Bazaar United Methodist Church

Bazaar, Kansas

1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-10

Amazing Love

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So 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. Love 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. There 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.

We love because he first loved us. Those who say, "I love God" and hate their brothers and sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom we have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters. 1 John 4:7-21 NRSV

Love is a word that we fling around in the English language as though it had little or no meaning. "I love chocolate." "I love my dog." "I love my children." "I love my husband." "I love God." It seems to mean anything from affection to delicious, from passion to acceptable. We read its meaning from the context in which it is found. We sing about love; All You Need Is Love, What the World Needs Now is Love, When You Say You Love Me. We wax poetic about love. Yet few of us seem to know much or understanding anything at all about the love of God. It's something we hear about but which only registers about a quarter of an inch into our grey matter, our understanding and not into the depths of our hearts. That miniscule understanding of God's love is the reason it is easy for us to be hard, even harsh in our judgments of others, while thinking ourselves good. It is the cause of our own lack of love for difficult people and for those who are different from us. It is the single Christian concept which we in the church so fail to get that we abysmally botch living out the Christian life to which we are called.

The author of First John knows that and throughout this passage he uses both the noun and the verb form of agape. Agape love is love without strings. It is the love God has for his Son Jesus and for us. It is perfect love; love without strings, without requirements. It is love without limits or bounds. It is selfless and self-effacing. It is love that builds the other up. Agape is the selfless commitment of the lover to the beloved. It is love that holds the needs of the other higher than the needs of the self. It is best described in 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter. Love is patient and kind. It does not envy or boast. It is not proud. It is not rude or self-seeking. It is not easily angered and keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes and always perseveres. Love never fails. That's agape. That's the love God has for you and me. And the fact is that there is nothing we can do that will ever stop God from loving us.

God's love is the basis of our salvation. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. (John 3:16-17) The most fervent revelation of God's love is the gift of Jesus the Christ. God's love is so great and so powerful and so deep that he chose to give himself to us and for us. God chose to send himself into the world so that we could know how much we are loved. Remember that Jesus was not sent without his own acceptance and agreement. This was not the authoritative Father sending his son without the son's full agreement. No, this was the godhead, the loving fullness of God, determining that the only way for people to get the message was for God himself to come among us. And so Jesus became incarnate of the virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit.

Several years ago one of you gave me a little pillow that says, "Home is where your story begins." That is true, and so your home and my home is in the very heart of God. There our story, our collective story, and each of our individual stories began in the heart of God where we were conceived in love and are built-up in love and sustained in love.

John Wesley said that love is God's "reigning attribute, the attribute that sheds an amiable glory on all his other perfections." Too many of us think of God as a score keeper; keeping a list of wrongs, like we often do, instead of as the one who loves us so much that he says, "I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more." (Hebrews 8:12) Do you know God's love like that?

Love is not known by our having loved God. Love is known in that God loved us and sent his Son. According to 1 John, love comes to us vertically, from God and we share love back to God on this vertical axis. But Christ came to earth and demonstrated the love of God horizontally in the world to others, giving us an example of how we should live in love with God and others; making the movement of love in the shape of a cross: The love of God demonstrated in the love of others. God continues to love us on this vertical axis; coaxing us into a love relationship along that line while yearning for that love to flow through us horizontally to others. Therefore God's love continues to be demonstrated in the form of a cross; because the atoning sacrifice of Jesus took place on the cross.

Oswald Chambers says the center of the Christian life is the love of God in the atonement of Christ Jesus. This is the central point of power in a Christian's life. And this is, perhaps, where it gets difficult for us, or at least more difficult. We do not, we cannot comprehend the sacrifice of Christ. Yet God's love for us is best seen in the incarnation and the atonement. And perhaps they should be seen together, because leaving his home in the heavenlies had to have been for Jesus as great or a greater sacrifice than dying on a cross.

The Stations of the Cross at Brisson Seminary have a saying written underneath each picture from the writings of St. Francis de Sales, their founder. Beneath the picture of Christ nailed to the cross it says, "The measure of our love is to love without measure." Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber is quoted as saying, "Love changes everything-how you live and how you die." When we catch hold of God's love, that love that is without measure; that is when love changes everything. It is then that we begin to be able to abide in God.

Today's scripture says that those who abide in love abide in God. Now that word, abide, is not one we use regularly and it is the reason I read from the NRSV rather than the NIV today. To abide means more than just to live. The Greek word is meno and it means to be in a state that begins and continues, to stay, to remain, to live, to dwell, to abide, to sojourn. As we abide in love, we live in love, dwell in love, sojourn in love. It means we don't give in or give up. When we abide in love we abide in God. And we abide as a branch does on a tree or in a vine. We thrive when we abide.

Henry Francis Lyte was in delicate health all his life, but it didn't stop him from working like an ox, year after year, pastoring among the seafaring folks around Devonshshire, England. Finally his strength gave out, and in 1847 his doctor suggested he move to the milder climate of southern France. The parting was heartbreaking. Lyte refused to leave without one final sermon to his church of twenty-four years. His health was so frail that his friends advised against it, but he was determined. Standing feebly, he said, "Oh, brethren, I stand here before you today, as alive from the dead. . ."

After finishing his sermon, he served the Lord's Supper to his weeping flock and dismissed them. That evening, as his life's work drew to its close, he found comfort in pondering John 15: "Abide in Me and I in you."

According to his gardener, Lyte wrote [a] hymn after having walked down to the ocean and watched "the sun setting over Brixham Harbor like a pool of molten gold." Taking out a piece of paper, he wrote a poem and returned to his study to rewrite and polish it before giving it to his adopted daughter.

The next day he left for France. Reaching Nice, he had a seizure and passed away with the words, "Joy! Peace!" on his lips. His poem, however, lived on, becoming one of our most beloved hymns:

Abide with me-fast falls the eventide!
The darkness deepens-Lord, with me abide;
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me!

We abide in Christ when we abide in love, in peace, in charity with those around us. And it certainly makes our life happier and easier if we are not in constant turmoil with all these people. The love of God pouring into us and out through us, also brings the world into our purview. For God so loved the world. . . If God so loves the world then we, too, need to love the world and those in it.

On May 8, 1984, Benjamin Weir, a veteran Presbyterian missionary to Lebanon, was kidnapped at gunpoint by Shiite Muslims in Beirut. During his sixteen month imprisonment, he was constantly threatened with death. On his first night in captivity, one of his captors came to him and told him to face the wall, which he did. "Now take your blindfold off, and put this on." The man handed Weir a pair of ski goggles with the eye holes covered in thick plastic adhesive tape. He could see no light. In Weir's mind, the sun had set. He later wrote:

In the twilight there came to mind the hymn, "Abide with me-fast falls the eventide." I felt vulnerable, helpless, lonely. I felt tears in my eyes. Then I remembered the promise of Jesus, "If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask what you will and it shall be done unto you."

"Lord, I remember your promise, and I think it applies to me, too. I've done nothing to deserve it but receive it as a free gift. I need you. I need your assurance and guidance to be faithful to you in this situation. Teach me what I need to learn. Deliver me from this place and this captivity, if it is your will. If it is not your will to set me free, help me to accept whatever is involved. Show me your gifts, and enable me to recognize them as coming from you. Praise be to you."

For the next sixteen months, his hope and joy was that he was not simply [living] in captivity; he was abiding in Christ and thus able to "bear much fruit."

We must abide in God for our love to thrive. Again it is Oswald Chambers who said, "The disciple who abides in Jesus is the will of God. . ." That's how we do the will of God. We become the will of God. And we do that by abiding in God, abiding in Jesus Christ until we become as he is. Amen.