Loving Others
Sermon Review
10 December 2000
Reading 1John.3:11-20Today I want to talk about being loving and encourage you to love as genuinely and as authentically as God intends that you should – not only because Christians are commanded to, but for our own good as well the good of others.
Being loved & being loving is at the centre of the Christian faith.
John.3:16 ‘God so loved that He gave his only begotten Son…’ Like Father, like son & daughter, is the argument of the Scriptures, with that likeness being played out primarily by loving 1John.4:8. In fact this Scriptures makes clear that ‘no love = no God’. When a person is born again through faith in Christ, God’s love is ‘poured’ into his or her heart Rom.5:5. This is not mere energy or capability, but the very presence of God the Father & Christ the Son (John.14:23) who are essentially ‘loving’ 1John.4:8. God’s intention is that His presence breaks the loneliness and seclusion of self-interest and self- preoccupation through His love for us, and through our loving Him and others eg ‘Love the Lord your God…’ Matt.22:37-3. This being loved, and being loving, is God’s way of progressively breaking the stranglehold of loneliness in the human heart.
What are the characteristics of the Love John is thinking about?
- Sacrificial – it gives at the expense of oneself for the benefit of others v.16
- Practical – it is quick to share material or relevant help, not just empathy v.18
- Compassionate – it is not passionless, but springs from personal compassion and concern for others v.17
So, being deeply, sacrificially, practically, and compassionately loving is at the heart of the Christian faith
What are some of the benefits that John highlights being loving brings?
Loving verifies the authenticity of a Christian’s profession of faith v.14. Loving provides personal assurance of our own faith, reassures us of the reality of other people’s faith as well, and provides personal assurance for ourselves in the presence of God v.19,20
What are some other benefits of being loving?:
- One’s own healing. Loving others requires us dealing with those things which poison and kill us. The ‘log’ in our own eyes, our resentments, envies, grudges, prejudices, and undue fascination with our own pain with - allowing the loving presence of God to bring healing, engage in reconstruction, transforming our inner life, character, and capacity for emotional breadth, depth, and health. When you pick up an apple with a worm hole in it, you are inclined to think that a worm crawled to the surface of the apple, liked it, and bored the hole from the outside. But this is not generally the case. Rather a worm lays an egg in an apple blossom and the egg is hatched in the core of the apple. The hole that you see indicates that the worm has bored its way out from within. All our best intentions to love are so often flawed due to the worms of self-interest that bore their way to the surface – God wants to deal with the worms within!
- Being truly loving brings us out of ourselves. It gets us caught up in others lives, problems, pressures, joys, happiness and pleasures. It helps get perspective on our own problems! We need a bigger life than just our own, or we will die in the stagnant narrow confines of our own self-preoccupation. As Jesus says, if we keep our life to ourselves, we will lose it; if we lose our lives for His sake, we will find it Matt.16:25. Remember the sadness of Lazarus’ life, and it’s end.
- Being truly loving requires growing appreciation of the value of others. It is not only true that the value we place on ourselves will be reflected in our dealing with others, but it is equally true that the value we place on others will be reflected in how much we value ourselves. Being loving increases the sense of our own significance, playing a role in improving our own mental and spiritual health. Being loving helps us become real – it helps us find the courage to drop our masks as we find the impediment that they are to our own growth, and appreciate ourselves far more than before. Loving stops us being nothing more than unrealised potential instead it helps make our potential actual.
- Loving others makes it possible to love God 1John 4:20. God is both invisible and has everything, so how can we show our love to him? It is not possible to love him directly, but it is possible to love him indirectly through loving others eg. Matt.25:34-40. A heart that cannot be loving towards others is not capable of loving God. It is cold, selfish, mean and pygmy-like in its essence. It seems that our experience of loving others makes it possible to actually love God.
Revealing the real God
God is love, therefore our attitudes and actions put flesh & blood on the bones of the gospel. If we are not truly loving, we not only misrepresent God, but we fashion the flesh and blood of anything from a Frankenstein to cold, clinical Scientist upon the bones of the gospel, causing people to flee from him rather than flock to him. Whereas, when we are genuinely loving we communicate what God is really like, and in doing so, we stimulate hope, enabling people to move from the security of what they know to the unknown – like Christ to the cross.
His anticipation and expectation enabled Him to move from anonymity to notability, from obscurity to clarity, from the cradle to the cross because he believed he was secure in the hands of God the Father. In asking people to come to Christ, we are asking them to move from the known to the unknown – to do so they need to have hope; we need to give them every encouragement to have that hope by loving them as God does.
Conclusion:
Many things can stop us loving – for Cain it was envy and resentment. What stops you from loving? Whatever it is, the unwillingness to be real and genuine with God, others, and ourselves, is the most universal and damaging. Consider the effect of not being real enough to be genuinely loving:
- You cast doubts over the genuineness of your relationship with Christ at worst. At best you demonstrate the state of disrepair that your current relationship with Christ is in.
- It means you have to find alternative ways of finding personal assurance in the presence of God. What will they be?
- You eliminate from your life one of God’s major means of changing, transforming and healing you within. You will be at the ongoing mercy of the narrowing, suffocating and hardening effect of your own resentments, anger, pain, and disobedience. You will build your own shrinking prison; your own solitary confinement.
- Worst of all, you will misrepresent God and cause people to turn away from Him, instead of towards Him.
Loving others sacrificially, practically, and compassionately is at the heart of our own salvation, as it is also at the heart of the salvation of others. Our hearts are essentially self loving and self interested – God is opposed to that for it is harmful to ourselves. His love has been shed abroad in our hearts not merely so we respond in love to him, but so we also truly love others. We need to, for our sake as much as for the sake of others.
To love others is to really love yourself. Or to put it another way – if you love yourself, you will work hard and seek grace to genuinely love others.
Blessings