The Resurrected Life, Part Four...

Sermon on 1 John 4:7-21

This Resurrected Life that we have been looking at over the course of the past few weeks during the Easter Season can be a little messy. That is part and parcel to the working of God. You take something dead, that has been in a tomb and raise it, well it will stink, can be dirty. Coming out of the grave would do that. Being someone raised up to newness, this new life, so we have to muddle around for a while trying to get our bearings and that is where we are.
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We saw that the Resurrected Life, one who has died and been raised in Jesus (that is a Christian), is one who is called into relationship. Called from darkness to light where we have koinonia with God. Fellowship like a marriage that makes us one. We saw that before we were orphans, but now we are called children by God. His children. Sons, because of his Son Jesus. We are also those called to live as Christ, which means we die. We, all of our desires and wants of things that take the place of Jesus, die so that we might live in him and love as he loves. Because we wanted to know what love is, and it is Jesus.

This morning, again, we have love as our theme. But in a different way. Last week it was laid out as the image of love. What it looks like. Now we are presented with love as where it is, how we can do it, and why.

1 John 4:7-8 – Beloved let us love one another. Why? Because love is from God.

• It is almost as though John is telling us – Loved one’s, desire God. More than all things. If love is from God, if that is where it originates then our real desire is for God. Not just for love for love’s sake.
• Why? Because, John says, to love our brothers and sisters is a sign of the new birth. For love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. Do you get that? It is this call to love, begging us to love, so that we might show ourselves to have been buried and raised in Jesus. Begging for the new birth because we know we need it. A setting a part of our hearts for love as a way of knowing God.
• Danger** - not loving means not knowing God. Not loving one another, means there is an absence of knowing God and what he has done. Not loving one another means a lack of knowledge of Christ and the cross. The price that has been paid.
• The struggle is that as Christians, as Lutherans, we have to beg God because of how we read Paul and Ephesians 2 – He says that we were dead in our trespasses and sins. Holding onto the judgements, the desires and decisions that show us to still be clinging to the darkness. Which is why Jesus came. Coming for the fact that we still see people as black and white, rich and poor, American or not.

1 John 4:9-11 - What is this love John is taking about? Last week it was painted as the crucified Jesus, this week we expand the definition to something more. Still attached to the cross.

• We hear love and what is it we think of? Hugs and kisses? Friends? Kids? Pets? Wife/Husband? Boyfriend/Girlfriend? Love for us is tied to people we like. Tied to emotions and passions. Here, this love God has is tied to judgement. A decision made.
• God sending his one and only son into the world so that what? We might live through him. Sending his only son for one purpose, to bring life into a world of death, and he was so confident that Jesus would do his job, he sent him knowing he would die. Would you send someone on a mission that you knew death was going to be the result? Sacrifice one for the good of the many? Well yeah, as long as it is not me. Yet that was the scope of God’s decision concerning you.
• John elaborates by saying that God’s love is meant for the unlovable. The non-lovers.
• Paul says it this way in Romans 5:8 - But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
• Choosing to die for those who didn’t want anything to do with him. Not a love of passion or affection. More than that. How can something be more than that? Loving the ones who hate him. Loving us while we have no time for him.
• At-One-Ment – John uses a word here, hilasmos, propitiation, or atoning sacrifice. In the Psalms it is used as a picture of the cutting of the bonds brought on us, of actual forgiveness, tied to the reparing of a relationship. In Leviticus it is connected to the Day of Atonement in which a sacrifice on a particular day of the year would take place by the priest to atone for the sins of the people. The job of the priest. A fellow sinner amending things.

Notice though here in 1 John:

• God is the initiator of a repairing of a relationship with no reparations on the part of the other party. God sending his only son as the atoning sacrifice.
• This initiating work makes the Prodigal Son parable seem obsolete. In the Prodigal Son, the Son decides to go back to the Father after wanting him dead, and the Father sees him coming and runs to him. Here the Father is painted by John as the one going to the son and bringing him out of the mire.
• The calling for us – if we have been loved like this, we ought to love in the same way. The struggle is seeing here the love of God so immense that love becomes its fruit in you.
• Luke 7:36-50 – Woman who loved much is forgiven much. How big is our Jesus and his love for us? How many of our sins have been forgiven? ​

1 John 4:12-16 – the amazing thing is to be called to this love even though we have never seen the Father. Never seen God but know of him through the cross. Through this love.

• And it is this love that becomes our completion. As though we are not complete without God’s love made manifest in us because of Jesus’ death for you.
• Like I said last week, this abiding work of both us and God being evidenced in our lives. Being evidenced by the Spirit at work in you, as John says here. The evidence of your love is the Spirit given to you.
• The Spirit giving you eyes to see that you might testify to God’s saving and loving work upon you.
• The Spirit giving you a voice to confess Christ as God’s Son who actually accomplished something for you, so that the work of the Spirit in you, sealed upon you at baptism, leads to this desire for communion because we know ourselves to be in debt to the Creator because of his love. Because if Christ is God’s Son, and he has made you children, he has given you a place in the family. A family that we are now called upon to love because how can we not love someone whom our Lord bled and died for? How can we ever think they are not worth it? More so, How can you ever think you are not worth it because of Jesus and his love for you? Apply this to the disagreements we have in our current political situation.
• Verse 16 – One of the greatest interplays of believer and God. Why?
• We have come to know God’s love for us, because God is love. So the more we know God, the more we know his love. The more we know his love the more we know God, we then remain in love, we remain in God, but most importantly God remains in us. In you.

1 John 4:17-19 – All our love is tied to his love and has to be.

• Last week I said to you that our love is imperfect and incomplete. His is not.
• Because his love is complete, is fulfilled, is final, we have confidence before God How? Our love is complete because it rests solely in God alone.
• No fear, why? It’s not our love but his doing the work. God abiding and we abide in him.
• The one who fears the day of judgement is one who needs to be told of this Jesus whose love casts out fear because he loves when we can’t.
• Because our love cannot exist for one another, for our fellow saints, without knowing that we only love because of his saving work.
• A deciding love – a stick-to-it love – never fading love

Lt. Christie Plackis – is an Army diver.

• Woman, small, seen as weak, frail, nothing
• Joins army in ROTC in college, hears about diving, wants it because she is told she can’t.
• She was made for it – 8 yrs old swimming, lifeguarding, etc.
• She gets to her Basic Officer Leader Course and she wants to know everything about it but she was told she was too small and weak.
• Her response – There were a lot of haters. I had to step back and remind myself that they don’t even know me. It just fueled the fire to train harder. It made the fire even bigger. It made me angry but determined, it motivated me.
• She spends her free time in the pool and training her body physically, and mentally.
• She said PT was fun but the biggest morale-killer – 500 pushups and 100 sit-ups. Yeah. That would be hard.
• She wouldn’t stop because it was what she wanted. To the point that the guys wouldn’t quit because they thought, if she can do it, I can too.

2 things of note with this story –
1.       The life of the Christian, this Resurrected Life is not a sit still faith, although that is part of it. It is an active training and working. Loving others comes through being drawn near to God. Communion with him breeds love for those he has loved.
2.       This love we learn of is the kind of love Christie wanted for diving. Told she couldn’t, she did it with all her might. God does that same thing for us. He is unrelenting. I ask God “Why do you love me.” He says, “Because I can.” We get worked over by him to do the same for one another. Why should I love the unlovable? Because I can.

Never forget that I love first and foremost, ONLY because HE first loved me.
​TW