For the second week in a row, we have had problems with the audio in our stream. Other mics picked up my voice, so you can hear the sermon, but you will have to turn up the volume – sorry! Alternately, you can read the sermon ms. below. It will not track perfectly with what I actually said, but all the important stuff is there.

At Christmastime, we celebrate God’s love, which he expressed to us through the gift of his Son. But God expressed that love to us at Christmas so that we could experience and express it all year long.

1 John 4:7-16: “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

“Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.”

Verse 7: “Dear friends, let us love one another…” or it could be translated, we should love one another, “for” – here’s the reason – “love comes from God.” It is the best of his gifts. When we think of God’s gifts, we usually think of the gifts God gives to us, but the Apostle John was also thinking of the gift God gives through us: love. God enjoys giving his love through others: it allows him to get more people involved—and God loves a party!

It is possible for you to miss out on God’s gift in one of two ways. First, you can miss out because you’re so focused on his gift to you that you don’t recognize when he wants to give through you. And second, you can miss God’s gift to you because he sends it through me, and you fail to recognize that it is his gift.

For example, today, it is my privilege to be the person through whom God delivers a gift to you: his word. But because it comes through an ordinary guy like me, you might not recognize it as his gift. Getting to deliver one of God’s gifts of love does not make a person special, but it does make a person blessed. And receiving such a gift as from God also makes a person blessed.

Still verse 7: “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.” Now it’s not everyone who does a loving thing that knows God, but everyone who is loving – the word is really a present participle, which signifies ongoing action. The love John is talking about is more than a one-time act of affection or sympathy. Some people are affectionate or sympathetic because of their personality or the way they were raised, and that is a tremendous advantage; but it is not what John has in mind. The love he is talking about is more than affection, or sympathy, or desire.

Follow John’s line of reasoning: We should love because (1) love comes from God and because (2) we come from God (or as he puts it, we have been born of God). A very wooden translation from the original language goes like this: “Love from God is and the one loving from God has been born.” John is thinking of people whom God has brought to new life through faith in Jesus Christ. Such people (spiritually speaking) are born with the love gene. It is their nature to love. They may not be in touch with their true nature, and things can and do get in the way of that nature, but people who share God’s life share God’s love.

The way this sentence begins emphasizes that fact. In the original language, “Dear friends” is simply “beloved.” It is the beloved person who can be the loving person. The person who is loved by God can love like God because he shares God’s love. Loving each other is enormously important, but it is always secondary to, and contingent upon, receiving love from God. If we are not receiving love from God, loving others will always be an imposition, a duty, and unreachable ideal.

Your ability to love others – spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends, friend-friends, strangers, enemies, and even God himself – is dependent upon your ability to receive love from God. Do you know that God loves you, not just in the abstract as biblical datum, but in your experience? I was a pastor for some time before that truth finally traveled from my head to my heart: God loves me. It was a revelation from God’s Spirit, and it makes a huge difference.

Now look at verse 8: “Whoever does not love” (again, it is a present participle: the one not loving) “does not know God, because God is love.” You can’t know a person, including God, merely by studying him. To really know a person, you need to see what he sees, sense what he feels, and esteem what he values.

If you really want to know a guy who is all about fishing, you need to fish. You need to know what it’s like to be on a wilderness lake as the sun is coming up and a foggy mist rises from water that is warmer than air. You need to know that the fisherman is a treasure hunter and feel the excitement of believing that buried treasure lies at the end of the next cast. You need to experience the fisherman’s aesthetic pleasure in seeing a light rain transform a lake’s glassy surface into an intricate lace pattern.

You will not know the fisherman through gene mapping. You will not know him because you read his credit report. You will not know him by learning his job title at the factory or at the office. To borrow John’s language: “Whoever does not fish cannot know the fisherman, because the fisherman is fish.”

I know that’s a stretch, but it puts us on the right track. You want to know – really know – the skydiver? Jump out of an airplane. You want to know – really know – the mother? Have a baby. You want to know – really know – the investor? Sell you house and cars and put the money into the stock market. Do you want to know – really know – God? There is only one way: You must love. You cannot stand on the outside of love – protecting and defending yourself – and ever know God. He lives in a different world. His mind works in a different way. He values different things.

You may say, “But I do know God. He takes care of me. He provides for my needs.” But because he cares for you does not mean that you know him in any way more meaningful than the golden retriever knows the owner who feeds him. But what if the golden retriever could change, could grow, could begin to understand his owner’s concerns, longings, hopes, pleasures? But for that he would need a different kind of life.

It is the same with us. We need a different kind of life, one that changes us, opens us up to new realities that we could not know before. We need God’s kind of life: not biological but spiritual; not temporal but eternal. That is the kind of life that God shares with those who believe in his Son. And the heartbeat of that life is love. Without that kind life, that kind of love, you cannot know that kind of God, the God who is love.

Now, it is true that God is love, but don’t turn that around and say that “Love is God.” Turn love into a god, and it will become a demon that will terrorize you. But that is precisely what western culture has done: It has deified what it calls love – desire – and that love has been our demon. But exalt the Lord as God, and love will be your delight.

