Living from God’s love

The following video transcript has been lightly edited

We're in chapter 4 of John's first letter to the church. And John is writing to help the church build a community of joy. And his theme throughout has been this call to love one another. God has loved us, and so therefore we must love one another. And it reaches a crescendo in chapter 4, where John says, hey listen, God is love. And love has come in the person of Christ and revealed love to us through Jesus life, death, and resurrection. And therefore, the way we want to live, what will help us build this community of joy, is to be a people who live from God's love. That that's the core, that's the anchor, that's the foundation that everything else is built on. I don't know about you, I love the idea that my life would be one that reflects love.

Love of God, love of others. But it's also a really hard thing to pursue. And so what John does in chapter 4 is he gives us three things that I think help us reconnect or abide in God's love, as he says in the chapter. And I want to sketch those out for you today. The first is that we need to be captivated by the mystery of God's love.

God's arrival in the person of Christ. And his life, death, and resurrection, and the way that that creates atonement, as John says, is a mystery that you and I need to be captivated by, to be in awe of. Second, we need to seek resonance. We need to seek ways of living in flow with, in resonance with, God's love.

And then lastly, we want to resist fear, because fear has nothing to do with love. And so I want to sketch out each one of these points for you to help you live from God's love this week.

So the first, to, to be captivated by the mystery of God's love. You know, I think as human beings, what happens to us often is that facts become something that no longer light us up, no longer have as much meaning as they once did.

Because we know them to be true. So it's like, oh yeah, I believe God exists, I believe that God has revealed himself in the person of Christ, and I believe that that has all happened to set right our relationship with God and one another and the world. And we're like, oh yeah, ho hum. And we lose the mystery and the wonder to it.

Because when we stop and step back and we think, oh man, this is incredible. God has come in the person of Christ. And God is love. And has acted and lived truth, peace, patience. There's no separation between who God is and how God acts. And God has revealed himself in the person of Christ and set right our relationship with God in the world.

That's amazing. That is captivating mystery. You know, I think our kids are the kind of relationship we have with them them as beings you can capture that wonder that mystery My daughter turned 14 recently and as I took her out to breakfast, I was just amazed. I was in awe. I was captivated By the love I have for her, our relationship, how she's grown.

So we want to reconnect with God's love. We want to reconnect with the mystery and the wonder. I think two things on that. One, I think the reason we celebrate communion together each week is to help us capture that, to reconnect with and be captivated by the wonder of Christ. And so I invite you to come join us and be a part of that.

Additionally, I think that's a walk in the woods or prayer. These are the things that help us reconnect with the mystery and wonder of God. Okay, so if we want to live from God's love, we want to be a people who are captivated by mystery and wonder. And two, we want to seek resonance. So what John says is that God is love, and whoever abides in love is abiding in God, and God is with them, and we are with God.

That word abide is about living with, and so if God is the one who is truth and peace and patience and kindness and gentleness and can bear all things and endure all things and is one who is truth. Then when we align ourselves, with those things, then we're aligning ourselves with God.

I love the concept of resonance because it's a, in some ways, it's a musical term. And so when we listen to the band, we get to listen to the piano and the guitar and the vocalists and as they sing and as they play and the notes combined together, there's a resonance. There's an extra hum in it and the sound becomes bigger and more full. And so we want to do the same thing in our life.

We want to figure out how do we resonate with love? How do we align ourselves with it? And that's going to be by aligning ourselves with truth and peace and patience and kindness and gentleness and self control. We're going to set our life and we're going to build rhythms, whether it's coming to church or reading in the Psalms. Or having a healthy dialogue with someone where we engage their personhood, their thoughts, and their feelings, and their dreams, and the things they wonder about. Because when we're doing those things, we're aligning ourselves with who God is and God's love. And so that's what we want to do. And by doing that, we get to live from God's love.

So what is it for you this week? How might you align your life a little bit more I want you to find the flow of God's love in conversation, in truth, in peace, in patience. Seek those things out so that you can abide in God and God can abide in you. And we can, as a community, live from God's love. Lastly, we want to resist fear.

What John says in his letters, he says, there's no fear in love. And in fact, perfect love casts out fear. And the reason that fear has nothing to do with love is because fear is about punishment. And so what we want to be as a people is we want to be a people who remind ourselves of God's love. And then we want to love others. We want to resist fear and punishment.

You know, the world works on a lot of other ways other than love, power, prestige, popularity, performance. These four things are things that we see in our lives every day. And when you think about it, we, we end up feeling afraid because we're operating out of that as a basis.

And the reason is, is we know that each of those things can fade, can go away. When you're in power, it's not going to last forever. And in fact, if you have the power, there are others who are seeking to get it. And so if your comfort and your certainty and your security is based on power, you know, it's fleeting.

And so you have fear. We can be popular for a time, a season, but life changes. It moves on. And then there's someone more popular. And so if that's where we're getting our security, then we're going to be afraid because we're going to be afraid that we're going to lose it.

Privilege. We think about that. Hey, maybe we're killing it at work and we're making a bunch of money. And so we're able to have this kind of privilege, but that can all go away so fast.

And then finally, performance. If we're always trying to perform in order to find love and certainty, then we will always be afraid. We will always be afraid that we haven't done enough, that we're not enough, And so all of these are things that the world invites us to build our lives on.

But God says, no, no, no, don't do that, because then it's about punishment. It's about fear. Rather, know this, that God has shown us love, and that God came to us. God didn't wait for us to love him and then reciprocate. God sought us out, came in the person of Christ. And that perfect love casts out fear. We don't have to operate on popularity and prestige and privilege and power, we can instead operate on something else. We can operate out of God's love.

So I hope that this week that you're able to do that, that you're able to recognize those times that you're trying to operate out of something else that has a layer of punishment and fear, to resist that and get back to building life and rhythm by operating in prayer and relationship and gathering together to worship and and pray and have communion together because those things help us resonate with God's love and recapture the wonder so that we can be a people who experience God's love and then live out of it.