation.
Initiation
John begins v. 9 and v. 10 with the phrase “In this…” (or “by this” or “this is how”); he’s about to explain a process. In this case he’s about to explain how God shows us love and what that love accomplishes for us. He says in v. 9: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.” We can look at v. 9 like we look at a clock to find out what time it is. Verse 9 is a big-picture verse. John flows straight out of “God is love” in v. 8 to describe how this God who is love manifests that love among humanity by sending His only Son into the world so that people might live through Him. It’s a cause and effect statement: God’s love is the cause; people living is the effect. Verse 9 has the ring of John 3:16 to it: God loves the world; eternal life is the outcome. But, like John 3:16, v. 9 also contains a bridge in between cause and effect; it’s a divine-human Bridge: the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the agent of God’s loving and He is the agent of our living. He brings effect out of cause, life out of love. And how does He do it? We find out in v. 10.
Verse 10 gives us the details. In v. 10 we take the clock apart; we see the power source, the springs, the gears, the shafts that move the hands that make it possible for us to tell the time. “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” God’s love and the sending of the Son are mentioned in both verses, but v. 10 answers the question that v. 9 raises; it tells us why we need to live in the first place. We need to live because we’ve got a death problem—a death problem caused by sin and remedied for us through another death: the propitiating death of Jesus.
John’s term “propitiation” means the averting of wrath or judgment of a god through an atoning sacrifice. Propitiation was around before Christianity. Pagan religions invented various ritualistic forms of animal and human sacrifice to pacify their invented gods. But by contrast, God didn’t wait for Israel to invent sacrifices; He initiated system of animal sacrifice for them. And in v. 10 we see the full flowering of God’s initiative in propitiation: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” It’s not that after centuries of animal sacrifices God realized He was still angry with His people and decided to make one final sacrifice for sins. He planned all along to send His Son, but He wanted His people to see the incompleteness and vanity of animal sacrifices. He wanted them to see how, even though He was the one who’d prescribed the sacrifices, they would inevitably begin to take credit and congratulate themselves for their faithfulness in offering those sacrifices. So God took the initiative in making a sacrifice they could never make, a sacrifice for which they could never take credit, a sacrifice by which they could never say, “Look how much we love you, God,” but a sacrifice at which they could only marvel and say, “Look how much our God loves us!”
And by the way, just because we no longer live under the Old Testament sacrificial system, it’s still possible for professing Christians to congratulate and credit themselves before God for acts of obedience. If this weren’t true why would John feel the need to emphasize God’s initiative in salvation—“not that we have loved God, but that he loved us…”? Christians can sing “O how I love Jesus,” why? “Because He first loved me.”
Imitation
According to John, God’s initiation of love to us through Christ should lead to an imitation of that love on our part. He says in v. 11, “Beloved (again, he doesn’t call them Christians, or saints, or disciples, or little children; he calls them Beloved)—“Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”
For better or worse, kids are ferocious imitators of their parents. Deborah is famous for her stern “No!” and a frustrated “Grrrrrrrrhhhh!” when correcting Isaac. Emmaline, our almost 5 year-old mom-in-training, has picked right up on this, and we’ll catch her imitating Deborah when Isaac messes with her dolls. When Landon does or says something mean to one of his younger siblings, if he’s standing close to me, my first impulse is to give him a little rap on the top of the head. Well, of course Isaac is usually watching when I do that, so guess what he does when Landon irritates him—or even when I irritate him. Needless to say, imitation in the human realm is fraught with all kinds of problems owing to the presence of residual sin in our lives. But, since Christ as propitiated our sins and given us new life and salvation, we don’t have to be slaves to sin’s impulses; we’re now capable of imitating God’s love for us by showing love to others. And often our imitation of God’s love will have its greatest impact on us, on the other person, and on anyone who might be watching, when that other person gives us little if any incentive to love them. After all, that’s how God loved us. He took the initiative to love us when we gave Him no incentive to love us. You see, for the person who truly loves another, the incentive is always internal not external. Paul says in Romans 5:8 that when we were still sinners God showed His love to us by sending Jesus. Rather than wait until they become our friends, Jesus says, “Love your enemies [while they’re your enemies].”
What if instead of rapping Landon on the top of his head I did the harder (more loving) thing: kneeling down, looking him straight in the eye and explaining why his actions toward his sibling are inappropriate. I’d much rather Isaac see and imitate that than my impulsive irritated slap, not to mention Landon himself.
What about you; who’s giving you little if any incentive to love them? You may be thinking, Gee, where do I start? Let me encourage you, pick someone, and start today! Get a taste for it. It will always be harder to imitate God by initiating love for another person than to just get angry or ignore them, but love is always better for everyone involved. Are we too busy, too lazy, too angry, or too hurt to love one another in the body of Christ? Could there be anything more pressingly urgent for the Church today? I say no.
Inhabitation
If God took the initiative to love you in your sinfulness you can imitate Him by being a loving, initiative-taking wife, husband, fellow church member, Christian co-worker, parent, son or daughter, friend, or fiancée. Whatever the relationship, whatever the situation, it’s possible to imitate and initiate God’s personal and sacrificial love if and only if the Spirit of this same God inhabits you. John says in v. 12, “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” John isn’t saying that God waits for us to be loving before inhabiting us and perfecting His love in us. He’s saying we’ll know that God already inhabits us and is already perfecting His love in us when we love one another.
You want to see God with your earthly eyes? Look at those Christians who are good at loving others, and do likewise. Want others to see something divine in the dinge of everyday life in this world? Love them and don’t worry about their reaction. If you’ve believed in Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins, God inhabits you! Imitate Him by initiating love. Let God’s love for you in Christ and your desire to honor Him be your incentive, because you’re certainly not going to find it in other people. Listen to what Paul says in Galatians 5:13-15:
“For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.”
A Christian wrote that to other Christians almost two thousand years ago; and the warning still stands. Nothing could be more deadly to the soul or more damaging to a church’s witness than failing to love one another as our loving God has so loved us.