sermon notes from the Vineyard Church of Milan 10/09/2011
7Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
1. Big picture.
2. Look at some key ingredients.
3. What’s it mean for us?
4. Practical Tips
So big picture…Gnosticism…The anxiety of secret knowledge. Am I one of the select few, the privileged elite? Do I have what it takes to attain salvation? How do I even know, because it seems like there is always someone ahead of me?
John’s message is simple. It’s not about secret knowledge; it’s about loving one another.
Are you doing that? Then you’re born of God. Salvation is yours as a gift. You know God. Keep learning to love, keep practicing; keep pressing into love (into God!). It’s not a level to achieve; it’s a wondrous, staggeringly beautiful landscape to explore, with more glorious treasures to find at every turn.
Are you not loving one another? Well, then you have lost the plot entirely. You don’t even know God at all – despite whatever “knowledge” you’ve attained. You may think you’re on the path to enlightenment, but you’re living in darkness, unseeing.
Let’s say you meet this woman. She’s beautiful, interesting, intriguing, challenging, inspiring. And she’s also a mystery. A mystery unlike any you’ve ever known. Just when you think you’re making sense of her, what makes her tick, what’s going on deep behind the scenes, she surprises you. Shows you something new. Proves your previous assumptions about her wrong.
Falling in love with her, you decide to ask for her hand in marriage, and she says yes.
Why do you want to spend the rest of your life with her?
Is it because you have determined to figure out the mystery? So that one day, she will make sense to you? So that one day, you can say, Aha, I have apprehended this mystery, and made her mine? And in that moment, somehow, you will have arrived…?
No, of course not. Because, for one, that will never happen. Anytime you think that that has happened, you will be wrong. And secondly, if that is your goal, you will have already missed the point. The point of you and her. The point of marriage. The point of exploring her mystery.
The point of exploring the mystery of her is so that you will be able to love her better; every bit of the mystery that you come to understand will give you new ways to love her. The point of marriage is to create a context in which the mystery can be freely explored and love can be freely expressed. The point of you and her is that by entrusting yourselves to the mystery that the other is, love would make you something more than you were before.
It is the same with every relationship. Including, and especially, our relationship with Jesus. The point of exploring the mystery of Jesus, John is saying, is love. The point of discipleship is to create a context in which the mystery can be freely explored and love can be freely expressed. The point of you and him is that by entrusting yourselves to the mystery that the other is, love would make you something more than you were before.
Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God…God is love.
Everyone who loves. From a Greek phrase meaning “everyone who loves.” Everyone who loves God? Yes, this includes that meaning. Everyone who loves people? Yes, this includes that meaning too. Everyone who loves fish and animals and lizards and insects? Yes. Everyone who loves the earth and flowers and trees? Yes. All those people have been born of God? Yes, that’s what this passage says. Yes, but! We say. Of course we do. We always say that when we hear things that challenge our preconceptions. But nonetheless, that’s what this passage says.
What are we to think or do in response to it?
Perhaps we should ask, what does it mean to be born of God? [gegennetai] = born of, fathered by, are sons and daughters of, have a genetic inheritance from. It doesn’t necessarily mean we aren’t estranged from him, or are in good relationship with him, or are full partners in the family business, or even that we aren’t actively working against his purposes in various respects. But it does mean we are his kids. That our love bears witness – in a way nothing else can – to our true identity as his children.
And it says that everyone who loves knows God. Ginosko knows him – in the sense of knowing that goes deeper than head knowledge, the kind of knowing that goes deep down.
Does that mean that everyone who loves has an intellectual understanding of God? That everyone who loves would encounter God in one way or another and say, Ah – I know you, you are the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. You are YHWH who appeared to Moses in the burning bush and delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt and came among us in flesh and blood through Jesus of Nazareth? No, not necessarily. But it does mean that everyone who loves knows God deep down as much as the most enlightened, religious religion expert in the world. And if God were to reveal himself to them, they would, just as authentically as anyone else on planet earth, regardless of religious background and training, be able to say, “Ah, you I know. I have known you my whole life, even though perhaps, I haven’t been aware of it.”
Because, John says, God is love.
Not God is like love, or God is a big fan of love, or a proponent of love. Not God recommends love, or commands love, or even has a lot of love.
God is love.
Where you see the word love in noun form the scriptures, you see God. Where you see it in verb form, you see the activity of God. Where you see love manifesting itself in the world, you see God manifesting himself. Where you see God at work in the world, you see love at work. Where God is present, love is present. Where love is present, God is present.
If we have trouble wrapping our minds around this, it’s for one of several possible reasons. Maybe we’ve got misconceptions about God. Or maybe we’ve got misconceptions about love. Or maybe our capacity to conceive just isn’t well developed enough.
In any event, when John says God is love, it’s an invitation to further explore the mystery.
What we learn about God will teach us about love.
If it doesn’t, we haven’t truly learned anything about God.
What we learn about love will teach us about God.
If it doesn’t, we haven’t truly learned anything about love.
Our experiences of God will be experiences of love.
If they aren’t, perhaps it wasn’t actually God we were experiencing.
Our experiences of love will be experiences of God.
If they aren’t, perhaps it wasn’t actually love we were experiencing.
When we hear the voice of God, it will be the voice of love.
When we hear the voice of love, it will be the voice of God.
