Abiding in Love

4-29-18 (Easter 5B)

1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8

Abiding in Love

Can you remember the moment that you really began to understand what it meant to say that you believed in Christ?  Perhaps it’s an odd question, and each of our answers may vary greatly depending on our lives and experiences.  I know that there are a lot of us here today, myself included, who are “cradle Christians” of some flavor or another - from the day we were born, there was no question about it: we went with our families to church on Sundays, went to Sunday School and learned the Bible stories, maybe earned a few pins for memorizing Bible verses and such, and sang the songs that still get our toes tapping when we sing them now at KidzConnect or when the children play them on the chimes… it’s simply been an integral part of our DNA and we’ve never known anything else.

Others might not share that same experience - perhaps your family didn’t take you to church and you’d never even heard any hymns until a friend invited you to come, or until you decided to get married, or until you came to a church dinner or outreach event… whatever your experience, it took some time to get here, and you’re still figuring some of it out here and there but you’ve found your home now.

For me, personally, it was a surprising combination of both - being a pastor’s kid, I spent a lot of time at our church, and I knew what was going on… but I wasn’t really that involved.  The church life is just different for a pastor’s kid.  For me, it wasn’t until I started going to church camp that I began to really discover my faith and learn what it meant to say “I believe.”  And in my third year of camp, after finishing a 100-mile canoe trip, camping in various spots each night along the Allegheny river, and getting completely rained out on our last night of the trip… as we spent a final night in camp before getting picked up by our parents the next day, I approached my counselor, Greg, and timidly asked him if he’d help pray for me and help me invite Christ into my life.  At camp, I discovered a side of my faith that I’d never really known before - maybe it was just that the message wasn’t coming from my parents for the first time… but whatever it was, it sparked something in me.

And maybe this is striking a chord with some folks - whether you’re a cradle Christian or otherwise, there’s a moment where something clicks and you begin to understand what the Holy Spirit has been whispering to you all along.  Maybe it’s a particular discussion a Sunday School class that gets you going, or a mission trip with your youth group, the words in a particular hymn, or something the pastor happens to say during a sermon that challenges you or puts things into a different perspective… but something clicks.

Whatever it is, it changes you, but it’s also just the first step in another, longer journey.  After that week at camp, I decided to really start reading my Bible - I started in Genesis and decided I’d go all the way through to Revelation.  I’m proud to say that I actually succeeded in what I set out to do, even if it took me a long time to do it.  I went to some big youth conferences and Christian music festivals, got really into the whole Christian Music scene, started reading the Left Behind books because they were so popular among Christian circles in that time… I got so involved in my faith that I actually got carried away.  I talked about that experience a little bit in another sermon a while ago, in fact - I became a bit “too heavenly minded for my own earthly good.”

And the reality is, it’s so easy to do when you start to figure it out - we see it happening even in the earliest beginnings of the church as we read through Paul’s letters handling issues in his various congregations, and we see it again in the community to which John writes the letter we hear from today - from the context of John’s writing, we can tell that he is addressing a church that is struggling, a church that has experienced division and heartache due to “false teachers” who seek to take them away from the things that are at the heart of the Gospel.  And from the way that John hones in on this aspect of God’s love, of our calling to live out that love and the ways in which these other “false teachers” and “antichrists” do not follow that law of love… we can infer that these false teachers were peddling a kind of gospel that was not centered in that love of God.

It’s an easy enough gospel to fall for - in fact, these false gospels still abound in many, many ways and in even the most familiar places.  We hear the messages peddled on the street corner, in so many of the most popular books on Christianity, from the preachers on our television screens and on the radio - and I fell for it hook, line, and sinker, myself for a good while - it’s a deceptive gospel that even calls for the simplest of faith.  It’s a kind of gospel that preaches a message that echoes really well with the little voice in our heads that constantly eats away at us, that tells us incessantly what we’re not and what we don’t have - that voice that whispers “I’ll never be successful enough, I’m not strong enough, I’m not lovable, I’m not a good parent.  I don’t look right, act right, talk right, think right…” and those false gospels offer us a promise - that if we just say the right prayer, believe the right beliefs, give money to the right causes, vote for the right people, and speak strongly enough against everyone else who is in the wrong, that we’ll finally be good enough - not just for ourselves, but for God as well.

I wholeheartedly believed in this kind of Gospel for far too long, and took a little too much comfort in that knowledge that, when that roll was called up yonder, I’d be there and other people wouldn’t.  And then my cover-to-cover reading of the Bible brought me to this section of 1 John - about the same time that my own personal reading moved me into the works of C.S. Lewis.  And once again… it all kind of just… clicked again as the Holy Spirit went “see what I’ve been saying all this time?”

This is love - not that we loved God, but that God loved us and sent us God’s son.  It hit me like a spiritual ton of bricks: this is love.  Not that we say the right prayers, not that we check all the right boxes, not that we have the right verses memorized, recite the right creeds, sing the right hymns, hang out with the right people… not that we do this, or don’t do that… these things may have their place and time, sure, but they’re not what is at the heart of who we are or what God is.  They’re not love. But God is.  And, God being love… God loved us first.  Before we ever set foot in church, before we ever heard our first Bible story, before our parents ever held us in front of a baptismal font, before we stood in front of that font ourselves and proclaimed our faith… before the world was even created… God. Loved. Us.  Everything else has just been God trying to remind us and convince us of that love.

And when we finally allow ourselves to be convinced, when we finally accept that we are, in fact, loved, and that in Christ we are made “good enough,” it’s amazing what a change it can make.  Because once you realize that you are loved, it becomes a whole lot easier to hear that message and live into Christ’s commandment to love one another.  “We love because he first loved us.”  The false gospels take Jesus’ message and encouragement to us to “bear good fruit” and they twist it - we hear “if you don’t do these things, if you don’t do the right things, then you’ll be cut off and thrown into the fire!” when what I think Jesus was really saying is that when we learn to abide in Christ’s love, we can’t help but do anything but bear good fruit.  When we realize that we are loved, and when we extend that love to other people, not just in the hopes of getting them to do the right things like us, but really, truly, deeply loving others as Christ has loved us… the only thing we can do is bear the kind of good fruit that Christ tells his disciples he seeks.

It’s such a profound and simple statement - just love.  And yet, try as we might, it seems so difficult to truly live it out.  First and foremost, even though it sounds so easy, it’s perhaps the hardest thing in the world for us to even just simply love ourselves.  We are constantly competing against that whispering voice that tells us we’re not enough.  And because we think that we’re not enough, we take those fears out on others as well. John writes that “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” - no matter what that voice of fear and insecurity says inside our heads, no matter how much we feel ourselves unworthy or less than… that voice doesn’t have the final word.  It doesn’t even have the first word - because both the first and the last word belong to God, and that word is always Love.  So friends, I invite you to hear these words from John again and let them be our encouragement today and always: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”  Let us love one another - let us remember that we are loved.  And to God be all Glory.  Amen.