This morning's scripture verses are taken from John 13, 34 to 35, and 1 John, chapter 4, 7 to 12.
John 13, verse 34. "A new command I give you, love one another. As I have loved you, you must also love one another. By this everyone will know you are my disciples if you love one another." 1 John, chapter 4, verse 7. "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God because God is love.
This is how God showed his love among us. He sent his Son and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love, not that we loved God, that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God loved us so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us." This is the word of the Lord.
Well, good morning church. Good morning church. May the peace of the Lord be with you.
Well, if you're new here this morning, your new guest with us here this morning, welcome to the church. My name is Sam and I'm the pastor here. If you'd like to connect by grabbing a meal or getting coffee together, just kind of getting to know each other a little bit better, I'd be happy to do that, me and my family. Just fill out, just help me by filling out a connect form on the table outside there in the lobby and that will give me the necessary information, email or number to contact you so that we can get connected and get together. If you are just joining us this morning, we have started a brand new series on community about three weeks ago now. Week one, we asked the question, why were we made for community? Week two, we asked what kind of community we were made for and today we are asking what holds the community that God is building and establishing here.
The answer God has for us is not in the programs or the events that we provide here at the church.
It's not even in our shared interests. It is the love that God has poured into us, a very specific and sacrificial kind of love, a love that yearns, that the world yearns for, a love that when the body of Christ participate and practices in it, the world does take notice and it is impossible to ignore. I want to start off with a question for us. Is it hard for us to love people?
Is it hard to love people? If we're honest, the answer is yes and the easiest people to love are the people that we have no relationship with. It is the stranger on the street, it is the person across from us on the bus, it is the person we've never met at work. The people that are closest to us are often the hardest, most difficult people to love. It's our families, it's our friends, it's the people we serve with at church, it can be the person you've been avoiding for months, it can be the person whose personality annoys you, those are usually the people closest to us.
It can be the people we work with and see just about every single day, but it can even be us.
You see, it's easy to point at other people and say, "Yes, that person there, those people there, they are hard to love." But if we're honest this morning, church, we can be difficult to love at times as well. Jesus' command to love sounds easy, we nod when we hear it, yes, but let's be real here this morning. It's awfully difficult to practice and put into action. We notice often the gap between what we know we should do and what we're actually doing. And I know how hard it is personally. I find myself falling short in this area to love. But the solution is not to try harder or to manufacture it. It just doesn't work when we try to do that and it's not sustainable.
What happens is that when we try to do this, when we try harder at it, we get tired and exhausted over time and then we feel really bad, we feel ashamed, we're guilty for not doing what we know we're supposed to. We live in a world today where the word love is often thrown around that it has lost its meaning. What we call love today is often understood as a preference or as whatever makes us feel good. That kind of love is often conditional. We only love as long as the feeling or emotion lasts. And the church is not immune to the way the word love is thrown around. We say we love our community, we say we love each other, we say we love our church. But Jesus' concern is not whether we throw this word around. His concern is whether we are living it out. How are we practicing what it means to love one another here? Unfortunately, our world struggles to find the church practicing Christ-like love because what often they see is not so drastically different from what they see in their own lives or in their own social circles. So here's a question I want us to kind of sit with throughout the morning. What if the problem is that we're trying to produce a love from within ourselves when the kind of love that Jesus is calling us can only be produced by being grounded and immersed in the Father's love? What if the love that Jesus is talking about here is the kind of love to be received and then to give it to others? We cannot give what we have not first or yet received, right? We must have this lived-in experience of God's love before we can pass it on to others or else it just becomes performative. So we want to look at the two passages that Rick read for us here this morning, John 13 and 1 John 4. And we want to look at three things between these two passages. The first is the call to love one another, a new command or a new standard, a new bar.
So John 13 is in the context of Jesus moving towards his crucifixion and death.
We see Jesus's triumphal entry riding on a donkey in John 12 and then he prepares his disciples for his inevitable departure in John 14. And it's within this context between these two chapters that Jesus is eventually rejected by Peter, one of his closest friends, being betrayed by Judas, moving towards his death where Jesus speaks to his disciples about loving each other.
Now this command to love each other was not given at a time in season where everything went well for Jesus. There was nothing comfortable or convenient for this movement towards his inevitable death.
It came from a place of deep pain and an anticipation of a deep suffering and sacrifice.
But can you imagine for a moment offering this command at such a time as this?
Jesus knows that his inevitable and excruciating death is coming and yet he offers this command.
And he doesn't just offer it, he doesn't just tell his disciples to do this, he models it for them.
His love is one of humility as he brings himself, lowers himself like a slave and a servant to minister and wash the filthy and dirty feet of his disciples. The cross is the ultimate expression of love that he was asking his disciples to do for each other. It's not a to-do list.
