All You Need is Love - Sermon

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE
1 John 4:7 – 21

Introduction:

A word that has never gone out of style is the word love. Even when Tina Turner, in her song, “What's Love Got To Do With It?” said that love is nothing more than a “second-hand emotion”, we still see love as a widely discussed topic of books and songs.

Two weeks ago, as I was preparing for this message, I decided to visit a website called amazon.com, a site where you can find new and second-hand books, compact discs and many other stuff. I went to the search portion and typed in the word love and I found 885,661 entries for books while for the phrase love songs I found 10,008 compact discs on their catalogue. I didn't even consider checking out the number of songs that have the word love in it, which would easily number in the hundreds of thousands if not in the millions. Some of the song titles are very familiar such as Tina Turner's “What's Love Got To Do With It?”, Nat King Cole's “Love is a Many Splendored Thing” and The Beatles' “All You Need is Love”.

While love is a common word, it is often misunderstood and abused to the point that it is cheapened. Furthermore, the way many people define the word has limited it to nothing more than a feeling or an emotion that one feels as well as the physical attraction involved. We also use the word to describe how we feel for a variety of objects. Normally, we would use the word when we describe how we would feel towards the people closest to us such as a spouse or our parents; however, we also use the word when we talk about food, sports and sports teams, hobbies and automobiles like when we say, “I love pizza” or “I love playing basketball” when what we actually mean is that we enjoy eating pizza or we enjoy playing basketball.

When one checks out the Bible, he will find that the word love occurs a lot of times. In fact, according to a Bible software that does word count, using the New International Version Bible, the word occurs 508 times in both the OT and the NT while the command to “love one another” occurs 10 times, all in the NT! In our Scripture text this morning, the word occurs 27 times while the phrase “love one another” occurs 3 times. Just from our passage we know that love is important, a theme that John keeps repeating throughout this book as well as in his other writings, but what kind of love was John writing about? Was it the love that the world sings and writes about? A love that is concerned with feelings and emotions or is this love something much deeper than that? Also, as I mentioned just a moment ago, the phrase “love one another” appears 3 times in the passage. Why do we need to love one another? What should be our motivation for loving one another? These will be the questions we will tackle in our study of this wonderful passage in 1 John 4.

Check Out The Word:

The unfortunate thing about the English language is that it only has the word love while in the Greek language, there are actually four words that are translated as love in the English language, of which three are very familiar for many among us here. If you have been in church for quite some time and have heard tons of sermons, you probably know what these words are. The first Greek word is eros, which means physical intimacy and attraction. This is where we get the word erotic. The word does not seem to appear in the Greek New Testament but the idea is implied often such as the concept of lust which is prohibited in the Bible or when the Book of Hebrews tells us that the marriage bed must be kept sacred which is deemed as a good thing. This word would most likely be the one often implied by the songs we listen to and the literature that we read today, except that it is almost always in the negative use of the word.

A second Greek word translated as love is the word phileo. which is the love that is common among friends and can even be used when referring to a boy-girl relationship. This form of love is all about showing affection for another person, of two people having what is known as a kindred spirit. You feel love for the other person because of how they treat you and how you both share the same interest . In other words, phileo is reciprocal in nature. The downside of this type of love is that, since it is conditional, we can choose to withhold affection to another person until such time that they conform to a certain standard or norm that we expect them to keep. This word occurs a few times in the New Testament, most prominent being the conversation between Jesus and Peter in John 21 and the name of a particular city in ancient times called Philadelphia or the city of Brotherly Love.

The third Greek word for love is storge and this word is used mostly or exclusively when referring to the relationship within a family. It is affection for a parent, a child or a sibling. This word is not common knowledge to many and it does not seem to appear at all in the Greek NT, just like the word eros.

