February 13, 2005

"God the Great Lover"

The First letter of John offers incredible words about love, and especially about the love of God.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, a day given over to the celebration of love. There’s no question that our culture is obsessed with love. The Beatles got to be huge in the 60s because they were always singing about love, from “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” to “Love is all you need.”

According to Amazon.com there are at least 32,500 books in print with “love” in the title, and over 11,000 records with “love” in the name.

A search on Google lists over 121 million web sites with some form of “love” as one of the key words.

The problem is that we try to stretch the word love, which is only four letters long, to cover so many things that are so wildly different. I can say “I love pizza,” and you will say, “Yeah, pastor, we can tell.”

But is that love the same as the love of someone who gives up his own life for someone else?

During the president’s State of the Union address a moving scene played out when an Iraqi woman whose son had been killed by Saddam Hussein hugged the mother of an American soldier who was killed in the war. Are we talking the same kind of love? Hardly.

So when the authors of the New Testament were looking for a word that described what God’s love was like, they were stumped. They had words for friendship, and words for sexual love.

But they didn’t capture the fullness of God’s love. So they turned to an obscure word in the Greek language, “agape,” and filled it with a whole new meaning. John says “God is love,” and then adds a definition of love: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us and sent his son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

In other words, God loves those who don’t deserve his love, and loves them to the point of self-sacrifice.

It’s hard for us as rational beings to understand this or believe it. Sigmund Freud didn’t think it was possible; he said, “Not all men are worthy of love.”

That’s exactly the point. We can’t disconnect love from worthiness. We are more familiar with eros love, which is more than just sexual, it means any love that is attracted by a worthy object of that love.

Freud said human love has its rational limits. If there’s nothing there to attract a lover, nothing worth loving, then love fails. Simple as that. It’s why agape love seems to make no sense.

Can a holy God love sinners like you and me? It’s against reason, it’s against all human inclinations. It cannot be explained.

Thomas Merton, one of the great spiritual writers of the 20^th Century, said that “God is asking me, the unworthy, to forget my unworthiness, and that of my brothers and sisters, and dare to advance in the love that has redeemed us all. And to laugh at the preposterous notion of ‘worthiness.’ “ And it is laughable, isn’t it? The idea of being worthy of the love of God? All we can do is accept it and be joyful, as in our opening hymn this morning, “Joyful, joyful we adore thee.”

Michael Yaconelli wrote about his experience when he went on a retreat. He was at a low point in his life, feeling depressed and demoralized, but after a few days he heard Jesus talking to him, words that had been drowned out by the noisiness of life. Jesus said, “Michael, I am here, I have been calling you, but you haven’t been listening. Michael, I love you. I have always loved you. And I have been waiting for you to hear me say that to you. But you have been so busy trying to prove to yourself that you are loved that you have not heard me.”

Yaconelli wrote, “My soul was awakened by a loving father who had been looking and waiting for me. Finally I accepted my brokenness. I had never come to terms with that. I knew I was broken. I knew I was a sinner. I knew I continually disappointed God, but I could never accept that part of me.

“I continually felt the need to run from my weakness, to deny who I was, and to concentrate on what I should be. It became clear to me that I had completely misunderstood the Christian faith. I came to see that it is in my brokenness, my powerlessness, my weakness that Christ made me strong.

“It was in the acceptance of my lack of faith that God could give me faith. It was in embracing my brokenness that I could identify with others’ brokenness. I can only tell you that for the first time in my life, I can hear Jesus whisper to me every day, ‘Michael, I love you. You are beloved.’ And for some strange reason, that seems to be enough.”

In this sermon series that’s will continue throughout Lent up to Easter Sunday, we’re going to be talking about what God is like, and it just seems natural to talk about God as love as the start of the series. Everybody needs love, that much we know for sure, and everybody, consciously or subconsciously, wants to feel loved by God. We need to receive love, but here’s something you may not have thought about before—God needs to give love. It is the nature of God to love without hesitation, without holding anything back. This is why he created the universe, and why he created you and me—so that he would have someone to love, and what’s more, someone with a heart and soul who could return that love as freely as it was given.

So let’s start from there, with the idea that “God needs to love,” and look at some of the other things we know to be true about love.

First of all, real love is forgiving. We talked about forgiveness last week, and it’s a natural carryover to a sermon about God’s love. One of the key verses in the 23^rd Psalm, in all the Psalms, really, is the one that says “God restores my soul.” God really showed his amazing love for us when he gave us a soul. Only human beings received a soul; no sheep or cattle or birds received a soul, only humans.

Genesis tells us that “The Lord God breathed into his nostrils, and man became a living soul.”

That soul was beautiful and perfect, but what happened? Man found a way to ruin it. Through sin our souls became all twisted and weak and stained. And it was destined for destruction, as the Book of Ezekiel says: “The soul that sins shall die.” But God did something wonderful for us—he restored our souls. I don’t know who among you may be into antiques and restoring furniture, but I know that it takes a real craftsman to restore something to its original beauty.

It also takes someone who understands what the original was like and values its true worth.

And that’s what God was all about when he sent Jesus into the world—he wanted to restore all mankind to its original value, taking souls one by one and refinishing them, repairing them, taking out the rotted areas where necessary and making them the things of beauty they were when we were created.

What else do we know about love? Love carries tremendous risk. When you love somebody you’re vulnerable, you’re out there on the high wire without a net, open to all kinds of getting hurt. We don’t think of God as being at risk, but he took a tremendous chance with the way he created humanity. He was willing to risk our rejection by giving us free hearts.

