Life in Love – 10/15-23

So, we are currently experiencing the greatest religious shift in the history of our nation. The second greatest shift occurred right after the Civil War, when millions and millions of Americans began attending church. But that movement was not nearly as large as what is happening now. It’s just going the opposite direction as millions and millions of Americans stop attending church.

Now, according to an important new book, an important but not enjoyable-to-read new book entitled The Great Dechurching by Jim Davis and Michael Graham, along with leading social scientist Ryan Burge, about 40 million Americans/adults used to go to church but no longer do. So, around 25 million of those are leaving mainline Protestant or Catholic churches, and about 15 million of those are leaving evangelical churches. The former group has been leaving for a long time, the last thirty-five or forty years. The latter group have been leaving more recently. And what’s especially important about this latest research in the dechurching is its granularity — it gets into more detail than most studies. You’ll see a lot of articles come out, lots of podcasts describing people departing. And usually they simply, in the reasons given, simply mirror the theological or moral or social assumptions of the people writing or speaking, things like the reason people are leaving is they’re tired of right-wing politics or the church is homophobic. Now, of course, there are many dechurched people who have left for those reasons, and any time, throughout its history, the church has become too tightly interwoven with partisan politics, whether on the left or the right, it has never ended well. Those are real issues.

But Davis and Graham’s research examines the dechurched in specific profiles in order to listen more carefully and understand more accurately why exactly they left. So, let me just give you one example. One profile they entitled Dechurched Mainstream Evangelicals. Here are the top six reasons they gave why they left the church. Number 1 — I moved to a new community. Number 2 — Attending was inconvenient. Number 3 — Divorce, remarriage, or some other family change. Number 4 — COVID 19 got me out of the habit. Number 5 — I didn’t fit in with the congregation. And number 6 — I didn’t experience much love from the congregation.

Now, if you look at those top six reasons, they’re striking in their normality. They seem for the most part, except maybe the last one, seem a bit bland, mundane, not the kind of reasons you typically read about. But there is a big difference, depending on which profile you look at. For example, the authors described two different major categories of people who have left the church, and the first one is those who casually dechurched, and that’s about 75% of them, including many of the ones we just saw — casually dechurched. But then 25% of them could be described as dechurched casualties, and that 25% group left for very different reasons than the 75% group. And among these dechurched casualties, there are some pretty horrific stories, and those are generally the ones you see featured on podcasts or in articles.

Let me just tell you one that was in the book. It is just heartbreaking. Her name is Tammy. She felt politically alienated and economically abandoned by her church. Her marriage had fallen apart due to a drug addiction by her ex-husband, which resulted in abuse. And she had asked for help from her church and had received none. But the final straw came when her daughter was sexually assaulted at a summer camp by a church staff member. Tammy then went to the senior pastor and revealed the crime. The pastor simply said, “I will take care of it.” The staff member was put on administrative leave, and essentially nothing happened. So, Tammy was done. She reported the crime, left the church, and has not been back. And it makes sense. This is eight years later. She still believes in Jesus, still prays, still reads her Bible, but can’t imagine returning to that church and for good reason.

This is one of the reasons why the material John is covering today, I hope you will see, is so significant. But according to Ryan Burge, when social scientists think about people’s religion, they categorize them in three ways — belief, behavior, and belonging. Belief — What does someone believe? Behavior — How does that shape what they do? And then belonging — Where do they belong? What are their social affiliations? And these categories, though not identical, look surprisingly similar to what we’re seeing in 1 John. John is providing us with three diagnostic tools — number 1, belief; number 2, obedience; number 3, love — very similar to what Ryan Burge was describing — belief, behavior, and belonging. John is writing to Christians in churches throughout what is today Turkey, and he is trying to help them know how they can know. How do we land and really have some sense of assurance of who we are in Jesus and how that changes the way we live? The structure of 1 John, in my mind, can be very frustrating because I like to think in terms of staircase, one theme building on another theme. That is not how 1 John unfolds. Things spiral. John touches on a subject, leaves that subject, touches on another, leaves that back to the other. And it’s round and around and upward we go.

