Sermon 6th May 2012

Today, our Honorary Curate, Gill Tayleur, preaches based on the reading from 1 John 4: verses 14-21


GOD IS LOVE

What is love?

Some answers from young children when asked that question, what is love?

“Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they know each other so well.” Tommy – age 6

“Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.” Karl – age 5 

“Love is when Mommy gives Daddy the best piece of chicken.” Elaine - age 5

“When my Granny got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my Granddad does it for her, even though his hands got arthritis too. That’s love.” Rebecca- age 8

"Love is when someone hurts you. And you get so angry but you don't yell at them because you know it would hurt their feelings."

“What is love?” is a question asked by theologians, philosophers and ethicists; by romantic poets and adolescents; by betrayed spouses and abandoned children; by the hopeful and the hopeless; by the dreamy-eyed and the sceptic.

What is love?

In our Bible reading this morning we’ve heard what the apostle John wrote: “God is love.” It’s there in verse 8 and again later in verse 16.

God is love.

What does it mean?

Well it doesn’t mean, love is God.

John says, “God is love”, not “love is God”.

If we think love is God, that love is the final and supreme good, then love is what we will live for, what we’ll serve. That may sound OK, but sometimes experiences and people that make us feel loved aren’t actually good for us, or them, and sometimes they’re at the expense of others. We might want to turn our back on a relationship because another makes us feel more loved. Pursuing feelings of love as the ultimate good can lead not to God, but to selfishness. No, love isn’t to be our God!

John doesn’t say “love is God”. He says, God is love.

The North American minister and author John Piper explains what he understands God is love to mean, like this:

God's absolute fullness of life and truth and beauty and goodness and all other perfections, is such, that he is not only self-sufficient, but he is also, in his very nature, overflowing. God is so absolute, so perfect, so complete, so full, so inexhaustibly resourceful, so joyful, that he is by nature a Giver, a Worker for others, a Helper, a Protector. What it means to be God, is to be full enough always to overflow in such giving! That giving, overflowing, is love! God is love!

That giving, that overflowing of goodness one to another, happens even within God himself. Even within the Trinity, that is God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, separate but one in some inexplicable way, all God, - even within that Trinity, there is a constant flowing of love between themselves.

And this flowing and overflowing within and from God, flows on to us. So John can say in v7, “love comes from God”. It comes, as heat comes from a fire or light from the sun. The sun gives light because it is light. And fire gives heat because it is heat. God gives love because it’s his very nature. It’s part of what it means to be God. So “love comes from God.”

Love comes from God – to us! To all humankind in all times, and that includes you and me! From God, flows his goodness, his kindness, his joy, in his love-gifts to us. The gift of life, the gift of every day and every breath of air we take, every mouthful of food, every note of lovely music we hear, every beautiful flower, every smile on the face of a friend, a child, or one who loves us. All these and so much more are good gifts from God’s abundant generous ever-flowing love and we can see God’s love in each of them.

I’ve recently read this fabulous book called One Thousand Gifts. It’s by Ann Voskamp, a Canadian pig farmer’s wife. In it, Ann writes of how she learned to notice, see and receive God’s every day gifts of things that are lovely and beautiful - as gifts of LOVE to her from God. She starts to list them, one thousand of them just for starters!

So we can see God’s love in his many gifts to each of us, gifts of life and beauty and truth and those who love us. But there’s an even better way of seeing God’s love, and that’s in his best love-gift of all, his son Jesus.

How do we see God’s love for us? What does it look like?

v9 “This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved him but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

There are plenty of other Bible verses saying similar things:

John 3:16 “God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not die but have eternal life.”

Romans 5:8 “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

How do we see God’s love for us?

We see God’s love in the flesh, literally, in his son Jesus. In Jesus. In his life and in his death. And we see it supremely in the cross. If you want to know what love looks like, look at the cross. Look at Jesus giving up his life, dying for our sins, in our place, out of love for each one of us. His love and Father God’s love. “Greater love has no man that this, than he lay down his life for his friends.” Look at the cross.

At the cross, we see love, love for each one of us, and it can change us.

There’s an Ian White song that goes,

Let me look deep, and stay there long, 
for the glance may save, 
but the gaze transforms.
Transform me Lord. 

A glance at Jesus, and the cross, can save us. In a glance we can understand and grasp that Jesus died for us, and throw ourselves on his saving mercy and love. But a gaze – a long, slow, hard, thoughtful, contemplative gaze, at Jesus and the cross, can transform us.

When we gaze long at him there, we become more like him. Because we see and receive his love and mercy, and it changes us.

