Love Is Not Blind
We make progress in love together in Christ. When love is returned in kind, the obligation of love is not burdensome. Where love is not returned, any thought of obligation is irksome. My guess is we are all open to having more love, fuller love. John assures us we can. He’s also telling us that love looks like something. It looks like obedience. “We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands” (2:3). So, do we know Jesus? No one says, satisfied, that all he or she knows of Jesus is an accommodating fiction. John says there is a way to know. We want that blessed assurance that we really do know Jesus rather than a self-applauding fiction. True knowledge of Jesus is not a matter of the intellect. Knowledge, like truth, for John and the Bible is life-changing, character-shaping, action-inducing. When truth has got hold of us, we act on it. Truth has moral consequences.
English evangelical pastor John Stott claims that, for John, “no religious experience is valid if it does not have moral consequences.”[1] We live in an age hungry for experiences: valid, invalid, and everything in between, including religious experiences. People want contact with God, or at least the feeling of it: the feeling of contact with something different, something to catapult them outside the confines of their daily living. The Church word for contact with God is communion; the biblical Greek for it is koinonia. It is a spiritual experience, a gift of the Spirit. We can have this experience, daily. To realize this is a work of time, patience, hope, faith, and . . . can you guess? Love. We don’t leap from one rapturous height to another. It’s the spliced world of advertising that sells that message. The life of faith doesn’t work that way. I trust we figured that out a long time ago. We have glimpses. We hear a voice as from a distance, now and again. We catch the aroma of heaven when we see Christ’s love enacted and as we do Christ’s love for one another. Obedience is the experience of contact with God.
We truly know Jesus when we do what he asks of us, living his commands. We know them already: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; love your neighbor as yourself. Upon these two commands hang—what? The whole teaching of God, His teaching for life. All of Scripture is an elaboration of and commentary on these two commands.
Is there anyone here besides me who does God’s commands only very imperfectly? Calvin was writing to our age five hundred years ago when he commended “those who strive, according to the capacity of human infirmity, to form their life in obedience to God.”[2] We have a hard time getting it right; we’re saddled with human infirmity. We’re given grace, light, truth, love. We don’t make our weaknesses and innate inclinations an excuse for not bothering to live in obedience or for manufacturing a more accommodating way.
There is the failure from weakness, the failure from willful disregard, and the failure from opting for another way of being “faithful.” In this letter John counsels us about all three. “Whoever says, ‘I know him,’ but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person” (2:4). No gray! We tend to pride ourselves upon our love for neighbor, at least in principle; that is to say, our general laissez-faire attitude toward others and how they choose to live. Who am I to say? What do I know? Do we pride ourselves on our love for God, love as God would have us love Him? To what extent is accountability to God active in our living, loving, and choosing?
The problem for the church, bored, tired, confused, and troubled, is to love in Spirit and truth. We see how the world has worked its way in; the church receives the world: not the nasty horrible part, of course—heavens, no!—but the urbane, intelligent, loving part of the world, the part that seems harmless and helpful. Senator John McCain spoke of going to Washington, DC to change it, only to be changed by it. The church, confused and tired, welcomes the world rather than those fleeing the world. Welcoming the world, the church welcomes the world’s version of truth—we’re all open-minded, here. The world cobbles together truth as needed to cover the fallen desires of fallen flesh—our infirmities in the saddle. Permissive and accommodating, this truth markets itself as tolerant, open-minded, nonjudgmental—just like God, right? In such an environment, why would we need to seek God’s revealed Way? Old ways for old times; our way for our times. We reveal the way to God: God fits your story, your experience, your truth. People of good will are sure they are doing what God commands: loving and choosing welcome! Welcome according to the world’s messages, love according to the world’s values. How much time we spend, and lose, in the world!
John points us to the way to make progress in love: “if anyone obeys his word, love for God is truly made complete in them” (2:5). Obedience completes love, perfects love. We know our obedience is pretty shabby. We don’t really need or want any reminders. When we conceive of obedience as our act, the act of our will, we end up frustrated, confused, troubled. However, when we begin to realize that obedience is the gift of God, the Spirit alive and at work in us, the power of the blood of Christ in us and among us, then we truly begin to grow in love. Love obeys. Love is accountable. Love obeys the one who is loved. No one in church says, “I will obey self.” John is warning us that it is possible to claim Christ yet not have him. If you want to know the fullness, the perfection of love, live as God asks of you: obey His Word, His story, the truth. The faith the world teaches is permission to pursue our own way.
