Sharing Community

The Christian Enjoyment of Love
(1 John 4:7-21)

One of the most remarkable things about Christian community is that the love we are invited to enjoy between human beings is a love that originates in the very being and nature of God. In this message, tenth in a series on the biblical letter of 1 John, Rob Yule shows that love originates in the triune nature of God, is communicated to us by God's Holy Spirit, and evidenced in the way Christians love one other. Rob gave this message at Greyfriars' Classical Service on 22 October 2006.

'Dear friends, let us love one another.' These words are characteristic of the apostle John. Known as 'the disciple whom Jesus loved' and 'the apostle of love', he was always encouraging Christians to love one another.

How much we need John's message today. There's so much loneliness, backbiting, abuse, hatred, cruelty, violence and lack of love in the world today. The world is a very unloving place. John shows us that the church is meant to be an antidote to the world, a community where God's love is experienced and loneliness is overcome.

1. God shares in a community of love

John tells us that love doesn't start with us. It starts with God. It doesn't even start with what God does, but with who God is. John tells us twice that 'God is love' (1 John 4:8, 12). He doesn't say that 'God is loving', but that 'God is love'; not just that God shows love, but that God's very being is love, eternally.

To be love, God must be personal. We have here a hint of the Trinity, the mystery of the triune or three-personal nature of God. God is love because from all eternity the persons of the Godhead are in a vital communion of love with one another. God the Father loves God the Son, the Son loves the Father, the Father and the Son love the Spirit, and the Spirit loves the Father and the Son. God is a dynamic community of love from all eternity – the fountainhead of love and prototype of all community.

This truth has been neglected in Western Christianity, but is strongly emphasised in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Trinitarian emphasis of the Eastern Church is best illustrated in Andrei Rublev's famous icon of the Holy Trinity, painted in the early 15th century. Rublev, like the earlier icon painters, was aware of the biblical prohibition against visually depicting God. So he based his depiction of the triunity of God on the story in Genesis 18, when Abraham gave hospitality to three strangers. The text of this passage in Genesis is numinous, varying between the plural and the singular. It refers to three visitors, yet Abraham addressed them as 'my Lord'.

Rublev's painting is in the shape of a circle, emphasising oneness, superimposed on a triangle, representing the three persons. God is the three-in-one. The figures are placed in a harmonious relationship with one another, acknowledging one another and deferring to one another. As persons they don't have an independent existence, but exist in relationship with one another. They live in a community of love.

'God is love', says the apostle John. Love is not a merely human phenomenon. It's a divine reality which we are invited to participate in. Rublev was commissioned to paint this famous icon, because the abbot of the monastery, at a time of great social turmoil and violence in Russia, wanted to teach the monks of his community how to love one another. 'Our social policy,' a modern Russian Orthodox theologian observed, 'is the doctrine of the Trinity'.

This is the first reason why we should love one another: God is a community of love.

2. God shares his love with us

The second reason why we should love one another is that God loves us. God is love, but he hasn't kept his love to himself. God wants to share his divine life with us. He wants us to participate in the community of love which he enjoys from all eternity.

John explains how God shared his love among us: 'He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.' (1 John 4:9). By sending his own Son into the world, God showed us his love, and invites us to share in his love.

There are two amazing things about God's love for us:

The first is that God's love is shown to the unlovely and indifferent. We don't deserve to be the objects of God's love. We don't deserve that he sent his Son into the world to save us. We didn't initiate it. God did. It's something God has done. He reached out to cross the barriers of indifference, rejection, hostility and hatred that we erected. John even says that God provided, by his Son's death on the cross, the very means for our wrong attitudes to be justly overcome, atoned for, and forgiven. 'This is love,' John says, 'not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.' (1 John 4:9-10).

This is beautifully expressed in Samuel Crossman's great hymn, 'My song is love unknown', one of the finest hymns of the 17th century, a great period of Anglican spirituality.

'My song is love unknown,
my Saviour's love to me,
love to the loveless shown,
that they might lovely be.
O who am I, that for my sake
my Lord should take frail flesh and die?'

The second amazing thing about God's love is that there is a pain of giving up, of sacrifice, in the very heart of the Godhead. The eternal fellowship of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is temporally interrupted, so to speak, by the Father sending his Son into the world to show a loveless humanity what God's love is like.

We are so self-centred we rarely pause to think what it must have cost God to send his Son into an environment where his Son would be misunderstood, misrepresented, and mistreated. There was a cross in the Trinity, before there was a cross on Calvary; a sacrifice in the heart of God, before there was a sacrifice on the hill of Golgotha.

3. We are to share in a community of love with one another

John concludes by reminding us of our obligation to love one another. 'He has given us this command: Those who love God must also love one another.' (1 John 4:21). Love is a command that we should keep, a duty we should fulfil. Because God is love, and God has loved us, we are under a powerful obligation to love one another.

But love is more than a command, more than a duty. 'We love, because he first loved us.' (1 John 4:19). Our love is a reflex, a response to God's love. Our love for one another should be the natural outflow of God's love, our response to the wonder of who God is and what God has done.

Love isn't just a command: it's an invitation to community. To love one another is to enter a life of communion. We are invited out of our isolation, our loneliness, our independence, into the joy of the communion that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit enjoy eternally.

John mentions some marks of this loving community:

• Love makes God's presence real and tangible. 'No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.' (1 John 4:12). A loving community is a potent force because it makes God visible.
• Love enables us to personally experience God's Spirit. 'We know that we live in him and he is us, because he has given us of his Spirit.' (1 John 4:13). Paul says this too: 'God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.' (Romans 5:5). The nearest I have ever known to revival was in 1989-1991, when our student membership at St. Albans, Palmerston North, reached about ninety. Their love for one another was truly beautiful to experience. The presence of God was so real. It was a holy love, not marred by sensuality or pride.
• Love assures us that God has forgiven our sins and accepted us as his children. 'In this way love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgement, because in this world we are like him. There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear . . .' (1 John 4:17-18). How beautiful when you don't need to strive for acceptance but can rest in the reality that God loves you and has accepted you.
• Love fosters integrity and credibility. Where love is present, there's no room for the religious hypocrisy that professes to love God but is indifferent to the needs of others. 'If we say we love God yet hate a brother or sister, we are liars. For any of us who do not love a brother or sister, whom we have seen, cannot love God, whom we have not seen. (1 John 4:19-20). Love is credible. Love is how we are meant to live. If you live in God's love, you'll always be able to help others, keep your integrity and hold your head high.

Rob Yule, 22 October 2006
© 2006, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church