Love

I’ll be honest…I was going to start this sermon with some snippets from Billboard Top 20 love songs, but I cannot communicate some of the lyrics in these songs because of young ears. Instead, I will communicate a point that Rob Bell makes in his book, Sex God. Bell points out that relationships today are thought of as animalistic…full of feeling and instinct, where we feed our primal physical urges. He points to Spring Break in Cancun as a prime example, but I offer that anyone who turns on the radio nowadays will find the same examples. “Love” is the most sung about, talked about, published subject in our culture…literally billions of dollars are spent chasing “love” and championing “love”, but do we really understand love? And just so we get the joke out of the way, this morning, I want us to focus on answering the question, “What is love?” (Baby don’t hurt me). I want to put some structure around the idea of love, because as Christians, we live under the banner of love, and I, for one, do not want to champion the same ambiguous, pathological love being followed by the rest of the world. Thus, let us see God’s definition of love found in 1 John (3:16). From the cross, God hangs the banner of love, which defines us as Christians. Love is not simply a feeling, but it is a force that drives us toward our happiest ending,

The most obvious characteristic of love here in 1 John is that it gives. Notice that Christ first gives Himself, initiating a response of giving. In other words, any sort of love on our part only occurs in response to the love first offered by Christ. Think about this for a second: the greek word for grace is where we get the word “charity”…so love starts as a non-profit organization…we are the neediest of the needy, so Christ offers us the gift of love by giving Himself on the cross. I was reminded of grace the other day when Justin’s father took Justin and I out to lunch. You know when you’re eating with someone, and they suddenly tell the waiter that they are going to pay for your food. Most often, I make a concerted effort to end such nonsense, that I will pay for my own food…much to my dismay, I am often overcome and I must submit. This is the experience of grace, that we must submit and receive our gift with humility and thanksgiving. Grace requires us to swallow our pride, put away our wallets, as if our money could pay for our meal. Grace is a gift…and the beginning of love is grace…the grace that heals us and allows us to love others.

Augustine offers a helpful explanation of the relationship between grace and love. Augustine explains that prior to grace, our will is curved inward on itself and thus, we are born self-centered creatures. Think of someone whose spine is so curved that their eyes stare directly into their stomachs. In the same way, our wills curve in on themselves until they are healed by the gift of God’s grace. Given our own ability, we are only able to love ourselves. As God’s grace heals our will, it straightens and allows us to aim ourselves at God. Then, the unifying force of love sets us on a path towards God. I know this sounds confusing, so let me us an example. If you are a car, then your will is a steering wheel, and love is the engine that drives you. If we cannot control the steering wheel, then we cannot aim the car in the proper direction, and there is no use in driving anywhere. We will only go in circles. Grace straightens the wheel and love accelerates us toward God.

It should be clear by now that love is not a feeling, but a force that unites. Specifically, love unites the lover and the object of her affection together. When John was writing this first letter, there was a rift developing in his community. Some Jewish leaders had kicked the Christians of John’s community out of the synagogue, so the Christians were dealing with the problem of their own exclusion. It was obvious to John’s community that love did not look like exclusion or division, but unity. You see, sin is like waging war upon God…it separates us from God and makes us His enemies. Just as sin separates us from God, hatred separates us from our brothers and sisters. When John wrote this letter, He understood that the sacrifice of Christ offered us reconciliation with God and consequently, reconciliation with our brothers and sisters. The force behind this reconciliation is called love.

Ultimately, love is friendship. Aquinas describes love as a relationship that is mutually beneficial. In friendship, each party looks out for the other person’s good. Certainly, this is how God teaches us to love. Just before His death, Christ shares a meal with the apostles and tells them that they are no longer servants, but that they are His friends. This is the statement proclaimed each time we share in the Lord’s Supper: that we have become friends of God. We no longer building the Tower of Babel in order to wage war against Heaven, but we are called to friendship with God because of Christ’ offering. And this is the best possible result for us…how can there be any more fulfillment to our lives than to be friends with God? God gives us love to drive us into friendship with Him, because in Him we find everything, and He wants the very best for each of us. God wants the best for us because He is our friend.