The command to love one another is essentially and foundational because the death and resurrection of Jesus will inevitably establish a new people, a new community. And that community, also known as the church, is to be held together by this kind of love, the love of Christ through the Spirit of Christ when everything else threatens to fall, to tear the church apart. We see this in the Book of Acts, a series that we're just coming out of, where the love of Christ held the body of Christ together through some very tense and challenging moments and seasons of the early church.
But it didn't just hold the early church together, it also compelled them to carry out Jesus's mission together. Now this command to love one another doesn't make sense apart from the infamous feet washing that Jesus took upon himself to do for his disciples here in John 13.
And so before he begins to give this command to love one another, he sets the example of what form and what shape that love ought to look like. At this time, in the Groko Rehman and Jewish world at the time, foot washing was the responsibility of the lowest ranked slave in the home. There were no roads like the roads that we have today. The roads at the time were made out of dust. People did not wear shoes or socks like we do here this morning. You can imagine just how filthy the feet were walking around everywhere exposed to all kinds of dust and dirty things. So when people arrived at home or at a home, it was necessary to clean their feet before entering the house. It was not the norm to expect or see Jewish leaders or teachers washing their students' feet. This was abnormal.
It was not the norm at the time, which is why Peter, when Jesus begins to wash Peter's foot, he was so outraged when Jesus began to do this.
You see, washing feet was such a demeaning act, and yet here we have Jesus who is now setting a new bar, setting a new standard by stooping down, by coming down and demonstrating what it means to love. It is loving the unlovable, loving those who are undeserved. But can you imagine for a moment holding the feet of the person who is about to betray you? Judas was very much a part of this foot washing process. Jesus washed all of his disciples' feet, not just the ones that are part of his inner circle of friendship. And he leaves no room for misunderstanding with what he's done.
Listen to his explanation. Do you understand what I have done for you?
I have set an example that you should do as I have done for you.
What Jesus is doing is setting a new standard for love. The foot washing is framed as a model for how God's people, the community, the church, is to love one another. Right? Love is framed as inconvenient and uncomfortable, as opposed to how our world often frames it as, well, it feels good. That's what love is. It's uncomfortable. It's inconvenient for both the person doing the washing and the person who receives the washing. We did this a few years ago for one of our Good Friday services. We don't do it every year because it kind of loses its meaning if we did that. But every couple years we do this. And a few years ago we did this for the first time where we created space for our community to wash each other's feet. I remember having a conversation with someone about their experience and they shared that they thought washing the feet would have been harder. But it was actually receiving the feet being washed that was harder.
I thought about that. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. Right? Washing the feet were like, "Oh, so gross. Nasty." Right? But actually allowing yourself to have someone else handle your foot actually is harder. You see, the command to love one another is both in the giving of love and the receiving of it as well. Now, Jesus says that this is a new command. What makes this command new? What makes this command to love new? This commandment to love marks the disciples as the people of this new covenant that Jesus will and has established through His blood and His body.
In the Old Testament, God promised a new covenant with His people in which He would write His law on their hearts. The people of God in this new covenant will be known for their love for one another. And the kind of love is one that is, as I mentioned earlier, sacrificial in nature.
The command and the call to love one another is new and that is based on how Jesus loves.
He says, "Love one another as I have loved you." So how did Jesus love His disciples here in John 13?
He loved His disciples knowing full well what they were like and what lay ahead. He knew that His disciples would leave Him and they would scatter, and yet He loved them still. He loved His disciples by taking the lowest possible posture while serving them. The washing of feet was the most tangible expression and example of what love was going to be like in this new kingdom. He did not ask for love, but He gave it in the form of the most demeaning way possible.
He loved His disciples, all of them, and that included the one person who would betray Him, the one who would eventually sell Him out. Think about that for a moment. How hard it is for us to love someone the way that Christ has modeled for us when we are not on good terms with them.
Our human tendency is to withdraw. It is to avoid that person, and here we have an example of Jesus sacrificially and humbly relating to and serving Judas despite knowing full well what He was planning to do to Him. Church, how can this example of Jesus help form and shape our posture and ability to love others that we may not like or be on good terms with? You see this command to love one another is less about our feelings and more about the decision to act. To our modern day ears and understanding, love is primarily as a feeling. It is an emotion primarily, and I'm not saying that there are no emotions that are involved in love, but when the scriptures talk about love, it is primarily, mainly, understood through the lens of action. The great Christian writer and thinker, Sirus Lewis, says this about love. He says, "Do not waste time bothering whether you quote-unquote love your neighbor. Act as if you did. As soon as we do this, we find one of the great secrets that when you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him or her." Secondly, God is the source of our love. The community that John is writing to here in 1 John chapter 4 has recently experienced a painful split. There was a group of teachers in the community that had rejected the humanity of Jesus. Their theological error had a consequence, a relational and communal consequence. These teachers who were in error claimed to know God while failing to love their brothers and sisters in the church. And this is the situation that John is writing into, which is why he writes, "Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God, but anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love." In other words, we cannot make claims to know God and fail to love people. The two cannot be separated. They are intertwined, which makes this so urgent for John because the community has been taught and has been shaped by false teachers among them who teach that they can separate knowing God from loving people. But John insists that the two are inseparable. It's not possible to separate them.
