The Bible is our ‘instruction book’ and it not only tells us about God but also about ourselves and we should use it to learn how we should act. God uses the Bible to tell us about himself, we use the Bible to learn about God and about ourselves.
There are a number of commands in the Bible to do with love: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your strength and with all your soul’. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’. ‘Love each other, as I have loved you.’ (John 15:12) ‘By this will you be known as my disciples, that you love one another’’. But I’m not very good at love - what is it? How do I love a God I have not seen if I have trouble loving my brother whom I can see? (‘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 command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.’ ! John 4:20ff))
What do you think of when you hear the word ‘love’? In our modern world, love is almost synonymous with a warm glow: ‘As soon as I saw him, I fell in love’. ‘Oh, I love you to bits’. But God does not sit in heaven and simply think how wonderful we are and how much he loves us - and leave us alone: and I don’t think that that is what he wants from us, either. I needed to learn more about what it means to love God, to love my neighbour (and I have had some neighbours that I didn’t even like, let alone love) and even to love myself. And if we are made in the image of God, though less than God, then our love must also be in the image of God’s love, though less than God’s love. What I say here does not mean that I am limiting God’s love to our level: but that we have to start somewhere! Then one day, I had to study 1 John 4:7-21, which we are now going to read.
Reading: 1 John 4 :7-21
Give me some words to describe God:
Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer, Provider, Forgiving, Faithful, compassionate, true (not deceitful), merciful, just, judging, joyful, suffering, jealous, eternal, unchanging, healer, generous
We are told in the passage above that ‘God is Love’. From this construction it is true to say that what God is, love is. So let’s examine the list of God’s attributes and see if they correspond to elements in love: and can we love our neighbours in this way?
How is love Creative: (Love must be creative and not destructive, build people up and not destroy. Help people to find their purpose…)
Redeemer: (love has to pay the price in many ways, giving up one’s own ambition, doing what is good for someone else and not what you want to do, live where you would not choose to live, do a job you would not choose.) Extends to the ultimate sacrifice: Jesus, Sidney Carton.)
Sustainer: (Love has to uphold its object, support and encourage.)
Provider: (love has to give what is needed, practically and emotionally)
Forgiving: (love has to forgive seventy times seven and more: love has no room for a grudge, a resentment.)
Faithful: (yes, true love is faithful through difficulties, disappointments, absence, failures.)
Compassionate: (From the Latin, this means literally ‘to suffer with’: we use it to mean to have sympathy with, to be of one heart with.)
True: (Love has to be genuine, without any shred of deceit, or it is not love. No lies, preferably no secrets.)
Merciful: (giving the benefit of the doubt – yes.)
Just: (Not jumping to conclusions or condemning out of hand. Prepared to listen to evidence for and against)
Judging: (we shy away from the idea of judgement because of Matthew 7 ‘do not judge lest you yourself be judged’: but a couple of verses later we are told not to cast pearls before swine, which involves judgement of unworthiness. Love has to include a measure of judgement because, if you think of bringing up your children, they need discipline, they need to be taught when something is wrong, and good has to receive its reward, and this involves judgement. We need our friends and relatives to judge us, to tell us when we are wrong)
Joyful and suffering: (yes, part of love is rejoicing together and weeping together: these things strengthen the bonds between us.)
Unchanging: (true love may change in its outward aspects but it does not change at root, see faithful. ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds’ (Shakespeare).)
Jealous: there are two ways of using this word: the wrong sort of jealousy is destructive, possessive and corrosive: but God is a jealous God and this is used in the sense that we say of a friend, ‘he is jealous of his good name’. It is difficult for me to define although I know inside what I mean: you want the best for your loved ones, you are protective of them.
Healer: it is known that the power of love can heal a small child’s hurts but also quite major recoveries.
You could quote Galatians 5:22 ‘the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control’ and say that love is only one among the other things: but in fact the word ‘fruit’ is singular and love comes first: I take it to mean that all the other things are included in love.
So if you accept that this is true of your loving your neighbour, is it also true of loving yourself? Can you forgive yourself, judge yourself, rebuke yourself, reward yourself, be merciful to yourself, be honest with yourself, provide for yourself (ie allow yourself those things you need), be creative in the way you live your life, be true to what you believe….
