Love is an easy word to banter about. We receive a gift and we exclaim, “I love it!” We have an exceptionally good meal and we love it. We watch a program and we love it. We love our cars, our stuff, our camp, our home, our vacations, our gardens, our jobs. We easily throw the word love around as if it were a ball being tossed about. And it is not that it is a bad thing. Our English language doesn’t give us too many words with which to describe our emotions particularly when comes to those things we love. If we say we really like something, well it just doesn’t have the same ring to it as when we say we love something.

So, when it comes to God it is easy to water down God’s love to that of human emotion and human love. When we hear that “God is love.” It just doesn’t have the impact that it might have if there was a special word in English for God’s particular kind of love.

But this is what we have to work with, so let’s work with it.

God is love.

Hundred to one odds that this statement really doesn’t make you feel a whole lot of anything. We have so diminished God’s love to our human understanding that the full impact of that three-word sentence doesn’t register. It is like we need to sit with that for a time. It is especially hard to think of God’s love when it feels like love has been taken from you. Your heart aches and so you wonder about or even reject God’s love when you are hurting.

It may be important to make a distinction here to start with. In the Bible we are told that “God is love”, not “Love is God.” Hear that again, God is love, not Love is God.

God is love. Love comes from God; God does not come from love. We have made love our God instead of God our God. Love is some thing. God is someone. Love is the quality of some thing. God’s love does things.

God sent his own son. God works in the world. God commands things.

Love is a feeling. It is a wonderful feeling. It should be. But God is so much more.

The reading from 1 John 4 is an active demonstration of what God’s love looks like. Or, at least it gives us a glimpse, as we can not know God and God’s ways fully in our human finiteness. What can be helpful to begin with is to understand that we are made from love. The love of God outpoured into the creation of our world. It was meant to be a beautiful and good world. We know it is not. God, in making it so that we could choose love or not, meant that humans made those choices. God wants us to love of our own free will. This has also resulted in pain. We all know pain of loss. The most difficult of that pain is the pain of death. Death is the great divide.

If you think that God doesn’t get pain, doesn’t understand the depth of that pain then please think on the crucifixion. God’s own Son died, there was separation. The reason for all our hope is because God did not leave it there. Jesus’ rose again and is with God. Jesus was God with us, but the relationship was severed in death. However, in that Jesus defeated death for all of us for all time. In our dying we also now have the promise of rising from the dead, not to live once again among mortals, but to live fully in the love of God.

Scripture puts it this way,

This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God.[1]

Which brings us back to that love. For us, love is manifest in relationship. God’s love is manifest in relationship. God’s love for every human being is shown in our relationships with those we love and the relationships we are a part of in the world. Our work, our response to God’s love, is to love ourselves and to love others.

If you don’t love yourself, it will be hard to love others well. And if you don’t love yourself, you do not know your value in the eyes of God for God loves you. If we don’t love others then there is no way we can say we love God. God’s love does not pick and choose who to love. God’s love is shown to the world in the way we love one another, those close to us and those we don’t even know.

And God’s love is not just for Christians. God’s love is for everyone. What we read in this letter of 1 John is what that means for those who call themselves Christians to love. Hear again some of these words about love and what that looks like.

Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love.

God wants us to experience God and God’s love first hand, but the way to experience God’s love is in being in relationship with others. When we grieve, we need others to remind us of love. When we are joyful, it is always elevated when we get to share that joy with others. Yes, there is time to retreat and reflect, but we were made for relationship. It is why the church as a community of faith is such an important part of this equation. The church is a place where love is present because people are gathered together not just for any reason, but because we believe that God is love.

Is the church imperfect in showing love, yes, because we are a group of imperfect people gathered together learning how to give and receive love and then learning how to reflect that into our families and community…into all our relationships. The church is a place to learn about God’s love for us. It is a place that at its heart embraces the love that comes from God.

Here, together as gathered community, we give opportunity for the love of God to take up residence in our hearts and home. We give opportunity for our whole selves, body, mind, and spirit to mature in love.

And let us take a look at the role of fear in our lives. The scripture says that “There is no room in love for fear.”[2] Please do not read this to say that we should not fear anything. This is not talking about your physical safety and well-being.” There are times to fear. If you are under threat, pay attention to fear, it too is a God given response.

The fear that John is writing about here is fear of love. Perfect love casts out fear. God’s love for us should take from us any fear that we are unlovable, or that those whose lives are ended are not still living in perfect love. When we speak of eternal love, it is love in the present time and love always. God loves perfectly. We however do not love perfectly, so we do have fear in our world. It is said that the opposite of love is not hate, but rather the opposite of love is fear.

Let’s consider this. It is easy to fear another person, group of people, or even an entire nation when we do not know them. But learn about them, be curious, start a relationship, and love grows. Hope grows. Fear diminishes. Even imperfect love can diminish fear.

Practicing love in our every movement, conversation, and interaction of each day can teach us to let go of fear and embrace love. When we live knowing that we are loved, and that we can love, and this comes from a well-spring of love that is so deep that we cannot reach its depths, when we are no longer crippled or fearful, fearing death, or judgement, then we can trust that we have a well-formed love.

So, this is what remains, God is love. Loving God includes loving people. You’ve got to love both God and people if you are to have a well-formed love.

As John writes, “…if we love one another, God dwells deeply within us, and his love becomes complete in us—perfect love!”[3]

Thanks be to God for such deep and abiding love. Amen

[1] The Message (MSG) Copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.