Remembering God’s Love

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Scripture: 1 John 4:7-12 (NRSV)
7 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.
 
Devotion:
            In my own life I find it difficult to understand why I so often forget the simple truth of these words of scripture. In today’s culture we often sacrifice the commandment to love one another on the altar of our need to be “right” about a specific issue. Our culture has also trained us to seek our “rights” even if we violate the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves in the process.
            When Jesus was asked what was the most important commandment did not hesitate to reply with “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with your entire mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus demonstrated this kind of love with his life. We see his love for God and neighbor in his hours alone in prayer, and in his careful teaching about the coming kingdom, and we see it in his healing of the blind, lame, and the leper. We look at the cross and see him taking on our sins. We stare into the empty tomb and we are overcome with fear of the one who has conquered death.
            We living in this fallen world often get too comfortable with the worlds ways. Our worship becomes more an artifact of our culture rather than a time to be with Jesus the lover of our souls. Jesus threw the moneychangers and merchants out of the temple courts because he loved to hear the prayers of the people more than the commerce of the religion of the day. This Jesus so desires (and indeed commands) our worship freely and joyfully given. We must spend our hours in worship loving God and God alone.
            The world in which we live is a very unloving place. The spiritual and moral darkness seems to become more impenetrable every day. Those who know and are known by Jesus will be salt and light in the world. The love that Christians have must burn brighter and must preserve the world from falling into total darkness and decay. It is the church’s mission and destiny to do this.
           We must remember that God loved us so much that while we were still sinners Jesus died for us. Jesus freely took the punishment for our sins on that cross. Therefore we must love God and our neighbors. And for that loves sake we must become the lovers of the unlovely and the unloved that we see all around us. We must remember this simple command “love one another” and having remembered it we must just do it. Amen.

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