In the light of the cross, we become more loving, as God is. In the light of the cross,

my selfishness, my pride, my control, my clamour for attention or praise, my unforgiving heart – all of that and more, is changed! Because I see them for what they are at the cross – sin, self-centredness not God-centredness, and at the cross I can be forgiven and set free from them.

At the cross, we receive God’s love. And it overflows through us to others around us.

And that’s the point. God is love, we see and receive his love supremely at the cross of his son Jesus, and then we go and love one another.

This passage, in v 11, and so many others in the Bible, tells us to love one another.

There are 51 times recorded in the gospels that Jesus spoke about love.

Including at the last supper when he had washed the feet of his disciples, and then said, “A new commandment I give you: love one another. This is how others will know that you’re my followers, because you love one another.”

Bishop Tom Wright says, love is to be the badge of the Christian community, the sign of who we are and also of who our God is.

How easy to say, how hard to achieve. Probably all of us have had experience of times when the love of people in the church has disappointed us, when we’ve been hurt, or let down by others. That, sadly, has always been the case in church life. That’s why, from St Paul onwards, Christian writers have been at pains to insist that it shouldn’t be like that with us. The rule of love is not an optional extra. It’s of the very essence of what we’re about. God’s love is to flow through us, to others.

How do we do it? We know, really. We put others first. We look to their needs, not ours. Their needs, and their wants, when they’re good ones – Henry Drummond (the famous Scottish evangelist in the 1800s) in this great little book called The Greatest Thing in the World, says, There is a difference between trying to please others and giving them pleasure. “Give pleasure. Lose no chance of giving pleasure. For that is the careless and anonymous triumph of a truly loving spirit.” Isn’t it great when we do something kind for someone that we know they’ll really love?!

Loving others, by serving others. Jesus gave the command to love one another after he had washed his disciples’ dusty, dirty, smelly feet; the servant’s job. What’s the grotty job in your household or workplace or wherever that people think is beneath them, and they avoid doing? Jesus would do it. And he said that’s how we should love and serve others.

I’m sure we’ve all heard it said that love isn’t just a feeling, it’s a choice and an action.

So how loving are our choices and our actions? How loving will they be today, this week?

And are we becoming more loving? We do that the same way we become more anything – practise! How do we become a better cook? Practise! How do we become a better cricketer? Practise! How do we become a faster runner? Practise! Any muscle becomes stronger with practice, and loving is no different.

There are opportunities to love better every single day. To show love to a stranger – on the bus, in the supermarket, just to treat them kindly. To show love to those we work with, to our friends, to our families. And maybe hardest of all in some ways, to show love to those we live with. To serve them, to put them first.

Yes this is hard, in reality, but this is what life is all about. Jesus said this is the most important thing, to love God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, and to love our neighbours as ourselves.

And those 2 things are related. One of the ways we love God is by loving our neighbour. Verses 20 to 21 show this: “If anyone says I love God, yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

So our loving acts express our love for God as well as for others. A double whammy!

Henry Drummond again: “This is the supreme work to which we need to address ourselves in this world, to learn love. Is life not full of opportunities for learning love? Every man and every woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. And the one eternal lesson for us all is how better we can love.”

In this series, based on Bishop Christopher’s Call to Mission, called Faith, Hope, Love – hopefully if you’re a regular here you’ve had a letter and leaflet about it – we’re looking at those 3 great foundations of the Christian life. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul says faith, hope and love are the things that will last forever – and the greatest of them is love.

Love really is the greatest thing in the world, God’s love, flowing to us and on to others.

And whilst human love can and sometimes does let us down, God’s love is utterly trustworthy. God’s love is perfect, complete, whole, as he is, and nothing, nothing at all can separate us from it.

In Romans 8:37-39 Paul said,  “I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Come to the cross, come and gaze at God’s love on the cross seen in his son Jesus. Start that gaze now in our time of Holy Communion this morning, as  you come for bread and wine, or for a blessing, and carry on that gaze during the week ahead. Remember that there’s NOTHING that you can do to make God love you more – nothing! He already loves you immeasurably! You don’t’ have to do good stuff to make him love you more!

And that there’s NOTHING you can do to make him love you less – nothing! He knows you through and through, knows the good, the bad and the ugly, and still loves you to death. Literally, Christ’s death for you on the cross.

Come and gaze, come and receive the wonderful, limitless, inexhaustible, passionate love God has for you – and let his love flow out through you to others.

I end with a wonderful majestic prayer for God’s love to fill us, from Ephesians 3:

I pray that out of [God’s] glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge -that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Amen!