By This

 

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Easter 4B

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton

1 John 3:16-24

Theme: Making the Love of God real

 

¹⁶We know love by this: that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. ¹⁷How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? ¹⁸Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. ¹⁹And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him ²⁰whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. ²¹Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God; ²²and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.

²³And this is his commandment, that we should ⁽¹⁾ believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and ⁽²⁾ love one another, just as he has commanded us. ²⁴All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.

 

We continue in the first epistle of John this morning.  Picking up just a few verses down from where we left off last week.  I’m not sure why the folks who came up with the lectionary readings skipped verses 8 through 15 to bring us to today’s passage, but there you have it.  I started to skip the suggested reading and pick up in the very next set of verses for today’s message, but to be honest, John makes it pretty sticky business to go from where we left off last week to using some pretty absolutist language in regards to the idea of whether a believer can sin or not.  It’s not that I don’t want us to wrestle with that particular issue, it’s just that things being what they are in our life as a family and as a congregation, that question is something we can – and will – wrestle with at another time. 

 

Jim is a friend of mine.  He is a few years older than I am, he works in real estate, has a wife, a son, and an ex-wife and I believe two grown children from an earlier marriage.  Jim became a follower of Jesus late in life, within the last ten years.  He was raised in the church, his mother was a faithful member, so he was familiar with the terminology and with the vagaries and faults of people who gather together and call themselves a church.  I vaguely remember the day he made his public profession of faith.  I remember more vividly the day he was baptized. 

 

Our church held Sunday evening services, which were dedicated to more of a straightforward Bible Study time than a full-blown worship service.  I don’t remember the exact context of the question, but I remember our Pastor put him on the spot by asking Jim what was different for him now that he made his decision to follow Jesus.  He hesitated for a few seconds, and then answered:  “The way I treat people – the way I feel about them, act towards them, think about them.  Before, I used to be pretty ugly to people.  I don’t do that any more.” 

 

In an otherwise unremarkable testimony – and I only mean that in the sense that there was no thunder and lightning or awesome miracle that prompted Jim’s decision, his was one of those quiet “now is the time” moments when a lifetime of seed planting finally took root in his heart.  The statement isn’t really all that remarkable in and of itself, is it?  ‘I treat people different’ I’m sure it would speak volumes if I had known Jim better BEFORE he became a follower of Jesus.

 

What made it stand out in my memory was the honesty and simplicity of it.  He didn’t couch it in standard American Christianese.  He didn’t go for the clichéd answers that DO apply, but which have become virtually meaningless from overuse … or worse, from being applied in situations where the facts belie the reality of a life UNchanged.            

 

As I got to know Jim better – we lead the men’s group at our church for a couple of years – I came to appreciate that about him.  That he didn’t use the familiar language that we as church people tend to find useful.  If we are talking within the community, there ARE phrases that we can use to communicate a host of things that we would otherwise be spelling out.  Phrases like ‘backsliding’ or ‘moral sin’ or ‘church split’. 

 

Jim is as open and honest as he can be.  When he talks to you, he’s sincerely interested in what your answers are – he genuinely cares for you as a person.  He’s not without faults; he has a temper, which he can sometimes struggle to control, and sometimes you can actually watch as he tries to bite his tongue, but he acknowledges those faults and shortcomings, and laughs at himself and carries on with the business of the kingdom.  He rarely lets that get him down. 

 

So when I read this morning’s passage, Jim came to mind.  He loves God because God first loved him, he loves his church, and he doesn’t judge anyone.  He is one of the most welcoming people I know. 

 

This part of what John is saying is directed … sort of like an internal memo, if you will, to the believers in the churches in western Turkey and eastern Greece, as we mentioned a couple of weeks ago.  There are some basic but profound truths that John is both instructing his children in the faith in and at the same time reminding them of.

 

He opens the argument by stating the foundation of Agape love: 

 

¹⁶We know love by this: that he laid down his life for us

 

And he follows that statement immediately with … the corollary to the proof offered in that first statement:        

 

– and we ought to lay down our lives for one another

 

Notice that he is using the first person plural – us and we.  He’s talking about – and to – the fellowship of believers here, not necessarily how we should treat the world, but that will come to an even higher test.  Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.  John the beloved disciple remembered what he had heard come from the mouth of Jesus, and it had marked him for life.

 

But what he is addressing here is the way believers should treat each other.  It stands to reason, if we say we love each other, and don’t show that by the way we act and speak towards each other WITHIN the body of Christ, then our efforts to present to the world a different way of being and of doing life – through the life of Christ – is wasted time and useless in the extreme.

 

John’s question following the statement is terribly uncomfortable for those of us who live in as wealthy a society as we do:

 

¹⁷How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? 

 

I heard on the radio earlier this week a talk-show host take a call from a small business owner who was experiencing what so many across our country are living through – the slowdown in his business, and he was telling about the fact that he felt an obligation to his employees to keep them employed, to keep them working, in the hope that things would turn around soon.  He still had to cut costs in order to keep everyone on, so he chose to cut his own salary – apparently by a substantial amount, because what resulted was that for the first time in his life he was looking at not being able to cover his mortgage payment.  He had been in contact with what seemed to be a legitimate mortgage assistance company that took the money that he would normally have paid his mortgage with, in the hopes that they would renegotiate his terms with the mortgage lender, and in the end kept his money but were unable to renegotiate his terms.  The man kept coming back to the fact that he didn’t want to lay anyone off.  The talk show host’s response was, unfortunately, predictable:  “put yourself first, take care of yourself first.”  I listened to him say the words and was struck by how selfish they sounded, how ‘of the world’ they were, and I was disheartened, saddened in a profound way. 

 

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton? 

 

I hope it means that we take to heart the fact that our way of being, our way of thinking, our way of reacting and responding to a given crisis would be not to think of ourselves first, but second, or third, or last – that we would truly practice this Agape type of love – that self-sacrificing self-less love that seeks out the needs of others before thinking of one’s self.  We – the kids and Leslie and I – have been beneficiaries of that selfless love in these last couple of weeks while Leslie was gone in sitting down to meals in the evening that we didn’t have to worry about preparing, because they were lovingly prepared or provided for us.  There is something incredibly moving that is experienced when you receive a gift like that – so practical, so warm, so perfectly symbolic of what it means to belong to a body of believers who do love each other in truth and in deed, not simply in words and thoughts. 

 

In the same breath, I would challenge us all to look into our hearts to see if there is, as the psalmist wrote, any iniquity in us, and that we would allow it to be exposed for what it is and get rid of it in exchange for the pure love of Jesus that can so transform our souls as to make us new again.     

 

Let’s pray.