When you spend time with someone, you become like that person that you spend time with. Has anybody said this to any married couple in this room? They're like, "You guys look alike. You look you guys look the same and you might not look the same when you first dated, but over time you spend so much time together that you begin to look like each other." Has anybody ever said that to you?
They said that to me when we were in Ruby. Sometimes they said, "Are you brothers and sisters?" We were like, "Gross, no, we are not." No, no. If it's true in that sense relationally, then it's true that the more time we spend with someone, like if you spend time with someone who's generous, inevitably that rubs off on you. You begin to become more generous. When you spend lots of time with a person who is kind, the kindness of that person begins to rub off on you. Church, when we spend time with God who is love, eventually he produces his love in us. You're the person who is in relationship with God, spending time in God's presence, receiving God's love, reading God's love story, his promises, being shaped by his loving character. Inevitably, we begin to express and reflect God's love and heart.
The evidence of knowing God is love. A love that is visibly tangible, lived out, directed at other people that God has placed in our path in life. See, John is not rebuking his fellow brothers and sisters. He's not angry with them. He's inviting them to something better. Look what he says in verse 8, 1 John 4, "Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love." This is a direct response, rebuke even, to the false teachers. The teaching that you can know God without loving people is absolutely, completely, 100% false. And what John is saying is that the person whose life is characterized by love has not encountered, sorry, a person whose life is characterized by God has encountered as well the love of God. Loving people is not optional if we have encountered God's love in our lives. We cannot say that we love God and know God relationally and not love the people that God has put in our lives. Now the word love here in 1 John 4, verses 7 to 12, occurs 13 times, 13 across five verses. And every single time John uses this word, it is the word agape. Agape means a sacrificial kind of love. A love that puts the needs of others before our very own. A love where we are compelled to move towards the other person despite the inconveniences that it causes us and the discomfort it causes us. That's what it means to love people as God has loved us.
Years ago I led a short-term mission team that taught English at an orphanage.
This orphanage was not a state-of-the-art facility. It was a basic run-down building that housed kids who were abandoned by their families for whatever reasons. I remember it being really, really hot.
The living conditions weren't what we were used to back home here. We were the farthest away from any sort of comfort or convenience. And at the end of our time there, as we served these orphans, these kids, teaching them English, running Awana games, they're teaching them those games, there was one young boy that came to me and asked me, through an interpreter, asked me this question, why we had come and spent two weeks of our summer when we could have been back home comfortably living out our summers. This young kid. I can tell you that we did not travel all the way to this country, gave up our summers and sacrificed all the things that we wanted to do out of the goodness of our own hearts. We did not do that. The prophet Jeremiah had this to say about our hearts. He says, the human heart is the most deceitful of all things and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?
You see, we didn't serve because our hearts were good. We served and made sacrifices because God is good and because we have experienced God's goodness and God's love in our own lives.
We love God because God first loved us, right? This is what John later says, verse 19, the same chapter.
We had lived in experience because we have that lived in experience of God's sacrificial love for us. What comes from that place is the ability to love others. It's not about trying harder to love others. It's about being grounded in God's love first. And naturally, as we are grounded and rooted in God's love, as we experience the floodgates of God's love, the love of God comes from that space.
We don't need to manufacture that church. We don't need to create that.
The way that we show and love others comes from a place of belovedness.
If we are engaged in reading the promises of God, studying the promises of God, praising God, spending time with God in prayer, but then our relationships at the church are marked by a coldness and a distance to it, then there is something wrong. There's something that's gone amiss because if we have this relational intimacy, which all of those spiritual practices cultivate that, the aim of all of those spiritual practices is to cultivate a deeper love for God, an intimacy and a closeness with God in his heart.
And if we're doing all of those things, but the relational intimacy with God is cold, is missing, then there's something wrong. There's something wrong because love is the evidence of time spent with God.
But that knowing of God is not a factual informational knowing. It's a knowing based on relationship. To know God in relationship is to spend and be with him, to encounter God in his word, in prayer, in silence even, to be shaped and formed by his presence by being with him.
Do you love the people here?
