This Is Love

Ask ten people what love is, and you may get ten different answers. A feeling. A song. A promise. John gives a different answer. Love, he says, is something God did.

John is old now, the last of Jesus' close friends still living, the churches believed. He writes to Christians he calls my little children. Some people have left their fellowship and gone off with new ideas. Others are getting cold toward one another. And so John's letter keeps coming back to one great theme. Believe the truth about Jesus, who came in the flesh. And love one another. The two belong together. In chapter four, he brings them together in a few unforgettable lines.

Beloved, let us love one another, John writes, for love is of God. Love comes from God the way light comes from the sun. Everyone who loves, he says, has been born of God and knows God. And whoever does not love does not know God. Why? Because God is love. Not just that God loves, though he does. Love is who God is, all the way through. So when we love, we are showing the family likeness. We look like our Father.

But how do we know what God's love looks like? John points to Christmas. In this was manifested the love of God toward us, he writes, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. God's love was manifested: it was made visible, something you could see. It looked like a baby born in Bethlehem. It looked like a man who healed and forgave and gave his life. And then John says: herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the sacrifice that takes away our sins. Love did not start with us. It started with him.

So what follows? Beloved, John writes, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. Then he says something surprising. No one has ever seen God. That is true; God is invisible. But if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is made complete in us. In other words, people who cannot see God can see something of him when they see us love each other. At Christmas God's love was made visible in Jesus. Now it is made visible in the way his people love.

There is an old story about John from the scholar Jerome, written around the year 387. Jerome said that when John was very old in Ephesus, he had to be carried into church meetings. He could hardly speak, and all he would say was, little children, love one another. When someone asked why he always said the same thing, he replied: because it is the Lord's command, and if this alone is done, it is enough.

This Is Love. You'll find it in First John chapter four, verses seven to twelve. At Christmas we celebrate the moment God's love became something we could see. So here is a question to carry with you. No one has seen God, but people can see us. What will they learn about God's love by watching you this week?