INTRODUCTION
Most
of us have been “in love”—some of us, several times.
Remember the exhilaration, the euphoria, how
your heart trembled and raced.
It was a wonderful feeling. You
were sure that life would be forever different.
But that wonderful gooey feeling
didn’t last. It’s good it didn’t. Our poor bodies couldn’t have stood that
intense excitement month after month, year after year.
What
the world calls “love” is a strong emotion. Probably a better word for that
feeling is “passion.”
What
God calls “love” is more permanent and life-changing than any feelings you
might have—no matter how strong, no matter how helplessly, hopelessly you were
swept away when you first fell in love.
In 1 John 4:7-12 we read about
where real love comes from:
Dear
friends, 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.
Dear
friends, 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.
Notice that St. John writes, “The one who loves is born of God.” St.
John doesn’t write, “The one who knows
the most Bible is born of God.” Or, “The
one who can explain justification by faith knows God.” Those things are
important, but the evidence—the sign—that we are born of God is the love of God
that radiates from our lives.
I. Notice that, according to the
Bible, love isn’t something that we generate inside ourselves. Love comes from
God.
A. I’m thankful for the warm,
bubbly feeling of being in love. It is a gift from God.
I like to read stories about people
falling in love.
When I was a child our parents
would take me and my older brother and younger sister to the movies. Typically,
they ended with our favorite people hugging and kissing. We would watch avidly the
first 9/10s of the movie as the hero and heroine went through all sorts of
difficult and dangerous situations. But at the end would end up in each other’s
arms. I would sit there with my brother and sister, and we would close our eyes
and my sister would say, “Tell me when the mushy part is over!”
But then we became a little older
and we began to like the mushy parts.
B. But love, in the Bible, isn’t a
way of feeling; it is a way of acting, a way of behaving.
Love is doing. Love is living in a way that is different from how much of
the world lives.
Love,
in the Bible, is a command, a duty, a decision.
We’re
instructed to love—everyone. We love in obedience to God, who is love and loves
everyone.
I’m
thankful that love isn’t necessarily a way of feeling, because I can’t make
myself feel what I don’t feel, but I can make myself do the right thing in
spite of my feelings.
Someone
said, “God gives us love, not so that we can soak it up like sponges, but so
that we can be channels of his love to others.”
C.
The great theologian Karl Barth was asked, “Will we see our loved ones in
heaven?” He answered, “Not only our loved ones!”
We
love very deeply our children, our grandchildren, and those who love us.
Because
we love those who love us, we may think that proves that we are loving people.
Heinrich
Himmler was the head of Hitler’s SS. As one of the most high-ranking Nazis,
Himmler was responsible for setting up the concentration camps where millions
of Jews, gypsies, and others the Nazis considered undesirable were taken to be
exterminated.
Heinrich
Himmler was a loving man—to his wife and children.
Himmler adored his young, blue-eyed, blonde-haired
daughter Gudrun [pronounced, GOOD-run]. When he was away from home, he
telephoned her every day and wrote her a letter every week. He even brought her
to official state functions, including a visit to the Dachau death camp.
After one such visit the little 12-year-old Gudrun wrote
in her diary: “Today, we went to the SS concentration camp at Dachau. We saw
everything we could. We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. We saw
all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvelous. And afterwards we had a
lot to eat. It was very nice.”
To
the rest of the world, Himmler was a monster of wickedness, but he loved his
daughter tenderly.
But
Jesus said, “If you love those who love you what credit is that to you? Even
sinners love those who love them” (Luke 6:32).
The
test of love is whether we love outsiders—even our enemies, even those who have
done us wrong.
II.
Real love costs.
A.
Someone said, “The measure of our sacrifice is the measure of our love.”
A
preacher I admire wrote in one of his sermons: “The life of blessedness—the
life of love—the life of sacrifice—the life of God, are identical. All love is
sacrifice—the giving of life and self for others.” [Frederick W. Robertson].
St. Augustine had a saying that goes
like this:
“What does love look like?
It has hands to help others.
It has feet to hasten to the poor
and needy.
It has eyes to see misery and want.
It has ears to hear the sighs and
sorrows of people.
That is what love looks like.”
B. What are deeds of love?
Love is to write that letter of
appreciation or to comfort and encourage your friend.
Love is to say a kind word. Love is
to smile and act like you’re glad to see someone.
Love is a generous action. Love is
to write a check to help someone in need.
Love is to forgive a slight.
Love is to admit a mistake—even
when the fault is mostly the other person’s.
Love is to put myself in another’s
place when I want to criticize or judge.
Love is to listen when you would
rather be talking.
Love is to spend time with someone
who is lonely.
Love is to give another person the
benefit of the doubt. Love is to make excuses for people.
Love is to keep praying for people
in need—whether we know them or not.
Love is to stick up for someone
others are criticizing. Love is to say, when people are criticizing someone,
“She is my friend.”
Love is to do a kindness to someone
who doesn’t like me.
Love is to do a kindness in secret,
when the person never finds out who did it.