He could have programmed us as robots who would just love him without question, without the possibility of saying no. But God wanted genuine love from his people, not love that came at the end of a twisted arm.

A third aspect of love is sacrifice. How do you know who really loves you? By the sacrifices they’re willing to make for you.

How about it, ladies? Love is not measured in candy and flowers, but by what your lover is willing to do for you, to give up for you. Is he willing to let you watch your show instead of his? Hang onto him, he’s a keeper.

Now when we talk about love as sacrifice, it’s good to remember that St. Valentine really existed; he lived in the Third Century Roman Empire, a devoted bishop, and we know that he became a martyr for the Christian faith.

A lot of stories have popped up about St. Valentine; one of my favorites is the one that says the emperor Claudius the Cruel was trying to raise a great army, and to make it easier he outlawed marriage and even engagements. But Valentine married young couples in secret, got caught and was beheaded on Feb. 14.

According to the legend, before Valentine died he made friends with the blind daughter of his jailer. He told the girl about God’s love and the wonders of his creation, and she replied that her fondest wish was to see these wonderful things for herself. He told her that God does what is best for his children if only they believed in him. Was she willing to believe? She said she did believe, and the two knelt in prayer in his jail cell. According to the legend, there was a burst of light in the cell and the little girl began to sob with joy. “Valentine, I can see.”

The next day was Feb. 14. Before he was led off Valentine left a note for the girl, reminding her to stay close to God always. He signed the note “from your Valentine,” and the rest is Hallmark history.

Sacrifice is really the greatest love of all, as Jesus said: “Nobody loves you more than the one who is willing to give us his life for you.”

What else do we know about love? If we’re honest, we’ll admit that love is a mystery. Many famous authors have written that you can’t really explain love; you can’t earn it, but it just happens. Somebody else’s heart clicks with yours, and boom, you’re a couple. On the other hand, there is usually something that brings two people closer together, physical attraction or personality or something. But God’s love is free, unmerited, undeserved. In the Book of Deuteronomy it says, “The Lord did not choose you and lavish his love on you because you were larger or greater than other nations, for you were the smallest of all nations! It was simply because the Lord loves you, and because he was keeping his oath he had sworn to his ancestors. That is why the Lord rescued you with such amazing power from your slavery under Pharaoh in Egypt.”

Anybody here ever own a Pinto? One of the worst cars ever to roll off an assembly line. They were junk before they got out of the dealer’s lot. But a certain man put thousands of dollars into keeping his Pinto running until the time came when he had to bite the bullet and buy a new car. He actually traded in his other car, a Plymouth, and the dealer agreed to give him $2,000 for it. Then the man asked the dealer to take a look at the Pinto. He looked it over, took it for a test drive, and then offered the man $2,000 for both cars. In short, there was simply nothing to love about that car.

But that’s how we were, too. There was nothing about us worth loving, so steeped in sin and self-destruction. But God loved us anyway.

Probably the single most quoted verse in the Bible is John 3:16, which says, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” Agape love implies a love given with no thought of reward, not even of a returned love. That’s God’s kind of love for us. God doesn’t love us because he stands to get a reward for it, he just loves us. You and me, right here, right now. No matter how you have lived your life, no matter how great your sins are.

God loves you. Now. This very instant. Believe that, and eternal life is yours. That’s all it takes. Believe it, and you are born again, born again with a new kind of life that triumphs even over death and the grave.

Finally, what more do we know about love? That it is best sealed with a kiss. Few people associate the Bible with kissing, and maybe if they do at all they remember Judas betraying Jesus with a kiss. But there is one instance when a kiss shows exactly what the love of God is like, and that story is the prodigal son. The Gospel of Luke tells us that the prodigal son, who had blown his inheritance on wine, women and song and now was destitute, was coming back to his father. “But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.”

The love of the father toward his wayward son is exactly the model of God’s love for his children. Many people have this picture of God as harsh, even cruel, a God who is ready to condemn, a Dirty Harry kind of cop who is ready to pull the trigger on sinners, saying “Go ahead, make my day.” But this passage shows God to be a loving and compassionate father. The prodigal son expected at best a rebuke, an “I told you so.” Instead he received compassion, a welcome and a kiss. The great thing is, to God every day is Valentine’s Day. God’s ready to pass out kisses every day.

You all know I’m kind of a sucker for romantic movies, what some guys would call chick flicks. There’s a scene in the movie Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise says to Rene Zellweger, “You complete me.”

Sometimes when people ask me how to become a writer I tell them that the secret is to keep your sentences short, punchy, easy to understand, like that one, and in the first letter of John the author does the same thing when spells out what God is like and what our relationship with him is like: “God is love.” “We love because God loved us first.” When we understand that God loved us even when we rejected him and showered us with gifts such as grace and sacrificed his own son so that we could live with him forever, we are drawn to take delight in him for who he is, the way a lover takes delight in the one who completes us.

Christians are to be known as people of love, born and made of love, the perfect love of God and of his son Jesus Christ. And if we count ourselves true disciples of Christ, the world will know us, just like the song says, by our love. Our acts of kindness and mercy will not only tell the world that we belong to Christ, but will tell the world that the love we share is only a reflection of the love that arose from the heart of God. He is the great lover, and he will sustain us by that love until the day when Christ shall return to take us to our heavenly home.