Now, I want to pause here and make sure that we understand the proper definition of friendship. First, it is important to truly grasp the notion of caring about another person. This sort of love is not the same as when we say we love coffee or video games or Radiohead’s new album. That sort of love only benefits ourselves…we use these things for our own pleasure. And that sort of love is what is most commonplace nowadays. And I don’t simply mean the Spring Break, weekend romp examples of love. Relationships are commonly thought of now as pursuing the best person for you. It is no wonder that we frequent websites such as match.com, so that we can shop for the perfect future husband or wife. Just what we want. Yet, love should not be about fulfilling your own ends, but it should be about doing what is best for the other person. Thank God that He does not simply befriend us to use us. God offers us friendship because He wants what is best for us.

Also, friends want what is best for one another, and sometimes, this means saying and doing things that make us uncomfortable. For example, sometimes a real friend must step in and say what needs to be said for his friend’s good. I remember many times in my early college years, my friends would tell me to stop clinging to a destructive relationship that I had with a certain girl. I know this was hard for them to say, but it was for my own good…and I could not see this for myself at the time. Had I been left to my own devices, I could easily have missed out on the best things that God had planned for me…especially what I now know as an incredible experience of being married to Kelley. Looking back, I am so thankful that my friends did what was necessary for my own good. In an age of “do-what-you-wantism”, being a true friend means having the courage to engage in the hard conversations. Ultimately, God stepped in and intervened in our lives for our own good, and we should also do this for one another.

And so, we transition into the latter half of our Scripture for today. That Christ loved us by laying down His life for us, we therefore ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. Here is where the rubber meets the road: our response to the love of Christ is to love our brothers and sisters. Not to be outdone by Troy and his quote last week, I must insert a bit of Kierkegaard here. In his book Works of Love, Kierkegaard begins by pointing to Paul’s demand that Christians owe a debt of love to all. This is non-negotiable in the Christian life. Our debt of love will never fully be paid, because Christ first loved us by giving Himself on the cross. And we owe this debt to all, unqualified: those who are like us, and the weirdos whom we cross the road to avoid. Those we admire, and those we despise. Those who help us, giving of what they have for our good, and those who take from us and kick us when we are down. Those who are on our minds constantly, and those whom we constantly ignore. We cannot pick and choose who to love, because we owe this debt of love to all. Thank God that He did not pick and choose whom to love, but offers friendship to any who will accept. Likewise, we are to love all.

And this is how our lives play out…this is how the Kingdom of God is built. Our love of God, our hatred of self demands that we love one another. Piggybacking off of Troy’s sermon last week, I believe that the gifts instilled in us empower us to love others. Foremost in my mind is the gift of beauty…artists, take heed. The artist is a beauty maker…and beauty draws people to what they find beautiful. Think about it for a second…when I hear a beautiful song, I drift off from whatever I am doing and am drawn to its melody. Beauty draws us in…just like love draws us in. We even unite together to celebrate what we find beautiful. Artists…make beauty, because all beauty comes from the most beautiful, the most high…and we are reminded that we are loved by Him when we experience beauty.

Some of you are healers…whether in word, or in deed. Healers are able to step into broken relationships and soften hatred, destroying barriers and allowing reconciliation to occur. Some are able to heal bodies and minds, enabling people to reenter the world and build God’s Kingdom. Healers, heal, because when you heal you are loving people and drawing them together and enabling them to draw close to God.

Some of you are organizers. Just as God spoke in the beginning of time and brought order from confusion, you are able to make sense and order in the midst of the chaos of our world. Some offer counsel when life gets confusing. Some are able to take a mess of ideas from us dreamers and actually organize them into an event that functions and leads to actual results. Some of you simply look to heal the world by cleaning up the messes that others make. The smallest task of organization shows love, because as confusion divides us, order brings us together and allows us to build God’s Kingdom.

Some of you are servants. You see problems, and the problems eat at you until you can do something to solve them. You see houses that need to be repaired…you see people that need help…you see hungry bellies that need food…you see lonely hands that need to be held. You see need. Your service is love, because we all needed God, and you are responding by giving yourself in kind. You fulfill people’s need and in doing so, you help them see that God offers to fulfill their highest need, which is need of God Himself.

Although love is probably the most talked about, sung about, published and cherished idea in our culture, most do not truly understand it. We only know what love is, because Christ offered Himself. He offered Himself as a gift, so that we could love Him back. Consquently, our response to this self-giving love is that we give ourselves to one another in love. As always, we can only understand what we do when we understand what God has done for us. Lets take a moment to rest under the cross. His banner over us is love, and this banner hangs with arms spread wide…wounded arms inviting us into friendship with Him, and with one another.