Here’s the point: we don’t get to define love. God does. But when he defines love, he doesn’t spell it out in ink in a dictionary; he spells it out in blood on a cross. Look at verses 9-10: “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world” (that’s Christmas) “that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (That’s Good Friday.)

God doesn’t define love in terms of affection or desire but in terms of giving. Love does not mean “never having to say you’re sorry”—one of the silliest lines ever written. Loves means giving yourself to meet another’s need.

And are we ever needy! John describes that need in terms of sin – the thing that separates us both from God and from the person we hope to become. It’s killing us. Sin has multiple stems – lust, greed, envy, anger, pride, gluttony – and a million branches, but only one root: the dogged determination to be one’s own god. Sin is not simply a moral violation; it is rebellion; and the sinner is a rebel.

And we are trapped in our rebellion; stuck in our sin. It is the primary human disorder, a spiritual cancer that consumes us from the inside, and we cannot do a thing about it. We cannot cure ourselves. Only God can do that, but sin has made us allergic to God—the only one who can help us.

That is why God became flesh and dwelled among us. It is why God gave his only begotten Son, as the Bible’s most famous verse puts it, so that we would not perish but have everlasting life. Love is all about giving: giving oneself to meet another’s need. That is what happened at Bethlehem, which we celebrate at Christmas. That is what happened at Calvary, which we celebrate on Good Friday. That is what happened in Jerusalem, which we celebrate on Pentecost.

But John wants us to do more than celebrate. He wants us, verse 11, to imitate: to give ourselves – not just our advice or our money or our time, but ourselves – to one another. I can give money without giving myself, but money without love is a hand-out. I can give advice without giving myself, but advice without love is interference. Loyalty without love is servitude. Righteousness without love is legalism. St. Paul captured this perfectly when he wrote, “If I give all I possess to the poor … but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:3). True love differs from lust and affection, but also from philanthropy and patronage because love gives itself, not just its resources. And that is exactly what God did in Christ.

But how can anyone give himself? If he does that, won’t he lose himself? That’s what we fear. And the plain truth is, I can’t give myself away any more than I can pull myself up by my own bootstraps. The only way for me to give myself to someone else is for someone else to give himself to me. I need to receive another’s life before I can give my own away.

And that describes perfectly the dynamic of Christian love. God loves me, I love you, you love someone else; but it all starts with God, comes from God, and is God giving himself away – principally through his Son, and then through you and me. That’s why Jesus told his disciples, “Freely you have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8).

We are afraid to give ourselves away, afraid that we will lose ourselves. But we needn’t be. My “self” is not some static reality that I might foolishly give away a little at a time until there is none left. My true self come to me from God, which is why Paul can say that our life is hidden with Christ in God, and tells us that we are even now seated at the right hand of God in the heavenly places. My true self is released to me as I dare to trust God and give myself away.

Jesus told us this again and again, in a variety of ways: “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit” (John 12:24). “Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Luke 17:33). “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:25). We find our true self in giving ourselves away; that is, we find ourselves when we love.

Look at verse 12, and see how this works: “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete {or, as the King James has it, is perfected} in us.”

Here is one of the most unexpected things in this entire letter: God’s love is made complete or is perfected when we love each other. Does that mean God’s love incomplete – imperfect – when we don’t love each other? Think of it this way. Running through the true Church, which is comprised of all those who have faith in God’s Son Jesus, is a gigantic circuit that transverses time and space, like electrical wiring running through a house—or, better yet, a temple. God is constructing a vast, living temple (made out of us) where he can be seen, known, and loved, but the construction phase won’t be complete until all of his people are conductors of his love.

Right now, if one of us fails to love, there is an open circuit, a broken connection. But when the circuit is completed and we are confirmed in love, the Church of his love will light up the universe like noonday, and God will become visible in his beauty and glory. This is why John says, “no one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” If we love each other the light of love shines and God is revealed. No amount of good preaching, exciting programming, or professional-quality music can ever make up for love.

God made fish for water. He formed them so that they could move easily in water, gave them gills so that they could draw in oxygen from water. A fish out of water loses itself, its fishness. It can only be itself in water. Without water, it can only die.

Suppose your tropical fish grew tired of its glass prison cell. One day, it was able to jump out of the aquarium onto your living room floor. Here, it was finally “free.” And here, it quickly died, because fish are made for water.

If a fish can only be itself in water, what is the element in which a human can truly be himself or herself? To put the question differently, what is it we were made for? The Anglican scholar John Stott answered that question this way: “… according to Scripture the answer is love. Human beings are made for love because God is love. When he created us in his own image, he gave us the capacity to love and to be loved. So, human beings find their destiny in loving God and in loving their neighbors.”[1] And not only do they find their destiny; they find themselves, as God destined them to be.

Are you ready to find yourself? Are you ready to become part of the circuit that lit the night sky over Bethlehem, that illuminates God with the light of love? The way to become part of that circuit is to confess (the word acknowledges in verse 15 is the ordinary Greek word for confesses) Jesus. Acknowledge his rule, receive his forgiveness, sign up to be an instrument of his love.

Then the God who is love will live in you and you will find your life – the life you’ve always wanted – in him. But that life only flows into us as it is able to flow through us in love. So let me close where we began: “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.”

[1] John Stott, “Freedom,” Preaching Today, Tape No. 102.