And on and on. Each encounter deeper exploration of the mystery of a God who is love.
And almost as if John anticipates the momentary stationary panic our brains might go into trying to mesh what we know of God and what we know of love to make sense of what he’s saying (since John knows we have a limited understanding of both), John gives us a starting point.
This is how God showed his love among us… [this is how the love of God (ephanerothe) is made visible, made actual, realized among us…] he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.
In other words, when John is talking about love, he’s talking about Jesus humbling himself and coming into our world – with all the pain and sacrifice that entailed – so that we might live through him. That’s what the love that God is looks like when we get to see it up close and personal. That’s what love made actual becomes when it materializes. That’s what love in its fully realized form is.
It’s as if we were told that God was gold, and we’ve got all these flecks of material that we think might be gold, and we’re wondering if what John means is that God is this stuff we are holding in our hands. So John says, here, here’s a bar of genuine God/Gold. Go ahead, examine it, and compare what you’ve got in your hands. If it’s made of the same stuff, then yes, that’s what I’m talking about. If it’s not, well, then you’ve probably got fool’s gold in your hand, and no, that’s not God.
Notice this phrase “his one and only Son” (sometimes translated “only begotten Son”). Which is a little confusing, isn’t it, since he just said that everyone who loves is born of God. The confusion is a function of translation.
The word translated one and only in Greek is monogene. Mono meaning one, and gene meaning kind (genetic, genus, etc.). All of us who love are children of God, are fathered by God, have our genetic inheritance from God, but Jesus is God’s one of a kind son. He’s unique among all of God’s children.
As those who’ve become Jesus’ disciples have come to understand it, Jesus and his Father are different persons but one and the same God. Jesus is God himself incarnated in now resurrected human flesh. An equal member with the Father in the three-personed triune God, Father/Son/Holy Spirit who has been with God from the beginning, long before his incarnation in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, who was present before creation itself, through whom and for whom all things were created, and whom all of creation will one day recognize as Lord and Savior.
At the risk of inappropriately deifying someone, it’s a little like the technology company, Apple. There are all kinds of people who work for Apple. Who make and design Apple products. But there has only ever been one person who is Apple. Steve Jobs. He has uniquely personified Apple, hasn’t he? It’s an open question as to whether or not he has deposited enough of his DNA into his company for it be what it always has been (or more) now that he has passed away.
It’s similar with those of us who love as God loved us. We are all children of God who love and bear his image in this world. But there is only one unique Son – Jesus – who is love, who is the image of the invisible God. And none of us can take his place. (He is, in fact, the one who has taken our place so that we might share in his place…but that’s another sermon).
So what do we do with all this?
Remember, 1st John is in some ways a commentary on the gospel of John. And this passage is specifically referencing a scene from John chapters 13 and 14, which takes place after Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, but before he has gone to the cross.
It’s during that conversation that Jesus says to his disciples, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this you everyone will know that you are my disciples.” Which sounds a lot like that last line in our passage today, doesn’t it: “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”
A little bit later, when Jesus tells his disciples essentially that he is going to be leaving them (because he knows he’s going to be crucified), Thomas asks him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
Thomas’s impulse behind this question is the same impulse driving Gnosticism, the heresy that said salvation comes from attaining secret knowledge, the heresy the people in this church John is writing to are wrestling with.
“What’s the way? Where are you going?” What are the secret truths we need to get where you are going, Jesus, to have the life you have?”
Jesus’ answer in John 14 is straightforward. I’m the way. I’m the truth. I’m the life. You can only get there (to the Father) through me.
Which is the same answer John gives here when he talks about God sending his son so that we can live through him.
The “life” in John 14 is zoe life. And the “live” in John 4 is zoe living. The life that runs underneath life, in other words. The life of God. The life that doesn’t change when circumstances change. The life that can’t be taken from us, even if we lose our biological life. The life of the ages that gives birth to all life. The life we can hold onto even when everything else is falling apart. Jesus came so that we might, through him, have it. Know it. Experience it. Be infused by it.
We can’t have it through learning secret truths. By getting our minds around the secret plan and executing it. The only way is by putting our trust personally in Jesus, God’s one of a kind son. The son who is showing us what love is, teaching us how to love, pouring out his love on us, inviting us to participate in his love, inviting us to enjoy the Father’s love for him as if it is for us, because it is.
Jesus is the way to get where he’s going. Follow him, not some complicated plan, no matter how detailed and well thought out it might be.
Jesus is the truth. Invest your energies in knowing him, not mastering some complicated theological system.
Jesus is the life. Trust him and him alone for everything you need, not some well-intentioned but ultimately inadequate strategy for successful life.
And along the way, let the growth of your love of others, and nothing less, be the measure of your discipleship.
Practical Tips:
1. Get specific with Jesus about your needs and desires. For 3 days, don’t express any needs or desires to anyone else, unless they ask you.
2. Try to do one thing a day for 3 days that Jesus leads you to do. You don’t have to be sure; just ask, and do what comes to mind if it seems reasonable, or even if doesn’t, do it if it’s likely to be at least harmless.
3. Commit yourself. Commit all of your life to Jesus. More than your work. More than your pleasure. More than your stuff. More than your money. More than your family. More than yourself. Entrust all of it to the monogene Son of God. And while your at it, entrust him with your sins, too.
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