Let me illustrate that with diagnostic tool number 3, the one we’re addressing today, that is love, back in chapter 2, verses 7-11.

“Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Whoever loves his brother abides in the light.”

John nails love as an indicator of a follower of Jesus. But then he’s off talking about other things, and then he’s back again, chapter 3:11-24, two weeks ago,

“We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers.”

And then he’s off again, as Matt brilliantly unfolded chapter 4:1-6 last week with the tool of belief. And now he’s back. He’s back to love, chapter 4:7-21.

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.”

Now, each time John returns to one of these diagnostic tools, he is taking it up another level, building on previous content. The main point of today’s message … super simple. “Beloved, let us love one another” chapter 4, verse 7. And you’ll see, as we saw last week, Matt used the term “inclusio,” brackets, you’ll see at the end of this section, verse 21,

“Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

So, the point is clear, but what John is doing is he is building up these reasons or the bases on which we love one another which are wildly different from the culture we live in or the way we would naturally think. And the result is if you love, based on these reasons, your love will result in a greater confidence and assurance. Remember, that’s John’s goal.

So, let me summarize the four reasons and then we’ll work through them one at a time. So, we love because of the conception of love, the communication of love, the connection of love, and the completion of love. That’s where we’re going. Let’s start with the conception of love, that is the beginning or source of love. 1 John 4:7,

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. And anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

In 1971 in Fort Worth, Texas, a babysitter stole a family’s baby, and the police were unable to catch the criminal or find the baby for fifty-one years, until last year. And last year this woman, who is no longer a baby, fifty-one years later, was reunited with her family. And you think, “Well, how did they know? How did they know that she was related to them?” DNA. DNA. They could confirm the connection because of the DNA.

And this is what John is talking about. Love is like that. You know you’re born of God. You know you’re related to God. This love is like a genetic compatibility test that confirms they’re related. And John communicates this in verses 7-8, another little micro inclusio or this little bracket area. Look at that. “Love is from God … God is love” is like the womb in which we are born of God and we who know God display our resemblance. Now, John ends there with a remarkable statement “God is love.” That means God is not only love, but if you could somehow cut a part of God out, you would never cut anything out that was not love. As Dane Cortland describes,

“God’s love is as expansive as God himself. For God to cease to love his own, God would need to cease to exist, because God does not simply have love; he is love.”

Everything he does is love, done in love.

“In the death of Christ for us sinners, God intends to put his love for us beyond question.”

And this last statement is about to lead us to the next point, but don’t miss where he begins. God is love. And his kids are like him.

Number 2, the communication of love. So, we move from the conception of love to the communication of love. Now, we live in a world full of deception. Some of you may have seen last month American Airlines realized that they had installed many, many fake parts in many, many of their airplanes. And the more they investigated this, the more they discovered that the company that sold the parts was fake. The employees in the so-called company were fake. The safety documents that had been signed verifying the parts as genuine are fake. Ready to go to the airport today? No, it’s a bit concerning when you’re about to take off and you realize that corners were cut, parts are fake.

And what John is arguing is there’s something even more concerning, and that is living a life of counterfeit love. And so, what John does here is he said, “Let me show you the real thing. I want you to feast on the real thing so that you will easily, quickly be able to identify the fake.” Verse 9,

“In this the love of God was made manifest among us [made clear, made visible, put on display, communicated to us], that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God…”

That’s fake love. We often call it religiosity — us trying to earn our way back to God, proving our love that will never hold up. The real thing comes from God to us.

“In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

What does that mean? Propitiation simply means God, as a holy God, is just, and he must have wrath for our sin. Jesus bore that wrath on our behalf, and so we, by faith, are swimming in mercy, not wrath today.

If you’re a believer in Jesus, there is no wrath for you. That’s propitiation. He appeased God’s just wrath so that we would receive mercy. “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” When you taste real love, you want to feed on real love, and you want to spread real love.

