Read with Me
1 John 4:9-12 (HCSB)
God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent His One and Only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God remains in us and His love is perfected in us.
Listen with Me
John has just written the truth that God is agape love in His very nature. This agape love is not something that He merely demonstrates or occasionally bestows. It is who He is at the most fundamental level.
As proof of the statement, John gives the key example of how God’s character of love has been most notably demonstrated: Jesus. It was pure agape love that moved Him to send Jesus, His one and only Son, into the world to be born as a real human being, to show His glory and His grace, to endure strong opposition from the very ones He had come to save, and to finally lay down His human life in the most painful and humiliating way ever devised by depraved humanity. God sent Him, even though He knew from before time began what His fate would be. John clearly and correctly identifies this act of self-sacrifice for the salvation of others as the epitome, the very definition of agape love.
Then John takes his argument several steps further. The receiving of agape love from God’s hand obligates all those who have received it and benefited from it to love their brothers and sisters in Christ with the same self-sacrificing agape love.
This obligation goes far beyond loving one’s neighbor as oneself (Leviticus 19:18) that Jesus reaffirmed for His followers in their interactions with everyone, including those who were very unlike them (Luke 10:25-37). It is to be an imitation of Jesus’ own laying down of His life for the good of those who follow Him (John 15:12-17).
John is not naïve. He understands that such self-sacrificing agape love does not naturally live in the human spirit. It must be placed there and grown by God Himself, empowered by the Holy Spirit living at the core of each of His people.
This implanted agape love can be choked out by the cares of this world, by busyness, by distraction, and most of all by sin. It is a delicate plant that must be nurtured and strengthened by constantly exercising it, laying down one’s own life and priorities as a living sacrifice every day (Romans 12:1-2). But if a person is careful to live in God’s agape love by living it out each day in every interaction with those who are also of the body, then God will be able to grow it in our lives and make it complete.
Pray with Me
Father, at times in my own life I think I have conflated agape love with loving my neighbor as myself. Even though both of these require Your presence and Your help to live them out fully, agape love goes even further than simply doing good to others. It requires that I be willing to sacrifice myself and my agenda for my brother and sister in Christ if necessary, for their ultimate good. That is indeed a stupendously high bar, and it is clear that the only way for me to reach it is to allow You to live it through my life. Help me, Lord, to allow You to live so powerfully in and through me that Your agape love overflows from every aspect of my life. Amen.