One Another Love
“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God” (4:7). Everyone who loves. Well, then. If someone feels love, then that love must be from God; if it is from God, it is good. So goes the argument, and you just feel it’s right; you just know it isn’t wrong. John speaks of the love that “comes from God,” not our cultured thoughts or cultured feelings about love. John writes about “one another” love: “let us love one another.” It is “one another” love that comes from God. Everyone who loves with one another love has been born of God. God’s love is “one another” love. This makes perfect sense, for God is one another: one God in three Persons, blessed Trinity. I’ll have more to share about that next Sunday.
Obedience, faithfulness that purifies us, together, is “one another” love. People long for an experience of God, including many not here today, who haven’t thought of coming here or going to any church, today or ever. They don’t say they’re seeking God, but we understand they are, though blindly, deafly, lamely. They desire the experience of change—happiness, maybe: a feeling they can’t quite name. They don’t know where to get this power for change; we do. Obedience and purity are not high on their list: resentfully they serve the world, wanting all the while to serve self. Most live according to the standard issue disobedience and impurity of the world. They’re not living according to the Spirit.
Today is Pentecost Sunday, when we are especially invited to ponder the Holy Spirit, alive and at work here, everywhere, always. Life is evidence of the Spirit. Faith comes by the Spirit. One another love is the gracious gift of the Spirit. The Spirit gives us life and teaches our hearts the life of love; as our hearts are instructed, our heads follow. Changed thinking comes from a changed heart. The Holy Spirit is the heart changer. We change because we were made to respond to love: above all, the love of God.
The way of God is submission to God—I surrender all—anybody remember that one? Submission, surrender—these sound like weakness words, words that drove Nietzsche nuts. These words speak the truth when we’re speaking in relation to God, who is supreme and supremely love. God Almighty chooses not to use His power to force us to love Him. What love is forced? Scottish pastor and biblical scholar William Barclay wisely points out, “Unless love is a free response it is not love.”[1] Love sets free and makes a free response possible. Surely, we understand this. Set free from what, set free for what? Surely, we of all people know. Easter and now Pentecost sing us God’s answer. How to help others understand?
John is very definite—no gray, for him: “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (4:8): one another love, fellowship love, communion love. Not self-seeking love but self finding fulfillment in one another love.
The world knows plenty about self-love, love of Me, and how it talks and sings and sighs and pouts and screams and shouts about love, love, love. Only God can teach us one another love, love that sees and reaches beyond Me, love that sees and reaches out for Thee. If we do not love with one another love, we will not know God, we cannot. The “love” taught by the world for the world is fleeting, fickle, not exclusive, not permanent: it is love of Me, not love for Thee.
All of us love very imperfectly. We’re none of us as good at it as we like to think we are. For John, loving means doing the love of Christ; we know God insofar as we do the love of Christ. We make progress in love as we more perfectly (though always imperfectly) do the love of Christ, for one another and neighbors we have from God. The farther we are from doing that love, the farther we are from knowing God. This is an ongoing challenge for every believer.
In these “spiritual but not religious” times, people long for an experience of God because they do not know God; they do not know God because they do not do the love of Christ. The love of Christ looks like something: obedience, purity, ongoing, conscientious disentanglement from the world, laying down one’s life, that God might lift it up, saying, “Rise!”
God is love. We love that. God is judge. We aren’t crazy about that. Consider, though, that the one who judges is love. Love judges. We don’t quite like the sound of that, do we? Pastor is doing something fishy again, messing with your heads, but beloved, I’m only trying to teach your hearts, and mine, too. Love judges—that doesn’t fit the narrative; that doesn’t sound . . . loving. I’d much rather be judged by the One who is love than by one less than love, other than love. Theologian and pastor John Stott offers helpful reflections: “if [God’s] judging is in love, His loving is also in justice. He who is love is light and fire as well.”[2] Love, light, and fire. Sounds like Pentecost. Love discriminates, not according to injustice, but according to the justice of love and the holiness of God. Love desires the very best for the beloved: this is one another love—my good and blessing woven into your good and blessing, and yours into mine as, together, we heartily strive to form our lives according to the holiness of God. Love is in Spirit and Truth. Ours is Pentecost love—light, fire, holiness.
The justice of love does not bless sin. “Far from condoning sin,” writes Stott, “[God’s] love has found a way to expose [sin] (because He is light) and to consume it (because He is fire) without destroying the sinner, but rather saving him.”[3] The only destruction in which love delights is the destruction of that harming the beloved. Love frees. Love saves. Love frees and saves us from sin; ordinarily, what that means is love frees and saves us from ourselves, the fallenness frothing within every heart.