This was the story of the immoral woman in Luke 7. Jesus was eating in the home of a Pharisee, Simon, and everything was a bit stiff. Jesus was not well received. His feet were not washed. The normal hospitality steps were not taken. And things got way more awkward when a woman of the city came in, which is Jewish code for “prostitute.” And she knew all about fake love, but she encountered Jesus and experienced the real thing, and she just started bawling. Now, they sat around tables with their feet out, leaning, eating, and so, Jesus’s bare feet would have been away from the table. They took their shoes off. She’s bawling all over his feet. They hadn’t been washed; so, furrows, little rivers in the dirt on his feet are forming. She falls on her knees, starts washing his feet with her hair, anointing his feet with ointment. Everybody is sweating, super uncomfortable. We don’t understand how much of a cultural violation that would have been. And Simon, the Pharisee, the good Pharisee, is thinking, “What kind of holy man is this Jesus? He should kick that woman away and cast her out of the house. She’s dirty. We’re clean,” in his mind.

And Jesus reads his thoughts. Don’t you hate when that happens? And he tells the story. Hypothetically speaking, there are two debtors, and he describes these two debtors, and then the moral of the story is one debtor represents Simon with his little vision of forgiveness, and therefore he has a little love. And the other debtor represents this woman with her big experience of forgiveness, and her love is correspondingly huge. And he ends with these words in Luke 7:47,

“Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven — for she loved much.”

Now, some people think, “Well, she loved enough so that she was forgiven.” No, that’s not what the text says. “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven” is in the perfect tense in the Greek. She is in the state of forgiveness, much forgiveness; therefore, she expresses much love. In contrast to the Pharisee, he goes on to say, “But he who is forgiven little [in his own mind], loves little.” The woman rejected fake love, feasted on real love, and was actually transformed into a loving kind of person. Isn’t that amazing? This is the communication of love, and it doesn’t come through tears. It doesn’t come through an emotional experience. It begins with the heart of God sending his Son for our sins. We, seeing our need, receive that and experience big forgiveness, which overflows into big love. That’s the communication of love.

Number 3, the connection of love, verses 12-16. Now, have you noticed that most companies and many families have someone in the family with a distinctive laugh? Do most of your families have that? You can tell, oh, they’re in the house; they’re in the building; they’re on the block. You can tell. That’s what John is saying. When you get around Christians, there should be a distinctive (not a distinctive laughter, maybe) but a distinctive love that should indicate that Christians are around. And John explains how this works in verses 12-16. But verses 12-16 are so dense, so many theological words, that I want to try to summarize it, and then we’ll walk through it. I think you could say it this way, this next section — We know we live in God (we abide in God) when we live in love for God is love. We know we live in God when we live in love for God is love.

Let’s look at 12-16.

“No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us.”

Now he’s going to use the word “abide” six times. God lives in us, continues in us.

“God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.”

Now, you’re also going to notice he’s going to mention the Trinity — Father, Son, Spirit right here.

“He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”

Whew! A lot of abiding going on there.

So, again, summary: we know we live (using the word “live” for “abide”), we live in God when we live in love for God is love. Or you could say it this way. We know we are living in connection with Father, Son, and Spirit, this eternal Trinitarian affection, where there is no jealousy, no enmity, no division, perfect oneness; we know we are living in connection with Father, Son, and Spirit when you can trace back the love that we express to one another and experience as individuals back to the source of Trinitarian affection. That is the connection of love.

One more, one more. Number 4, the completion of love, and then we’ll try to tie all this together. My wife and I are currently rereading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. He wrote that right after the Nazis shut down his communal seminary at Finkenwalde, and right before World War II started. So, September 1938 he whipped this book out. And in the beginning of the book, he emphasizes the foundation of true Christian community. A community of love is built on the shared life of Jesus. There’s no other foundation. There’s no other basis. If he is not our peace, we will not be at peace.

But then he warns us of the danger of loving love more than living love, the danger of loving love more than living love. And he says it this way, and if you’ve been here for a while, you’ve heard me quote this before, and if you stay here for a while, you’ll hear me quote it again. It’s really important.

“Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.”

Now look at the center again. “He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself …” You could actually replace the word “community” with “friendship” or “marriage.” If I love the dream of my marriage more than I actually love my wife, I’m going to destroy my marriage. If I love the dream of what it’s like to be in a Christian community more than I actually love the people who are in the Christian community, I will destroy the community.

