Back to Love

Happy Mother's Day to all moms here today. Like Adrian said, whether you're a foster mom, an adoptive mom, a stepmom, a grandma, any woman who has ever loved and sacrificed and cared for a child, we love you and we appreciate you so much. We hope you have a great day today.

Well, good morning and welcome to a beautiful Sunday morning here at Twin Lakes Church. My name's René, another one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church, and it seems kind of appropriate to me on Mother's Day to talk about love. And I wanna start with this. I love how this group of four to eight year old children defined love. For example, Chrissy, age six says love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your french fries without making them give you any of theirs. That is true love.

Bobby, age seven, and I love this, says love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen. Well, Bobby is a very wise child, but I'll have to be honest, I never had a moment like that in my childhood ever, but that sounds beautiful. Nika, age six says if you wanna learn to love better, you should start with a friend you hate. I think we need about several million more Nikas in our world right now.

And then finally, Rebecca, age eight says when my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. And so my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love. And that's actually pretty close to the biblical definition of love that we're gonna talk about today.

As we start a series called Living in Love, you can download your message notes at tlc.org/notes. I encourage you to do that. This is an eight week study in the book of 1 John in the Bible, which is all about love. And I think it is the perfect book for all of us to study at this precise cultural moment. Why? Well, I'm just barely old enough to remember when I was a very, very young child in the sixties that pop culture was full of people saying things like, all you need is love. And what the world needs now is love. And love is the answer, which all sounds hopelessly quaint today, doesn't it?

Because today's world, as someone put it, hatred almost seems like it's been made into a virtue. People are motivated by hatred and anger and division. And as Christians, sometimes it seems like we've been formed discipled more by forces calling us to hate than forces calling us to love. So we need to get back to this and really rediscover the power of love. And that is what 1 John is all about.

The word love is in 1 John 35 times in this short little book of the Bible. And that includes one of the most famous verses in the Bible, 1 John 4:6, God is love. Now you hear that it's full of love. You hear that it's all about love. And you might assume, oh, it says lightweight as a Hallmark card. But this book of the Bible is not lightweight. It is dense with meaning. It is heavy. It is complex.

In fact, 1 John is kind of intimidating. It's kind of difficult to understand for many people. And that's why this morning, what I wanna do as we launch this series is give you kind of a bird's eye view of 1 John. I wanna talk about who, what, and why. Who wrote it, what it's about, and why was this book of the Bible written? And then next week, we're going to start studying it section by section. But when you understand this, it's gonna give you a grid for understanding this entire book. And I think you're gonna love it.

So first, who wrote it? Well, according to the very earliest historical sources we have, the author was the Apostle John, one of the original 12 followers of Jesus Christ, a fisherman by trade. Now the ancient authors tell us his nickname was the Apostle of Love. Because John wrote about love more than any other Bible writer in his short little three epistles, first, second, and third John. And in the Gospel of John, he uses the word love 80 times. So he's all about love.

But in case this makes you think of John as kind of Mr. Rogers, gentle and meek and harmless, that is far from the personality that he was born with. His first nickname, the nickname that his friends gave him, was Son of Thunder. Why? Well, one scholar I read said this, as a young man, along with his brother James, John was the most sectarian, narrow-minded, unbending, and personally zealous of all the disciples. He behaved like an extremist, a bigot, a harsh man. In his early years, he was the most unlikely candidate to be remembered as the Apostle of Love.

What's this guy talking about? Well, let me just give you a couple of examples, a couple of vignettes from the Apostle John's early life. And I think when you understand his character arc, this will really make what you read in 1 John very intriguing. Check this out. In Luke 9, Jesus Christ and his disciples are getting ready to go into a village of Samaritans. And you may know that between the Samaritans and the Jewish people, there was racial tension, there was political tension, there was religious tension, a lot of prejudice, a lot of division.

And so the Samaritans don't want Jesus, who's Jewish, to come into their village. They refuse an entry. And John has a solution. He says, "Lord, should we call down fire from heaven to burn them up?" What? And of course, Jesus Christ has to rebuke him. And then another time, shortly after that, John sees some new disciples of Jesus, healing people, helping people. And John comes running up to Jesus and says, "Lord, I got some good news for you. You're gonna love this." So what's the good news? He says, "Teacher, we saw someone using your name to cast out demons, but we told him to stop because he wasn't in our group."

