God Is Love
I John 4:7-16
What a
night! This is a night like no other
night in the whole year. There is
excitement in the air. There is an anticipation
of special things that will take place this night that will bring joy to
everyone’s heart. I have a question for
you. What is the one word that describes
Christmas? I suppose there could be all
kinds of answers to that question. Some
of the answers would depend on how old you are.
The younger ones might say “presents.”
Some might say, “Music.” Some
might say, “Decorations.” Some might
say, “Family.” Some might say,
“Savior.” Some might say, “Jesus.” After hearing the Epistle lesson from I John
4, I think we might have to conclude that the one word that describes Christmas
is “Love.”
If you listened
carefully to the reading of the Epistle lesson, you probably heard the word
love used sixteen times in those nine verses.
If you count the word “beloved,” then it goes up to eighteen times. Just from that it’s hard to argue against
“love” being the word of the day. The
love that the Apostle John is describing is a love that is very special. It is a love that comes from God. It is a love that knows all about the one
being loved and loves in spite of the sin and rebellion that are a part of our
nature. John describes how that love has
shown itself in several of the verses of our text. For example, in verse 9 he says, “God sent His
only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him.” In verse 10 He says, “In this is love, not
that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son as the
propitiation for our sins.” In verse 16
we hear, “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides
in Him.”
Through God’s
love, we have new life. The old is gone,
the new has come. If you have never
thought about that before, you may wonder how all that works. Apart from God and His love, your life is an
endless search for meaning and purpose.
You seem drawn to satisfying all your human desires but it seems like
you never really reach that level of happiness and fulfillment that you are
looking for. In fact, earthly happiness
always seems to be just out of reach.
You find yourself thinking that there has to be more to life than this
endless quest for self-satisfaction.
Love can be fleeting. It seems to
change with time. It never seems to be
returned in the same way that it is given.
You may begin to wonder what love really means. That almost sounds like a song title and it
probably is because most of the love that you hear in popular songs is a
physical, earthly kind of love that can be very elusive.
But God’s love is
different than the love we generally hear about in popular culture. God’s love is a love of action. It is founded in His nature. God is love.
He loved us so much that in His great compassion for our fallen
condition, He sent His only Son into the world to save us from the consequences
of that fallen condition. In order to do
that, the Son needed to come down to earth to be like one of us. Since the Son was true God from all eternity,
it would take a miraculous birth to make it all happen. God sent the angel Gabriel to a virgin named
Mary, a young girl living in the town of Nazareth
of Galilee .
It seemed like an out-of-the-way place but it was foretold by the
prophets that the Messiah would come from Galilee . There was a slight problem in all of
this. Mary was betrothed to a good man
named Joseph, a local carpenter. They
had not begun their life together as husband and wife and so there were some
questions in his mind when Mary was with child.
Again an angel appeared to him in a dream to explain the whole
situation. The child was the Son of
God. He was also to be born of a human
mother so that He would be true Man. This was necessary so that He could live
under the Law and keep it perfectly.
Because of the
Roman census, Mary and Joseph had to travel to Bethlehem , their ancestral home because they
were from the family of David. It was
there that the child was born in rather unusual circumstances. The census brought crowds of people to even
the small towns like Bethlehem . It is that birth of the child, announced by
angels to simple shepherds, that we celebrate tonight. That birth was all according to God’s
plan. We can say that because the
prophets of old had foretold it, and the specifics were announced by angels,
God’s messengers. The coming of the Son of God was a big thing, even though it
went relatively unnoticed by the rest of the world. Now it is still a big thing but the real
meaning of this celebration is downplayed by the rest of the world.
He also had to be
a true Man so that He could carry out God’s plan for our salvation. Only as true man could He could suffer and
die as the punishment for our sins. Yet
He had to be true God so that suffering and death and resurrection could be the
satisfaction or propitiation for the sins of the whole world. That is real love. That is the love that God demonstrated for
you and for me and for the whole world.
John then adds an
important point as we consider the love that God has shown to us. “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought
to love one another.” As you consider
the tremendous blessing that you have because God took this action on your
behalf, you are moved to show that some kind of love to one another. When I say “the same kind of love.” I mean
that your love for one another should imitate the love that God has shown to
us. That is a love that knows all about
the one who is loved, sins and faults and imperfections, and loves anyway. It is a love that is a giving love. It is a love that expects nothing in
return. It is a love that is unconditional. There are no “ifs” or “whens” or any other
qualifications before that kind of love is shown. That can be really hard sometimes for you
when you are still influenced by your sinful nature but with the power of the
Holy Spirit you can overcome that selfish nature and show that special kind of
love to others. John speaks to that in
verse 13, where he says, “By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us,
because He has given us of His Spirit.”
The Spirit works in us through the Means of Grace. Through the Word and
the Sacraments, we are given the power of the Spirit to show the love that has
first been shown to us.
It is that love
that we celebrate tonight. We do it with
all the joy that is in us. We do it with
special decorations and special worship.
We celebrate the fact that God loved us so much that He sent His Son to
be the Savior of the world. We celebrate
because we have been the recipients of that love and joyfully and confidently
confess our faith in Jesus as our Savior.
John concludes in the last verse of our text: “So we have come to know
and to believe the love that God has for us.
God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in
him.” What a wonderful blessing to know
that in and through Jesus, God abides in us.
He is in us not only when we feel the love in times like this, but also
in the times when our sin weighs us down, in the times when we don’t feel all
that great. He is there because He is
love and His love for us never fails. It
is strong enough to overcome our weakness.
It is strong enough to pull us back when we seem to wandering. It is strong enough to see us to our life’s
end. His love is eternal. It is strong enough to reflect from us to
others as we share the love that we have first received from God. Truly, He showed that love when He sent His
only Son to be your Savior. May your
celebration reflect that love not only tonight be throughout your life. Amen.
Painesville, Ohio
Christmas Eve
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