How does that work? Well, let’s say I’m craving community, and I attend your life group, and I come to your life group with all these assumptions about what I anticipate/hope you will do, like how you will receive me and how we will experience so much fellowship and joy, and it’s going to feel this way and look this way. And then I’m going to walk away tonight after life group with a glow on me because I’ve encountered you and we’ve experienced real community. And instead, I go, and I find out oh, it’s a little awkward, and there are people who say awkward things, and they disagree with me on some things, like political things. Why is that coming up in the middle of life group? And the food is nasty. Whatever it is, my wish dream — that’s what he’s talking about, expectations — shut me down. So, I’m not really listening and knowing you and loving you. I’m worshiping the dream of what I believe that experience should be, and nothing is more dangerous for Christian community. Nothing is more dangerous for a marriage or a friendship.

And so, this brings us really close to the right way to use this diagnostic tool we call love in 1 John and the wrong way because God invariably will put us all in difficult friendships, imperfect churches, hard marriages, other situations, we will encounter friendship conflicts, employer/employee tensions. And at that moment, as a follower of Jesus, I can use this tool in two different ways. I can, first of all, remember the sermon on Sunday and think, “Oh, stink. I’m supposed to be a loving person; otherwise, I’m probably not a real Christian. I got to prove I’m a real Christian. I don’t want to have to recycle all those doubts and fears and go through that again. So, I need to do something loving.”

And it’s kind of like trying to cut down a tree with a chainsaw, but you’re holding the chain end of the chainsaw. It’s just not going to work because what you’re doing is you’re starting with yourself, and then you’re trying to work your way back up to God and try to prove to him that you love him enough and love other people enough. And you never have assurance because typically when we do this (this is especially true in marriage, right?), you roll up your sleeves, you try to love really well, and then your spouse doesn’t respond as well as you think, and you’re done. “I tried. They could at least step up a bit.” But you’re holding the chainsaw on the wrong end. Where does 1 John 4 start? God is love. God is love. Look at his love for you. You’re waking up in the morning feeding on his love for you, filling your heart with a kind of love you cannot naturally create. It’s beyond us. It’s otherworldly. It’s divine. And then as that love is communicated to us, we are then able to express it to others, regardless of the way they respond. They can welcome it — awesome! They can throw it right back in our face, but it’s not dependent on their response.

Let me review where we’ve been, what we’ve just seen, and then I’ll come back to the passage we’re looking at. The conception of love — Love is from God. God is love. The communication of love — This is we wake up each day remembering, rehearsing, re-preaching the gospel to ourselves. The connection of love — He sweeps us into the sea of Trinitarian affection. Whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in Him. And then the completion of love — By this is love perfected with us so that we may have confidence.

Now, on a practical level, what does that look like? Do you remember two weeks ago, I ended with a story from Corrie ten Boom, when she encountered that guard and she knew within herself she could not love him, forgive him. He had been a guard at Ravensbrück and had overseen the prisoners. She and her sister had been prisoners, and her sister had died. “There’s no way! I can’t love him! I can’t forgive him!” There was nothing there. But she knew God was calling her in that moment as he reached out his hand and asked for forgiveness, said he had been forgiven by God for all his horrible things. And she prayed,

“Lord, I can’t do this. You do it through me as I obey you.”

So, she reached up her hand, heart cold, doesn’t feel it. But as she extends love, forgiveness, she said this warm feeling flows through her arm to this former guard. She described that experience as one of the most vivid, powerful experiences of the love of God in her life. Now, think about that. In the presence of her enemy, she’s experiencing from God one of the most powerful experiences of love in her life.