Jesus loved his disciples and one of his instructions was that they should love one another as he had loved them. How did he love them?
He called them to a purpose (Fishers of men), he challenged them (to drive out demons), encouraged them (to walk on the water), he fed them (breakfast on the seashore), he taught them, he protected them from the storm at sea, he rebuked them (‘O ye of little faith’), he accepted them as the fallible persons that they were, he gave them a chance to redeem themselves, (feed my sheep), he accepted their need for proof (Thomas): he never gave up on them.
Why did Jesus tell us the parable of the Good Samaritan?
It was in response to the command to ‘love one’s neighbour as oneself’ and the subsequent question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ It is clear from this that loving one’s neighbour is not just a matter of good feeling but of action. (Luke 10:25-37)
I think we can see from this that love is active and demanding. What does it say in James 2 v 14?
It says ‘What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or 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?’
A good description of love is in Fiddler on the Roof: Tevye asks Golda if she loves him; she says, I’m your wife. ‘I know, but do you love me?’ What does she answer? ‘For twenty five years I’ve cooked your meals, cleaned your house, borne your children, washed your clothes…if that’s not love, what is?’ What indeed?
But love also demands obedience: especially towards God. Jesus was obedient ‘to death – even death on a cross’ (Philippians 2:8) and we have to obey God’s commands as part of our love to him. We cannot do all the things I have mentioned before for God himself – we cannot support him and heal him, be merciful to him or forgive him, or provide him with anything except praise and obedience, so how do we love him? We are told, in Matthew 25:40 ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’ So our way of loving God includes how we love each other: and we can be unchanging, true and faithful towards him.
The next thing in the passage we read from 1 John is ‘We love because he first loved us’. What does this mean?
If God had not chosen to love mankind, and show his love in a positive way, it would not have occurred to mankind to love him. Fear him, maybe: placate his wrath, offer gifts, but not to love. I don’t mean to be in any way insulting when I compare our relationship with God to someone who owns a pet. We used to have goats: if we had just left them in the field to fend from themselves, it would never have occurred to them to love us. They might come to accept our presence happily if we made a habit of sitting on a log quietly and watching them: but that would be all. However, we fed them milk from bottles when they were babies. We gave them honey-and-salt mixtures when they were ill, we brushed their coats daily, we changed their bedding, we brought them different sorts of branches and leaves to eat – we cared for them in an active way: like the owner of a dog or a cat. And they came running when they heard us, they nuzzled up to us, they let my younger son ride on their backs, they enjoyed a cuddle, I would say they had learnt to love us. The higher has to make the first move, to show love in an active and positive way to the lower, who will thus learn to love. God showed us love and taught it to us.
What does it mean to ‘love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength?’ Heart is easy – that feeling of warmth and goodness that we have, gratitude and wanting to be with.
How do you love God with your soul? Prayer and praise.
Mind? Avoid distractions, turn to thoughts of God: ‘Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things.’ (Phil. 4:8) Use our minds to study the word of God, to spread the word of God.
Strength: DO things. You may not be physically strong or have a lot of stamina, but we can do the things outlined above and God will provide the strength we need.
A final thought: this came from something I was reading recently.
Everything we are and have comes from God, yes? Nothing can be called truly ours because it can all be taken away from us by man or by God – our health, our homes, our money, our children, our friends, our self-esteem – think of Job: he lost everything that he had had, and even his ‘friends’ weren’t much help to us – we still call such people ‘Job’s comforters’ to this day, meaning, ‘thanks for nothing’. So, everything can be taken away - everything but love, and that is the one thing that is truly ours because it is the one thing that is in our free gift, to give or withhold. In this also we are in the image of God, who says in Exodus, ‘I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.’ No matter what anyone or any circumstance does to you, you can choose to love or not to love. Let’s choose to love: after all, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten son.’
Can anyone sum up what love is? Is it being more concerned about the welfare of other people than yourself? Relating to God, are we more concerned about fulfilling God’s purpose than we are about our own little ambitions?
Read 1 Corinthians 13 – this is love from the point of view of inside us. The above is the practical application of this.
Think of all these attributes as having different colours – forgiveness green, compassion pink, mercy dark blue, whatever you like – and all the colours of the spectrum together create white light, which is God – God is light and in him is no darkness at all.
Romans 8:38-39
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