Look, I think we’re in trouble.

I think John is serious about this “love” stuff. It’s almost like it’s important! It’s almost like loving other people is the most important thing we can do!

Listen to all of the times in 1 John alone that this comes up. I think God might be serious about this!

Love one another…

2:10

3:11

3:18

3:23

4:7

4:11

4:21

Love is number one in our job description as followers of Jesus.

This is important. God wants us to live differently. God wants us to love others. It’s the number one priority.

How many other things do we try to put in the number one place? What other things do we use to measure how we’re doing with God? [ASK] (How much we know the bible, how long we can pray, how much time we give to church.)

Those things aren’t the measure. The measure is, how good are we at loving people?

Think of all the other ways we “grade” a church, all the other ways we decide if a church is doing what it should. We look at attendance, we look at finances, we look at the energy in worship, we look at the type of music, we look at what goes on up front.

But John says the measure of whether we know God, the measure of whether we are effectively following Jesus, is if we love other people. Is our church helping us love others?

Will you let me be as redundant as John for a minute?

It doesn’t matter how beautiful our music is, if we don’t become people who love others. It doesn’t matter how many people show up here on Sunday, if we don’t love people Monday through Saturday. It doesn’t matter what inspiring words I might say, unless we find ourselves growing in our actions of love toward other people.

There’s nothing worse than preparing for something with all kinds of energy and effort, only to later find that you were preparing for the wrong thing. There’s nothing worse than studying for hours to memorize the 50 states, only to find that the test is on the 50 capital cities.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve memorized the entire bible, unless it helps you tangibly love someone else. It doesn’t matter if you’ve prayed through the phone book every single week, unless it helps you act in love. It doesn’t matter if you’ve broken every bad habit that ever existed, if in the process of doing it you’ve been the biggest grump on the planet to live with.

Our goal, our expression of our faith, the most important thing in following Jesus Christ is for our character to change so that we love people more and more and more.

John is giving us the questions and the answers to the quiz ahead of time!

He doesn’t want us to ever lose sight of the fact that anything we do-any discipline, any action, any worship activity-anything we do is for the purpose of helping us act in love.

Love isn’t a feeling. It isn’t romance. It isn’t easy. It isn’t optional. Love is acting in the best interests of another person, in a way that costs us.

Love begins with God, and it is defined by its cost. The cost of love was Jesus becoming a weak and vulnerable and suffering human being. Love is costly, vulnerable, obedient, sacrificial, humble-it is everything that Jesus’ life and death was. Love is defined by Jesus.

Just about everything I read while studying this part of 1 John centered on this.

Loving others is completely dependent on how much God loved us. It is our response to God’s love. We don’t earn God’s love by loving others. We aren’t able to love others through willpower and trying hard, or by magically having the right feelings.

We love because God first loved us. And he loved us in a risky and a vulnerable and a costly way. He loved us by joining us as a frail and weak human being. It’s God’s actions that define love, and that love which God has for us both empowers us and is our example.

Since God loved us so much, it says in 4:11, we also ought to love one another.

But that is very, very hard to do.

It’s hard for me.

When I think about love, I think about the people I’m with the most, the people I live with. I think about Elaine and Natalie and Hayley and Aubrey.

In one sense, of course, we love our families instinctively. We almost can’t help it.

But it’s in our families that love really costs something. Loving Elaine and my girls is what I want to do, but it is also the thing that brings me face to face with my own selfishness more than anything else.

It’s easier to act in a loving way toward people here on a Sunday morning than it is to truly act in love at home. Here, all I usually have to do is listen attentively to people for what’s often a matter of minutes.

But at home, love costs something. It costs something for every single one of us. I’m constantly battling my attitude at home, because we are at a stage of life where there simply aren’t enough minutes in the day to do everything that needs to be done.

How do I respond to dishes in the sink? To a question about homework? To being asked for the 15^th time if she can watch a video?

The danger is in expectations. “If they really loved me…they’d realize I haven’t done anything fun for myself lately…they’d realize how much I do around here.”

You’ve been there, haven’t you? We all have. We all get in these funks where we think we’re the only one doing the work and woe is me, nobody EVER looks out for what WE need.

The danger, before we even realize it, is an attitude that is bitter instead of loving.

The danger is blindness as well. We’re not very good at seeing how the other person is, the one toward whom our bitterness is growing. We’re blind to the things they are sacrificing, to the ways they are overwhelmed, and blindness and bitterness are not the best basis for relationship.

We have a hard time seeing from another perspective, we have a hard time loving each other, because we’re selfish.

Can we go there? Can we admit, just admit out loud, that we are all selfish? It’s a little risky. It makes it harder to hold on to the bitterness and the grudges and the lists of how you do more than the other person you’re mad at, if you admit that you’re selfish.

But can we go there, together, out loud, right now? Can we say it together? “I’m selfish.” Come on. You try it. “I’m selfish.”

There! We admitted it!

We’ve admitted that we’d really rather have somebody else love us, than love others sacrificially. We’ve admitted how hard it is to give and give and not get back. We’ve admitted we often give love and do nice things simply because of what we get back from it.

And we’ve admitted that because we’re selfish, we wait sometimes for the other person to make the first move.

Now…if we’re all selfish, if we’re all waiting for someone to make the first move…how are we going to love each other?

How are we going to have healthy relationships?

This is why we so desperately needed Jesus. This is why we so desperately need God.

The other one DID make the first move. Somebody else DOES love us first. “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.”

We selfish people need something else in the picture if we’re going to love each other, if we’re going to have relationships with each other that work, if we’re going to get out of our selfish ruts.

We need God’s love in our equation if we truly want to live differently long term. Sure, we might pull off the martyr thing for a good long while; but sooner or later, the bitterness or the selfishness or the tiredness is going to sink us.

The news that love begins with God, that it is defined by Jesus’ life and death in love for us, is what makes living differently possible.

It’s why it’s repeated over and over again in 1 John:

3:1-2

3:16

4:9-10

4:16

4:19

God’s love for us means we are loved first. It frees us from having to earn love from others. It frees us to love sacrificially, to love as God loves us.

Love is sacrificial in so many ways.

We love sacrificially when we admit we are wrong and ask forgiveness. We love sacrificially when we go outside our comfort zones to welcome an “outsider”. We love sacrificially when we give generously, to the point where it may cost us some comforts or luxuries.

This week, in an online discussion with friends, I read some really wise words about loving. Let me share two of them with you:

“I want to try to figure out how to truly love people in a way that outweighs my desire to fix or change people. When I use the excuse of being loving with the end goal of changing people I fail. When I love in order to love I am free to let God do the changing.”

“Brennan Manning tells the story of a wise man sitting by a river. He notices a scorpion floating by, struggling to stay afloat, so he reaches out to save it with his bare hands. He is repeatedly stung by the scorpion, but continues anyway. He is asked by his friends around him why he continues on when this creature is hurting him so badly. He replies that his love is not dependent on how this creature treats him. His love is not dependent upon reciprocation. Love does what love does, regardless of the circumstance.”

Can we be people who take the risks of loving?

Can we take the risk of loving when we may not be loved back? Because that’s the risk God took with us. He loved us when there was no guarantee we would love him back.

Prayer-names of people (family, neighbors, co-workers) that we want God to love through us.