And Jesus has to go, "John, you might be a little bit unclear on the concept. I actually want new disciples." And John goes, "What?" And then a few verses later, John, along with James, his brother comes up to Jesus and says, "Lord, when you sit on your glorious throne," they're still thinking that Jesus is going to be a Messiah in the political sense, that he's going to kick out the Romans and be the new king, earthly king of Israel. He says, "When you sit on your glorious throne, we wanna sit in places of honor next to you, one on your right and one on your left." And it says, "They came and asked Jesus this in secret."

Like, forget about the other disciples. We wanna be, I know you're gonna be King Jesus, but we wanna be like Prince A and Prince B. And again, Jesus has to just kind of shake his head sadly at John and says, "You don't get it. What you're asking for is to be the Prince of Suffering." So are you getting the picture? As a young man, John's got a ton of ambition, but very little compassion. And then something happens to John. And by the time he writes his books in the Bible, he is a very old man and he is mellowed out entirely.

What happened to John? Well, I think a key incident happens at the cross. John is the only one of the male disciples of Jesus who comes back when Jesus is being crucified. All the other male disciples of Jesus who bragged that they would never deny Jesus, never leave Jesus, they all split when Jesus is arrested and they don't return, even when he's being crucified and tortured. Only John kind of comes wandering back along with all of the women who did stay with Jesus, including Mary, the mother of Jesus.

So John is there at the foot of the cross with Mary and the Bible says, "Jesus looks down at both of them and he says to his mother, woman." And then he looks at John and says, "Here is your son." In other words, he's gonna take care of you. And then he looks at John and he says this, "Here is your mother." And the Bible says, "And from then on this disciple, John took her into his home." John, this impetuous, hot-headed, kind of bigoted guy who's full of personal ambition because Jesus told him to, puts his personal ambition aside and brings Jesus' aging mom into his home and historians tell us that he took care of Mary for the rest of her life for decades.

And I wanna go back to this old engraving that I found in an old German Bible because I love the expressions on the faces of both Mary and John. They're kind of looking at each other like, "What? I'm supposed to live with you. I'm supposed to take you into my house." But he did take care of Mary. And you know, something that's always interested me is that John sort of fades from the scene in the Bible, early on in the book of Acts. And after a few chapters, you just don't hear from him again until decades later when he was very elderly. What was he doing during all that time? He was taking care of Jesus Christ's mother, Mary.

And then when he shows up on the scene again, he has changed from a son of thunder to an apostle of love. And I love that. I think those years formed John's character. And this teaches me a huge lesson, which is I can change. My failures are not final. My growth is not impossible. If the apostle John can change from being like, you know, Simon Cowell or Gordon Ramsey or something to being Mother Teresa, that means you and I can change too. And by the way, that means that person who drives you nuts can change as well. That's what the Bible's all about.

Now that's who wrote it, but what is it about? Well, as I said, the key word is love. It's used 35 times in this short little book. So that means we better define love, right? Or every one of those 35 times that John uses the word love, we could totally misunderstand his point. What is love? And this is pretty difficult to define. Here's how our culture defines love. Romance, passion, feeling, this is the kind of love that Hollywood movies are great at showing.

What's the problem with that definition of love? Well, feelings, romance, passion, that's all uncontrollable, right? When you say, I fell in love with you, you could say, I fell out of love with you. Now I don't feel anything anymore. And sadly, that is the definition of love that a lot of people operate on. But when John says love, love, love 35 times in this epistle, this letter in the Bible, he means something totally different. What does he mean? Well, in fact, John defines exactly what he means by love. And what I think is the key verse to this whole book, it's kind of the almost the exact middle of the book of John, 1 John 3:16, not John 3:16, but 1 John 3:16, he says, this is how we know what love is. He says, here's my operating definition of love. Here it comes, are you ready for this? Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.