Finally, we have the word agape. This is the word that appears all throughout 1 John. It is a love, when applied to God, that is concerned about the welfare of other people, about the willingness to sacrifice for the sake of another. It is a love that is unselfish, unlike eros or phileo or even storge which, at times, are conditional in nature. An important facet of agape love is that it is not an emotional form of love where everything is conditioned on one's feelings but it is a deliberate form of love where a person decides to do something for the other person. When God loves us, he shows it the with concrete action of sacrifice, by sending his Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross for our sins. When God loves, he doesn't wait for us to become lovable before he chooses to love us; instead, he loved us even when we were still sinners. When God loves, he does it out of his own initiative. He doesn't wait for us to show love to him first before he loves us back. It is no wonder that John makes the statement that God is love.

Having gone through a brief word study of the different words that we translate as love and what knowing what particular word is used in today's passage, I would like for us to examine now the motivation or the reason why we, as followers of Christ, should love one another.

Reason # 1: Because God's Very Nature is Love (vv. 8, 16b)

Love is not just one of God's many activities or dealings with humanity, but rather, everything he does is grounded in love. When God created this world, he did it in love. When God rules over us, he rules with love. When God disciplines us, he disciplines out of love for us. When he allows us to go through trials, it is because of his love for us. God's love compelled him to send his son, Jesus Christ, to come to earth to die on the cross for our sins. God's love for us moved him to adopt us as his children and to share with us the joys of eternal life. Everything God does is done in the context of love.

Why do I say that God's very nature should be a motivation for us to love? It is because, if we claim to be his children, to be his sons and daughters, then we are to behave like the father. I am sure that we are aware of the saying, “like father, like son” and what it means is that what the father is like, the son should also be like, or we can say that what we see in the son is a mirror of the father. God is love. His children likewise should exude love, first and foremost, toward the community of believers, for love must be seen in our family relationships, towards our brothers and sisters in the faith.

Reason # 2: God Paid A High Price To Show His Love (vv. 9, 10)

Agape love is not cheap. It is not a love expressed with flowers and chocolates or with flattering language but rather, it is a love expressed through sacrifice. I am sure we are all familiar with the joke about the man who said something like this to his girlfriend: “I will climb the highest mountain and swim the deepest ocean just to get to you.” However, when night time comes and its raining hard outside, the man calls his girlfriend to inform her that he can't go to her house because of the rain. When God loves, he loves us by paying a high price – He sent His only Son to come to earth, to die on the cross for your sins and mine.

For those who are parents here, who among you would be willing to sacrifice your son or your daughter just to save another person? Anyone willing to do that for another person? Most likely, you wouldn't dare do such a thing. Well, God did just that and he sent his son to save people who've rebelled against Him and who have done terrible things to insult him as well as to hurt others. The people who need saving are us, every human being on earth. Do we deserve to be saved? No. Is there anything in us that would make us lovable to God? No. Yet, God chose to do just that. He demonstrated his love for us by sending his son to die for us. He loved us in spite of our sinfulness.

I believe that this is a strong motivation for us to love one another because God paid the ultimate sacrifice just to express his love to us. He sent Jesus to die for people who were his enemies. Loving fellow believers shouldn't be that hard compared to what God did for us. True, there will be believers who behave in manners wherein we may feel that they don't deserve to be loved, but then if God could love them, then we must also love them, remembering that Jesus died for them just as he died for me or for you.

Reason # 3: We Grow in Christian Maturity When We Love (vv. 17, 18)

What is the mark of spiritual maturity? Is it our ability to list down all the books of the Bible by memory? Is it our ability to memorize a lot of Bible verses or even an entire chapter of the Bible? Is it our involvement in various ministries? While we tend to use these as gauges of spiritual maturity, and to a certain extent, they are true for many people, John actually wrote that agape love for one another is the gauge of spiritual maturity.

