"Tight lines" is a blessing fishermen offer each other, a wish for lines taut with the weight of good fish. May God grant that the lines written here be taut with His blessings.
Wednesday, 06 May 2009 | |||
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The Antidote to Fear | |||
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I just discovered a kind of backward reassurance in the
challenging passages we've been reading from I John. In this week's text,
I John 4:7-21, the apostle once again emphasizes the command he's
been pushing all along, to love one another. The challenge of the command
is especially strong in verse 8, "Whoever does not love does not
know God" and in verse 20, "If we say we love God yet hate a
brother or sister, we are liars. For if we do not love a fellow believer,
whom we have seen, we cannot love God, whom we have not
seen." As I struggle with my feelings toward a handful of people who have troubled my life, John's emphasis on love toward others is not very comforting. When I struggle to love a difficult person, John causes me to fear that my love toward God may be bogus. I was oddly relieved to read a sermon by William Brosend, at the beginning of which he suggests that all John's talk about love in this letter signals that relationships in the Christian community to which he wrote must have been pretty dicey. Brosend suggests that John's church was not unlike our churches today, where we constantly deal with fractured relationships. Thus, as I said, it's a kind of backward reassurance or the pleasure of company in misery. Yet it helps me when I reflect on the fact that even then, in the first decades of the church, Jesus' people needed to be strongly and pointedly reminded of His command to love each other. . . because they weren't any better at it than I am. Even more helpful in this text is John's constant reassertion of the priority of God's love over our love. Verse 10, "This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us. . ." Verse 16, "And so we know and rely on the love God has for us." Verse 19, "We love because he first loved us." Any love we have begins in God's love. We are not asked to manufacture our own output of love, but are invited to tap into the prior gift of God's love to us in Jesus. That's how, despite all our own imperfection and failure to love each other, we can still receive and begin to live in God's "perfect love" that "drives out fear." There remains an urgent call to grow in love. I can't become complacent on the basis that John's church was no better than our own in the business of love. Changing that is one major point of his letter. What we learn is that we have no need to despair when we fail in love. We need not fear God's judgment as verse 17 says. We may continually return to the fount of love in what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. From that starting point, we can make faulting and humble progress in learning to love each other, and thus genuinely demonstrate in our lives that God's love is real. | |||
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Profile |
I am the pastor of Valley Covenant Church in Eugene, Oregon. I love to flyfish and hike along the beautiful rivers in our area. I welcome your comments as I share sermon work in progress and occasional other thoughts.
Thank you for visiting this blog. I invite you also to visit my web page.
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