If you’re like me at all, you’re kind of hoping to leave church today and every Sunday with the feeling of having been in contact with God, experiencing God—somehow. As we come in from the world, this experience at first seems to amount to a feeling of God’s love for us personally. You and I would love to hear God say to us, personally, “I love you. You’re beautiful. Never change.” We respond, delightedly: “Thanks. Okay!”
Stott and Barclay would shift the focus. Where we would be content accumulating experiences of God expressing His love for us, Stott and Barclay, heeding John, urge us to focus upon developing and maturing our expression of love for God. Notice the difference in direction? We already have God’s perfect, complete expression of His love for us: Jesus Christ! How do we experience Christ? As we grow more completely in expression of love for God. If we’ll listen to John, we experience Christ as we do what Christ commands. “True love for God,” Stott writes, “is expressed not in sentimental language or mystical experience but in moral obedience.”[3] Sentiment seeks the experience of feelings for the love of feeling, your feelings. There are those convinced that encounter with God must be through emotional experience. “If I don’t feel it, how can it be real?” would sum up this attitude. To feel like you’re feeling God is to know God. Barclay offers another perspective: “To the Jew [like John and all the apostles] knowledge of God came, not by man’s speculation or by an exotic experience of emotion, but by God’s own revelation.”[4] We know God insofar as He reveals Himself. God reveals through His Word, even His Word made flesh.
God made us to feel. Above all, He made us to feel His love, so that we can know and love Him. How can we love Him if we do not know Him? How can we know Him if we rest content with the world’s fictions, the feeling of a feeling? Throughout Scripture, the people of God certainly felt God! Scripture does not ask us to feel God but to know God. We feel things. We know others. I-i-i-i-I, I’m hooked on a feeling . . . . Those peaks of emotion are powerful, I know! All such experiences are “necessarily transient [. . . .] a kind of religious drug.”[5] We fall short when we seek fulfillment in the high of being loved. Let us make progress in returning that love in kind. We make progress when we seek fulfillment in loving.
John, most mystical of the apostles, strives to be clear: “This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did” (2:5-6). Barclay quotes an earlier student of the Bible: “John can conceive of no real knowledge of God which does not issue in obedience.”[6] Perfection in love happens in the pursuit of obedience. Not the feeling of faith. Not faith in feeling. Just faith.
Don’t misunderstand. Religion without emotion is inconceivable! Only, a religion of emotion leaves us where we are and as we are. We pursue communion with God because God has opened the way. Feeling our way forward, we think our way forward, together, with, in, and under Christ. As Barclay puts it, “Intellectual effort and emotional experience [. . . ] must combine to issue in moral action.”[7] As with heart and mind we seek the Spirit, He embraces us in saving, purifying, transforming love. We do the truth, in love; love is not blind or blinded.
John assures us the message he has is not new (2:7). In our age the church is moving in new directions. The church doesn’t claim a new message: we are told that the church is living out more completely the message it already had received, just living out the same message by the new light. We are told that, in the new light, we now see the message more clearly. Only, to some, the new light is in direct conflict with the old message. There is confusion and trouble in the church. Fingers are wagging about un-Christian attitudes. How can these things be? Is it really true, as John tells us, that “the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining” (2:8)? The sign that the light is already shining, John says, is that the truth of the command “is seen in him and in you” (2:8). In him. That’s first. And in you. That follows from the first. What truth is being seen? Love looks like something. It looks like obedience. It looks like obedience because love looks like Christ, the living Word of the living, true God. This is why Barclay states that, “For John, Christianity is progress in love.”[8]
To the God of all grace, who calls you to share God’s eternal glory in union with Christ, be the power forever!
[1] J. R. W. Stott. Epistles of John. Tyndale NT Commentaries. London: Tyndale, 1964. 90.
[4] William Barclay. Letters of John and Jude. Daily Study Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975. 42-43.
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