When we love one another, we are actually growing in our faith. Have we ever thought about that? In verses 17 and 18, we find that the person who sincerely and sacrificially loves his brothers and sisters in the faith will find that they are made perfect in love.
What does it mean to be “made perfect in love”? We must not misconstrue the word perfect to mean that we will become sinless or that we can do no wrong. Rather, the word in the original language is used with the idea of maturity. When we truly love others, what happens is that we mature or we grow spiritually. Why? It is because when we decide or resolve to love others, then we learn to become patient along the way and we learn to be understanding. When we choose to exercise God's love on others, we are choosing to become kind to them. When we choose to love others with God's love, we are choosing to persevere in helping them. So, if we choose to love others, what happens is that we will be exercising many of the virtues listed in Scripture. This explains why we will mature or be made perfect when we love. The believer who refuses to love others with the love of God will find that their spiritual growth is stunted, that their relationship with God and with others strained.

Reason # 4: Loving Others Is Proof Of His Dwelling In Us (vv. 12 – 13, 16)

When we love one another, this is strong proof that God dwells in us. Look carefully at verse 12. John wrote that, although we have not seen God with our eyes, yet if we love one another, God himself lives in us. Then in verse 13, John wrote about the Holy Spirit who has been given to every believer and who dwells within us. It is the Holy Spirit who enables us to love other people. On our own, we will find it hard to love others with the love of God. It will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to forgive those who've wronged us if the Holy Spirit is not there to prompt us and to enable us to demonstrate God's love. However, if we are able to love others and we continue to choose loving others with God's love, then it is compelling proof that God really dwells in you. In Galatians 5, we find the Fruit of the Holy Spirit listed. The list are qualities or virtues that the Holy Spirit enables us to do towards God and others as well as experience within ourselves. The very first on the list is love. If someone who claims to be a believer does not manifest love for his fellow believers, then one would question whether or not that person was a true believer.

I believe that this issue of the Holy Spirit's indwelling was important because the Gnostics were claiming to also have the Spirit of God in them based on their possession of higher, secret knowledge. However, for John, the real proof of someone being a Christian is their profession of Christ as both God and man, and their manifesting of love for others. As the apostle James would put it, faith without works is dead. It is easy to acknowledge Jesus as God and man, but prove your faith by showing love to others; for if we can genuinely love one another, it is evidence that God dwells in us.

Reason # 5: Loving Others Is Proof That We Love God (vv. 19 - 21)

Finally, when we love others, it is proof of our love for God. In verses 19 to 21, John wrote that if we claim to love God but we hate our brothers or those who belong to God just as we belong to God, then we are nothing more than liars. For John, there is a strong connection between loving God and loving one another. You cannot claim to love God and then go about hating your brother. According to a Bible scholar, the word “liar” used in verse 20 has a double sense: a liar is someone who does not speak the truth (in other words, his claims are false); second, his action shows that he has detached himself from the reality of God (the liar's life betrays the being and essence of God). Bible commentator William Barclay wrote, “If God loves us, we are bound to love each other, because it is our destiny to reproduce the life of God in humanity and the life of eternity in time.” Furthermore, he wrote, “The only way to prove that we love God is to love the men whom God loves. The only way to prove that God is within our hearts is to constantly show the love of men within our lives.” God doesn't want us to make empty professions of faith, loyalty and love towards him. He wants us to back our profession with action and the action he requires to prove our love for him is for us to love his people.

Conclusion:

In closing, I would like to simply give everyone a challenge. It is so easy for all of us to say that we love God and that we love our brothers and sisters in the faith; but today we have learned from our passage that love is not just something that we say to another person or to God but it must be demonstrated because that is the nature of agape love. Right now, I want you to look around the people attending this particular service. Now, choose a particular person, someone who you may or may not know very well. It may even be someone who is a stranger to you. Throughout this week, I want you to do something to show your love for that person aside from praying for that person. It may be as simple as getting to know the other person more or maybe you could take that person out for a cup of coffee or for a meal and have meaningful conversations with each other. Maybe the person you're eyeing has a particular need that, maybe, God wants you to meet. Are you up to the challenge? Remember, the proof that we love God is when we love our brothers and sisters in the faith, so let's go and demonstrate love to them starting today.