Do you love the people here? Because that is the evidence that we know God and have spent time with him. And if you don't love the people here, the question is not what is wrong with me.
The question then is when was the last time you have spent quality time with God?
Where you sat in his presence, where you've reflected and meditated in his promises, where you have worshiped and praised him for who he is, not just because of what he can do for you.
Slow down and spend time. Our last kind of movement and point here is love that John defines.
John tells us that God is love and now he tells us what that love looks like.
Love is seen and expressed in the cross. Whenever John calls the community to love one another, he is calling for their love to be defined by the cross.
Agape, love is sacrificial. It moves towards other people's needs and it comes at a cost.
Love, as John understood it, was ultimately seen in God sending his own son to die for sins that were not his own. Love acts for the other person's good regardless of what they have done, especially what they've done to us. Listen to what John says in verse 10 of first John 4. This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
See, John speaks into our relationship with God. He speaks the truth about it and the truth and the reality is that God loved us first. We as human beings are the one who has a tendency to walk away from God. We are the sinner, not God. There's a great hymn called "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing." Anyone know this? There's a line, every time we sing this song, I'm reminded of this one line and it says, "Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love." Is that not a truth about us? Not that we loved God, but that God loved us first. But you know what the good news is here, church? It's that God loves us not because we have our lives intact or together. It's not because we loved him first. It's not even because we deserve it. The good news is that God loves sinners, that God loves broken people. He loves us. It is God's nature. It is who God is. God is love.
Then look at the last verse here in verse 12 where John writes, "No one has ever seen God.
But if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us." Now the word that we want to look at in that one verse is the word "telial," which means the word, it's the word complete there, right? And it means to bring to perfection, to maturity. In other words, God's love has an intended arc. He has an intended goal and purpose. The intended purpose of God's love is not that we remain in our holy huddles. It's so that it might be applied and practiced among God's people, the church right here. And a result of practicing in God's community, the body of Christ, it is then carried out into the world in every place that we go, in every space that we inhabit, in every relationship. God's love is not just for the church, it is for the entire world through the church. Have you experienced the love of God this morning, this week?
If so, how will you carry the lived-in experience of God's love in your lives into the places you will inhabit later today? We're not even talking about this coming week, just today after service. The truth here is that when love is lived out and practiced tangibly in the church, as the church, only then will God be made visible. If we love one another, the world will know that we belong to Jesus. The world will know who God is by our love.
John 3, John 3, John 3, John 13 gives us the purpose. Love one another as Christ has loved you.
First John 4 gives us the intended goal and arc, the how we do this. Right? When the body of Christ loves one another, God's love is made perfect. It is we come to a place of maturity, bringing the church as a result, making God visible and making God known.
There's an old song, I don't know if you know it, called They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Love. Does anybody know this one? You kind of can sing it round and round. Yeah.
It simply says this, I mean the lyrics are basically the title of the song. They'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love. Yes, they will know we are Christians by our love.
So let us practice loving each other the way Christ has loved us church. And how can we do that?
If there is one specific person in our community here that God has placed or risen in your hearts to send a text message or start a conversation, getting to know that particular person, maybe grab a meal or coffee together, not because you want something from them, but because you want to get to know that person just a little bit deeper.
But maybe this morning you just struggle. You're just like, I just I'm tired and I'm exhausted.
I'm depleted. Well, my encouragement then to you friend is to go back to God.
Spend time with him in his presence, sit at his feet, because the love that John speaks about in first John four comes from a place of relational intimacy with God. So go to the one whose love be filled by his love and then go and love others as you have been filled and loved by God. Let's pray.
Father, thank you for this morning. I thank you for John 13 and first John four in these verses.
It's obvious that love is the main theme here.
But it's not love in the way that we define love. It's love in how you define it. It's love that crosses lines. It's a love that moves us into inconvenient and uncomfortable spaces.
And you modeled this for us at a time when everything was inconvenient and uncomfortable for you.
You demonstrated how you how much you loved your disciples, even the ones that would go astray.
And so Father, we pray that you would help us to release us from the pressure of having to love, having to manufacture, having to create, having to force ourselves to love others. And really, we simply need to go to you, spend time with you, be present in your promise, in your word, and for you to fill our hearts with your love. And God, I really do believe that when we spend time with you genuinely, that you will fill our hearts with your presence and that you will fill our hearts with your love.
And so help us. We need you. We need your help. We can't do this on our own. We're not meant to.
Help us to do this in community where we have other brothers and sisters to encourage us to understand just how difficult and odd when we share just how much we struggle loving other people. And then to pray for one another, to uphold each other.
As the Holy Spirit come, offer us your presence. Fill us with your power that we might be able to live the way, love the way that you have loved. Thank you for this time and this space. We ask all of these things in Jesus' name. Amen.