If you are looking for the message of 1 John in a nutshell, that is it right there. If you unwrap the words and phrases in this one verse, you are going to understand the whole rest of the book of 1 John of the Bible. And if you don't understand what he's talking about in this verse, I think you really could misconstrue and misunderstand all the rest of what he's talking about. So let's unwrap it for the next few minutes.

First, look at the word that John uses for love. You might suspect if you've spent any time in Sunday school that the word he uses for love, there is the Greek word agape. Greek was the original language that the New Testament of the Bible was written in. And you might have heard somewhere that the definition of agape, that Greek word for love is unconditional love. But even that definition might have become a little bit of a cliche. What is unconditional love? What does that actually mean?

Well, another way to put it is this, agape love is love that chooses to cherish. Now, even that, you're like, what does that mean to choose to cherish? Let me tell you a story about agape love, about someone who chose to cherish, even when the feelings of romance and passion were not necessarily there. Once many years ago, I heard a man speak named Dave Reaver. Here's a picture of Dave today with his wife, Brenda. Dave was burned over 90% of his body in an APOM explosion in Vietnam. And he was transferred to a burn unit here in the States.

And the doctors told him that they had contacted his wife, Brenda, and that she would be coming to see him for the first time since he had been burned. Now, of course, they're a very young married couple in their early 20s at the time. Later that day, he hears footsteps coming down the hall. It was not Brenda, it was the wife of the man in the bed next to him. And Dave watches as she slips off her wedding ring, after she looks at her husband's burns, places it on the man's chest, and says, "I can't live with a freak," and turns around and leaves. And within two weeks, that man, Dave's roommate, in the hospital was dead.

So, Dave, knowing that his wife, Brenda, is going to come and see him too, he says he steeled himself for what he figured was his own wife's inevitable reaction. Later that same day, he hears, again, footsteps down the hall. This time, it's his wife who appears at the door. She approaches slowly, and Dave watches her eyes as silently she scans him from head to toe. And then the first words she says to him are these, "Frankly, Dave, in some ways, this is an improvement." And then she kind of laughs, and she leans over and kisses him, where, as he put it, his lips should have been. And she says this, "Dave, listen to me. I love you, and I will always love you. Now, let's get you out of here."

Within two weeks, Dave and Brenda were going out every single day on little day trips. Shortly afterward, he went home, and for years, Dave Reaver has spoken all over the country about the power of agape love, love that chooses to cherish, love that can look at somebody and say, "You may not be attractive," in one sense, physically or spiritually or emotionally right now, but I am going to choose to love you in a transforming way. He says, "What my wife did in that moment, when physically I was a mess, emotionally I was a mess, she chose to cherish me, her choice saved me. That is agape love."

And do you see, 1 John 3:16 says, "This is how Jesus loves you." When you were wounded, when you were a mess, Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. He gave his life on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins so we could have abundant life now, an eternal life in God forever. And it's important to realize, he says, "Jesus Christ laid down his life." He wasn't murdered, nobody took it from him. Jesus Christ chose to do that out of love for us.

I really want to make this point, love is a choice, not a feeling. Jesus Christ was not feeling all mushy toward the people who were nailing his hands into that cross, but he laid down his life even for them. He chose to treasure them. That's powerful, agape love. Now look where John goes with this. He says, "Jesus Christ laid down his life for us and we also ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters." His point is this, and this is the whole big picture of the book of First John.

When you get, when you understand in your heart how sacrificially and totally you are loved by God, then that is going to overflow to others because, write down these three words, acceptance is contagious. Acceptance, agape love is contagious. If I believe I am accepted by God unconditionally, I am going to love other people the same way. We love as we believe ourselves to be loved. That is First John in a nutshell. And conversely, John says, if we are not loving people, then it's probably because we don't really know the love of God ourselves.

One of the main points of First John is kind of the inverse of I love as I know myself to be loved. John's saying, if you don't love others, I don't think you really know the love of God. And one of his main points is you can say, oh, I love people, I love God and I love people. I love the poor, I love the oppressed, I love the lost. You can say it, post it, tweet it, blog it. But if you're not actually doing something about it, acting in love, then that's not love because God didn't just say he loved you, he sacrificed himself through Christ for you.