Love is thinking enough of our
friends to gently and kindly warn them if we see them making a mistake.
Love is to be tender-hearted,
considerate, respectful of another person’s feelings.
Sometimes love is to weep with
those who weep and to rejoice with those who rejoice.
Love means thinking less about
myself, what I want and what’s good for me. Love is to put the feelings and needs
of other people ahead of my own.
C. Think back over your life and,
if you are a follower of Jesus, you will think of many times when other people
have shown you this kind of Christ-like love and you will think of times when
you showed Christ-like love to others.
Enjoy those memories. Thank God for
them.
III. I want to tell you two
examples of Christian love:
A. First, I want to tell you about
a woman who was in our church. Her name was Kathy.
Kathy wasn’t pretty.
She had had a severe medical crisis
several years before we knew her and had spent some years in a nursing home.
She was physically handicapped. She
couldn’t drive and depended on friends to take her to church. Often we took her
to church on Sunday.
She didn’t know a lot of theology
and wasn’t a great student of the Bible.
Kathleen had little money. She
lived very simply in a little house with her adult son.
But Kathy knew how to share love.
She prepared refreshments and took
them twice a week to meetings of the church.
She wrote notes to members of the
church. She remembered birthdays, anniversaries, people who were in the
hospital. Sometimes she just wrote to encourage people. She wrote several cards
every day. Everyone in the church got cards from Kathy, each one with a thoughtful
note in it.
Because Kathleen had little money,
people in the church sometimes gave her stamps and furnished cards. Sometimes
she recycled cards she had received.
Once I was participating as a
mentor in a confirmation class. The pastor was answering questions from the
young people who were to be confirmed. One girl asked the pastor, “How can we
love Jesus when we can’t see him?”
The pastor said, “Sometimes we can
see Jesus in other Christians.”
Without missing a beat, the girl
who asked the question said, “Kathy Maxey!”
Then one Sunday morning, Kathy died
suddenly.
I don’t remember any funeral I’ve
been to where the departed person was so admired as was Kathleen Maxey. The
sanctuary was packed. People had to stand in the narthex and look in through the doorways.
Kathy Maxie’s whole life was a
sermon on practical love.
B. I have another example—also a
woman—also a friend.
In my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas,
there was an ugly little dwarf who used to sit in a little home-made cart in
front of the First National Bank and sell pencils. His name was Leo Beuerman. As
a child I saw him. He was still there when I was in college.
Leo had a normal sized body but his
legs were very short and useless.
Everyone in town saw Leo. He was a
fixture. They walked right past him. I walked right past him. A few people,
mostly children, stopped to buy his pencils.
A Christian friend of mine named
Earl decided to witness to Leo. He told Leo about Jesus, and Leo scowled and
cursed at him.
Leo lived in the country and came
to town on a tractor, which he could drive himself. His little cart was hitched
to the back of the tractor, and Leo let it down with a pulley.
Some nights Leo didn’t take the
trouble to go home. He just slept in his cart in a parking lot. One night some
toughs beat him up. The incident was reported in the newspaper.
Catherine, a woman from our church,
read the news item and went and got acquainted with Leo. She learned how
difficult his life was.
Catherine took Leo to her house and
give him dinner. She did this many times. Sometimes she kept him over night.
Catherine had a nice house. Her
husband was a professor at the University of Kansas.
When she took Leo to her house, she
had to ask someone to carry him into the house. She would have to ask her
husband to set him on the toilet.
Catherine began to bring Leo to
church. Leo responded to the love he experienced from Catherine. He became a believer.
He loved the Lord.
By this time Leo had become deaf.
Sometimes when we got to church, Catherine would tell me that Leo was in her
car and ask me to carry him in.
Because Leo was deaf, he carried a
little notebook and he would write things in it such as, “I love Jesus!” and
hand the notebook to me for me to write my comment. That is the way, he carried
on conversations. Leo couldn’t hear the service, but he loved to be with God’s
people.
Leo was only one of Catherine’s good
works. Every Sunday evening, she invited foreign students who attended the
university to come to her house for dinner and a social time. Every Sunday
night her basement was full of foreign students and some Christian American
students for these get-togethers. And she made sure they knew about Jesus.
Catherine gave puppet shows of
Bible stories and performed them in the schools.
She was a shining example to of
practical Christian love.
Love with hands and feet.
CONCLUSION
Where does this kind of love come
from?
John 4:7: “Dear friends, let us
love one another, for love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and
knows God.”
Here’s a prayer I found in an old
book. I use it often:
“O
thou, who art most glorious in goodness,
Let
me be abundant in this goodness like unto thee.
That
I may as deeply pity others’ misery,
and
as ardently thirst for their happiness as thou dost.
Let
the same mind be in me that is in Christ Jesus.”
(Thomas Traherne, 1637-1674, Centuries of Meditation,)
Let us pray for the mind of Christ.
Let us learn to love others as he
has loved us.
When we love others, God dwells in
us and we in him.
And God’s love flows through our
life into the lives of others.