John tells us, “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” (4:9). We love, as we live, through him. God shows His love, sends His love into this very unloving world always talking about love, so confused about love and loving the confusion. God’s love is for our living: He loves us into life by loving life into us: Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is the proof that God wants us for life, for Himself. He won’t force us to come to Him; on the day of Judgment, we shall all be called before Him.
Love does not force. Love calls. We’re called to show God’s love, imitators of Christ. The best way we can grow into this is by giving one another that love, and to our neighbors. But how? The Spirit will guide us. Seek the Spirit; await the Spirit; heed the Spirit. We are a Pentecost people. The Spirit leads us into the fullness of perfect love, God’s perfect and perfecting love, one another love.
“This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (4:10). All begins with God. Genesis is about many things but nothing so much as love: God’s life-giving love. God makes the first move; God causes the push that pushes us to Him. Our love for God could not exist apart from His original love for us. His love births us, calls us, claims us, saves us, forgives us, strengthens us, blesses us, heals us, leads us to life with Him, eternally. In this is love, that God refuses to let death have us. His love is nowhere clearer, more vivid, more devastatingly wonderful, than on the cross. From this side of eternity love is all messed up; we are all messed up. “Ah,” the world replies, “but we’re making progress!” I want no part of this world’s self-glorifying, supposed “progress.”
God came to us, broke through to us. He showed His love. John also tells us where this love was fully on display: did you pick up on that? It wasn’t Christmas. “Not the incarnation,” writes Stott, “but the atonement is the preeminent manifestation of love.”[4] Jesus taking our place, our well-deserved and perfectly just punishment. God fulfills both justice and love at the cross. We don’t fully understand. We won’t. The Spirit helps us to see the Truth of it.
For humans, part of an experience is visual; we want to be visually impressed—we want our eyes to feel something: that’s part of what it means to have an experience. John tells us, “No one has ever seen God” (4:12). How do we have an experience of God, if no one has ever seen God, if it is not possible for us to see God and live? God is love, John reminds us. By the will of God, according to the purpose of God, God has made His love for us visible. In a sacred way, God made Himself visible for us in Jesus Christ, nowhere moreso than at the cross. Now, it has been given to us to continue to make God visible by His one another love. We do this by the Holy Spirit.
“[I]f we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us” (4:12). Is made. By whom? The Spirit. Stott points out that “God’s love is seen in their love [the one another love of the brothers and sisters] because their love is His love imparted to them by His Spirit [. . . . John’s] words do not mean that when we begin to love, God comes to dwell in us, but the reverse.”[5] Love is not the precondition for God dwelling among us. One another love is the evidence that He is already among us. Where God is, love is: God is love.
If we love one another with one another love—Spirit enabled, empowered—God lives in us by the Spirit: the Truth and Love of God. His loving Spirit of Truth, His Truthful Spirit of Love, completes God’s love in us, together. “This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit” (4:13). God’s love is purifying us, making us holy as He is holy. The completion of His love among us is the perfection of our sanctification. God is transforming our lives through our life together for life together with Him, eternally.
“And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (4:16). Wherever we see God, we see love. Here on earth, we are very confused about love; our times are a time of love confusion, and how the world loves the confusion! And why? Why does the world love this confusion? That bears some thought, beloved, some prayer and contemplation.
God offers us clarity. God is light. God is love. We rely upon the love God has for us for life. We rely upon His love, for in His love we know love with the purifying, clarifying power of holiness. Love is one another love, permanent love that brooks no idol rivals.
What does Pentecost mean for us? Love. Life. Purpose. Stott puts the matter well: “The love that is eternally in God and was historically manifested in Christ is to come to fruition in us.”[6] That’s the meaning of Pentecost: God’s eternal love coming to fruition, bearing fruit, in us, in time. “This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus” (4:17). Progress in love is Christ. In Christ, by the Spirit, we make progress in love. The Spirit comes so that we can. Progress becomes evident in growing love for God, one another, and neighbor. The church is always being urged on, by Christ, by his blood, by the Spirit.
John tells us, “this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome” (5:3). Burdensome. That’s what we want to avoid. That’s what we do not want to put upon anyone: the burdensome burden of obedience, the burden of keeping burdensome commands. Requirements, expectations. They feel like rules, like servitude when we were told it’s all about freedom! Obedience. Purity. Holiness. But as for love? Love has no requirements, and knows no expectations, as we are told in these times, outside the church, and in church. “The true Christian, born from above, believes in the Son of God, loves God and the children of God, and keeps the commandments of God. Each involves the others. Belief, love, and obedience are marks of the new birth.”[7]
O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are God’s judgments and how inscrutable God’s ways! For from God and through God and to God are all things. To God be glory forever. Amen.
[1] William Barclay. Letters of John and Jude. Daily Study Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975. 99.
[2] J. R. W. Stott. Epistles of John. Tyndale NT Commentaries. London: Tyndale, 1964. 160.
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