A couple of verses later, John says, dear children, let us not love with words or speech, but with actions and in truth. I just want you to look at this verse for a second because this is a huge challenge for our culture right now. Researchers at the University of British Columbia recently did a study that fascinated me. They invited participants to show support for a cause on social media. You got that so far? Then they were asked to donate or volunteer to that same cause.

Now here's what they found, check this out. The more that people engaged in public endorsement, such as Facebook likes or online petitions, the less likely they were, less likely they were to donate or volunteer to those same causes. Why? Probably because psychologically they felt like, well, I already did something. Yeah, you hit the Facebook like button, but they were less likely to actually do something. That's exactly the error that James is correcting in this verse, and that is one of the reasons why we are helping out the Pregnancy Resource Center today.

You might know every year here at TLC, on Mother's Day we show support for organizations that help moms. And this year it's the PRC, the Pregnancy Resource Center. We're doing a Baby Bottle Fundraiser for them. I wanna show you just one story to help you understand how they love and help women. Watch this.

Everybody has something that they don't wanna talk about, and usually those things you don't wanna talk about are the things that need to be talked about the most. It was not a planned pregnancy of any kind, so that's how I came in to connect with the Pregnancy Resource Center. I remember meeting Cheryl, and she really wondered, should she be a parent? Was she ready to parent? Was she ready to even go further in the process of pregnancy? I thought my world was over, and I didn't, I was so lost and I was just, I was devastated.

I don't think I would have chose adoption if I had only known about closed adoption. For me, I couldn't just have a baby and then never look back kind of thing. I wanted to be a part of his life. For me to be actively involved still in his life because of open adoption, that was a choice that I needed. Cheryl is a very courageous woman. Women who choose adoption are being very grown in the sense of sacrificial love, and the courage that it takes is supreme.

It was important to me at the time that I wanted to offer a baby to somebody that couldn't have a baby, so I'm reading these profiles of all these families that couldn't have children. I'm just bawling 'cause I'm connecting on them with such a different level that I knew one of these families could save my life and could save Jaden's life. Jaden is my son. He just turned nine in April. I get photo books all the time. They send me cards. We FaceTime once a week. I'm so glad I could never imagine any other way kind of thing.

PRC empowers our clients through education, through our counseling emotional support, through practical support. It's definitely just an open door policy. You walk in and you just get the help, love, and support that you need. And you know what? That is such a beautiful story, and I wanna say Happy Mother's Day to all the moms like Cheryl. To all of you women who have courageously taken that pregnancy to term and given that baby up for adoption, and to all of you moms, all of you families who've courageously fostered or adopted those children, a special Happy Mother's Day to you too.

And here's how this all ties in to John's definition of love. As Christians we can say that we love these moms. We can say we believe in the sanctity of life, for example, that's a biblical principle. But John would say, "Well then let's actually do something to help." So I wanna encourage you to pick up one of our empty baby bottles. You can grab them here today at one of our in-person services, or at our church office during the week. Collect change in them, or you can just use an envelope at home. And then on Father's Day, bring them in. See what we did there? Mother's Day to Father's Day, and let's give all the proceeds to the Pregnancy Resource Center this year. John would say do that because that is love. Loving in actions and in truth. So let's love those moms who need our help.

Okay, now let's wrap up this overview with the why. Why did John write this? Why do you and I need to study this? What are we gonna get out of this? Well, let me explain it to you this way. In his autobiography, the famous playwright Arthur Miller describes his marriage to the movie star Marilyn Monroe. And he talks about how he watched her slide into deep depression. And he wrote that one night he was watching his troubled wife sleep. And he says these fascinating words.

He says, "I found myself straining to imagine miracles. What if she were to wake and I were able to say God loves you, darling, and she were able to believe it? How I wish I still had my religion and she hers." That's powerful. The back story of this is that Arthur Miller was convinced that Marilyn Monroe had been influenced by family members who were part of what he describes as a fundamentalist cult. And they kept telling Marilyn that acting in any way, in plays, movies, any kind of acting was a sin that God was judging her for.

