The Paeon of Love
(I John 4:7-21)
Preached at St. Barnabas Church, Bellville, TX
The First Sunday
after Trinity, 2010
by The Rev.
Stephen E. Stults
I John 4:7 Beloved, let us love
one another: for love is of God. As you know, we are now entering into the longest
season of the Church year, Trinity. We have just completed the last of
the major feast days of the Church year, Trinity Sunday, in which we
celebrated one of the key mysteries of the Christian faith, the makeup
of the eternal Godhead itself. We know that Trinity is meant to be a “season of
sanctification.” In other
words, the Trinity season is meant to be a long, restful season of
reflection, learning, and growth in the Christian faith. It purposefully
echoes the time of year where both growth (summer) and harvest (fall)
occur. We are to grow in the
faith and also harvest some spiritual fruit during this Church season. Today it is for our collective pleasure and mutual
edification that 1 John 4 appears as the Epistle for the day. It is St. John’s great proclamation of love, God’s love for us. It is, in my humble opinion, one of the most moving and even most
spiritually provocative passages in the New Testament. It’s been said that one
cannot read 1 St. John 4 without having some sort of spiritual awakening
or stirring. Maybe that
sounds a bit superstitious, as if the Word of God were some sort of
magic talisman or charm-bringer. Nevertheless, it is true. In my own case, I was in an EYC meeting in our
parish church in Hendersonville, TN, when we were studying this passage.
Upon reading it and meditating upon it with the group, I, in the words
of John Wesley, “felt my spirit strangely warmed” and actually felt, for
the first time in my life, the presence of the Holy Spirit. It was
uplifting, lightening, and almost estatic. I knew that there was Someone in my life that I had not felt
before. How can this particular passage of Scripture have
such incredible power? How
can it evoke such a response from a soul? To answer that, one would need a year or more just to do it
justice and we have just a few brief minutes! Nonetheless, let us
consider just a few points to make this passage meaningful, while we
embark upon our Trinity-tide journey in holiness. Perhaps this entire
lesson from Scripture can be boiled down to one question that it
brings forth, namely, what is the quality of Love? Is this quality
nebulous or is it material? Finally, is it genuine, or just merely feigned? Put another way, how real is this love? We can answer this is in the words of St. John
himself, as he tells us in 1John 4:7-8, “Beloved,
let us love one another.” So far, so good. Here we have a simple
admonishment to love one another. This is excellent, but why? The answer is simple and begins to show us the quality of love,
as John, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, says: “..for love is of
God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that
loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” Restating this: Love is of
God. Every one that loves is
born of God and knows Him.
The reverse is also true: he that does not love is not of God and does
not know Him. This is rather straightforward. It begins to illustrate the nature of love, according to St.
John.
 Then, John tells us one
of the sweetest, most sublime statements in the entire New Testament:
“God is love.” God is love. We now have our first hint of the
quality of love. It is God’s
most endearing attribute and the one with which He most closely
identifies. It is an amazing
statement when one truly considers its ramifications. First, seen through the
eyes of faith, it tells us that the quality of love is absolute. If God
chooses to say, through His Holy Word, that this is His absolute
attribute, it is truly amazing. Note that John did not say, “God is power.” He did not say, “God
is Omnipotence,” or “God is Wisdom,” or “God is all-seeing.” Of course,
we believe that God has all of these attributes. No, instead he said,
“God is Love.” This assigns to Love a status that is paramount and
central to God’s entire Being. Thinking logically, what does this say
about the quality of Love?
Without totally overstating our case, it says a lot.
Now, let us dispense with
the modern inversion of this statement, “Love is God”; for this is not
what the Scripture says. It is not the same thing at all. Sometimes, it
is tempting, perhaps, to make this inversion, the seemingly logical
statement that goes something like this:”Since God is Love, then it must
follow that Love is God.”
Perhaps one way to defeat this line of thought is simply to say: “Since
God made everything, everything must be God.” Aside from being patently illogical, it is also contrary to the
Christian concept of God.
Unlike Buddhism, or even Zen, where there is no real, objective
knowledge of God, aside from an amorphous sense of the One in all
things, our God is a clearly identifiable Being with attributes and
characteristics. In fact, He has clearly identified Himself as a Being
existing in three Persons. He is wholly other from his Creation, yet he
is near to it because of his quality of transcendence. That is, because
of the Holy Ghost, He is ever near us. St. John tells us that if a man
love God and confess Him, He will “dwell” with that person and that
person will dwell with Him (I John 4:15).
This is about as close as it gets. One commentator has
suggested that if Love is God, then love would be our chief goal, not
God. It would be our chief aim and center of all our efforts. How woeful
is our execution of that goal in this world if this be the case! The
behavior of mankind belies this thought. Rather than believing love is
God, it is similar to our view of Him vis-à-vis His Creation. God is not
his Creation, but yet he made it. In a similar vein, Love is not God, but yet God is the source of
all love. He is the font,
the ever-flowing source of pure love in all its forms. Earlier, we asked if this love is real or nebulous.
That is, is the love of God a real, material thing or just a wonderful
emotion upon which to reflect? St. John goes from the ethereal and abstract to the real and
material to answer this question. He tells us, “And we have seen and do testify that
the Father sent the Son to be
the Saviour of the world” (1 John 4:14).This is real, it is demonstrable, and it is
concrete. God did not just wish the World a good day, or think fond,
loving thoughts about it, but instead He sent his only-begotten, most
beloved Son to save it! Also, we know that this salvation did not come
without a price, for in the mysterious yet infinite justice of God,
only a spotless, perfect Sacrifice would suffice for this purpose. This
Sacrifice was real; it was painful, bloody, and torturous. Here is the
love of God made real, in that He actually did this, a concrete act. St.
John says: “In this was manifested the love of God toward us,
because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we
might live through him” (I John 4:9).
In an added note
of emphasis, John puts a sharper point on the reality of God’s love by
noting that His love was not solicited by Man. Instead, John notes, “We love him, because he first loved us.”
(I John 4:19). Thus, God is
the source of love, He is the performer of it, and He will be our
destination in love forever. God’s love for
us takes on another wonderful aspect as we read, “Herein is our
love made perfect, that we may have
boldness in the day of
judgment: because as he is, so
are we in this world.” What is the source of our boldness? How can we be bold when the rest of the world will tremble with
fear on that awful, final Day of Judgment? Simply this:
“There is no fear
in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment.
He that feareth is not made perfect in love” (I John 4:19). This boldness, this perfection in love, is in direct contrast to
the fearful, quivering Adam from Genesis 3, cowering in the bushes,
hiding from God. When we are perfected in the love of God, we will be
confident in God’s Love.
This confidence will be made manifest on the Last Day. Thus, the end
and sum of this lesson is that the love of God has the quality of
permanence. It has the
quality of absolute certainty. We can totally rely on it and we can even be bold in it. Thus, we will
approach the Throne of Judgment not with shame, but with confidence. Not
with fear, but love and acceptance, not ill will, but joy. Not
isolation, but eternal fellowship with God. This is what God wills for us. Through God’s perfect and
all-loving Will, we will live in the heavenly Garden with Him, but this
time without sin, without fear and without shame."
1John 4:10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and
sent his Son to be the
propitiation for our sins. Amen
Bible Gateway,
“Commentary on 1 John”
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