And he says, although Marilyn wasn't still actively, she was raised as first a Christian scientist and then a Baptist, she wasn't practicing anymore. But he said he could, she talked about this a lot and constantly felt like God must be judging me, God must hate me. And he felt that a key to lifting her out of her depression would be if she truly believed that God loved her. He was not a religious man himself, yet he saw how important that belief would be to her.

Well, really, that is why John is writing all about love to you and me. John actually writes four times in his book, "We Write This So That," and he reveals himself the four reasons that he's writing what he's writing about love in his book. And so we can understand very clearly the purpose for 1 John because unlike some other books in the Bible, John literally lays it out. Let me tell you the four purposes for this book. And I love these and I think you're gonna love these too.

He says, and let's cover these very briefly before we close. First, refreshed joy. He says, "I write this so that our joy may be complete." You see, when you really get that God loves you with a God they love, that as the song that we learned earlier today says, "You'll never be loved more than you're loved right now." When you can say with confidence, "I'm already loved, I'm already chosen, I know who I am because of what God has spoken, not because of what anybody else says," man, that brings you joy.

Second, released guilt. Some of you, I know, feel this constant, low background hum of guilt all the time. "I'm a failure, I'm guilty." Watch what John says. "My dear children, I write this so that you will not sin." John's saying, "Of course don't use God's grace as an excuse to sin, but if anybody does sin, what happens?" What do we think happens when we sin? Often we imagine that Jesus Christ has his hands on his hips saying, "You are such a disappointment." And he's like a judge or a prosecuting attorney. "You did this, you did this, you did this again after you promised you wouldn't."

John says, "Yeah, you can imagine a courtroom. You can imagine him as a lawyer, but not a prosecuting attorney. He's the defense attorney. We have an advocate who speaks to the Father in our defense, Jesus Christ, the righteous one." Jesus is standing for us. How powerful is that? And his righteousness covers us. Do you know in the core of your being that you are declared righteous in Christ? Now, in John's day, there were people who complicated that message and said, "No, you can never be sure of God's love. You always have to work harder and grovel more and live in fear of God." And that brings us to the third reason John wrote First John, re-clarified truth.

John says, "I am writing these things to warn you about those who are trying to lead you astray." See, there were then and there are now people who will try to complicate the simple message of the gospel. And John is saying that the truth about God's love, God's agape love for you, that is the key truth. It's the keystone, it's the linchpin that's gonna ratchet everything else in the Bible into sharp focus and you'll be able to discern error from a mile away once you understand the power of God's unconditional love for you.

And then finally, John says he's writing so you can have renewed confidence. Renewed confidence, John says, "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life." No. You ever wonder yourself, am I really a Christian? Am I really going to go to heaven when I die? I wonder if God still holds that sin from those years ago against me to this day. John says, "I write this so that you may know, not guess, not hope, but know that you have eternal life." And he goes on, this is the confidence that we have in approaching God. Confidence, how would you like to live every moment of every day in the confidence that you are loved unconditionally by God? That would change your whole life, wouldn't it? Like Arthur Miller knew it would have for Marilyn.

Well, that is what this study is about. You will get refreshed, joy released, guilt re-clarified truth and renewed confidence. Aren't you excited about the study? I hope you make time every single weekend during this eight week series in the book of 1 John to join us as we explore this fascinating book. And I want to leave you this morning with this because this is what John himself left us with when he passed away. There's a fascinating old letter by the ancient Christian writer Jerome, where he describes what John was like in his old age.

And he says, John's followers would come into the place where John was dying and they would ask for some last words from him. He says, "When John was dying, his disciples asked him for a final counsel to keep with them. My children," he said, "love one another." And then he repeated it again. "Is that all?" they asked. "That is enough," John said. "It is the Lord's command. And if this alone be done, it is enough." So all you need is love. What the world needs now is love. Love is the answer. Sixties cliches or does this really work? Well, if love is defined the way John defines it in First John, love changes everything.

Let's pray together. Would you bow your head with me wherever you're at? Lord, we thank you for your love for us, expressed in Jesus Christ, sacrificed for us on the cross. And I pray that everyone joining us would receive that love and revel in that love right now so that it would just well up inside of us and give us abundant life and then overflow to those around us. And we pray this in your loving and holy name, amen.