This is what I think John is getting at. You won’t experience the completion, the assurance that love provides if you’re not willing to put yourself into situations that are going to demand a love that you cannot produce. If I think I’ve got it … This is one of the things that’s so sad about the dechurching that’s happening today is because everybody has their story of stupid things church members have done to them. And who of us don’t have those stories? So, what I end up doing is hanging around with people that are just like me, trying to protect myself from any kind of uncomfortable situation. So, I’m going to start a church with my wife and me and maybe some of my friends who have common things. But that’s not a church. A church is communion around Jesus, which means we’re going to be uniting with people who are not just like us, who believe what we believe, but are not just like us, which is going to put us in situations that are going to force us to run to God for a kind of love that we need that is not native to our hearts. Does that make sense? And as we experience that love in unusual ways, our hearts experience the assurance that God loves me in a way that I do not deserve. And as I love others in a way that they do not deserve, there is an unexplainable assurance that comes from that.

Look back at verse 17 to see this described.

“By this is love completed with us [perfected/ brought to its destination], so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he [Christ] is so also are we in this world.”

So, as Jesus was in the world, living in the love of the Father, loving some really frustrating disciples, we are in the world as he is in the world.

“There is no fear in love, but complete love, perfect love, casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.”

So, if I start with this tool, and I’m holding the chain, and I’m trying to work back to God to prove that I love him, I’m going to live in fear. But God has not given us the spirit of fear that we go back into bondage. He has loved us as his enemy when we wanted nothing to do with him. He pours that love into us through Christ, washes away our sin, and then calls us to step into relationships that will require us to feast on that love-to-love others in the same way.

Look at his conclusion in chapter 4, verse 19.

“We love because he first loved.”

So, he’s not telling us anything new here. He’s bringing all this together.

“We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he’s a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he is not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

So, what is our response? First, we have to begin with God. Open our hearts to God. Leon Morris, in his masterful Testaments of Love: A Study of Love in the Bible, explains,

“To come to see that God’s love is a deep, warm love — a love constantly lavished on us quite irrespective of our merits [in other words, even when we don’t deserve it], a love that cost the cross — is to reach a turning point. It is impossible to experience this love and remain unchanged. A man may respond to it with all his being, saying, in effect, ‘This is tremendous. Deep down, this is what I’ve always wanted.’ He will then open his heart to God’s love and respond with an answering love. On the other hand, he may reject this self-sacrificing love, thus joining the succession of those who put Christ on the cross. What he cannot do is remain neutral. Attempting to remain neutral in the face of such love is itself a rejection, for love like this cries out to be received.”

I mean, when someone loves you this much, you cannot respond, “Whatever.” A “whatever” is a rejection, right? There’s no neutral person in this room, right now. There’s nobody who’s neutral in the face of this love. When you experience this kind of love, when your eyes are opened to this kind of love, when you hear of this kind of love, it cries out to be received. God, why would you do that for me? Thank you! And I pray if there’s any of you this morning who are on the fence, perhaps many of us who believe but right now we’re just not feeling it, to see the way God is going out of his way to tell you “I love you with an everlasting love. There is nothing more I could do to show you that I love you than what I’ve done in giving Jesus.” Will you open your heart to him?

Second, when we open our hearts to God through Christ, John is saying the next response is to open our hearts to one another, that when we experience this kind of love like the woman in Luke 7, it changes us. I can’t say “thank you for pouring this kind of love on someone who doesn’t even deserve it” and then turn around and want to give someone what they deserve. Something’s broken in my brain and heart for that to happen. It doesn’t mean forgiveness is automatic or that we’re going to automatically feel really good about it, or it doesn’t mean steps don’t need to be taken, confrontation, accountability, all that kind of thing. It doesn’t mean that. But it does mean we’re going to be running to God to revisit the forgiveness we’ve been given so that we have that kind of love to pass on.

And one of the specific ways I think the Lord is leading us as a church family to consider this is in light of that dechurching research. What was most surprising to the authors in that book, as discouraging as the overall trend is, is the majority of those who are dechurched are actively open to rechurching, to return. Listen to the way they say it.

“The most important thing to know about [and here they’re talking about one profile, but it’s true across the board about dechurched, mainstream evangelicals] is that 100% of those in our study are actively willing to return to an evangelical church.”

They were so surprised by this data, not expecting it that they decided to field test it. So, they gave the research to a church in Missouri, a Presbyterian Church in Missouri, and they said, “Could you field-test this?” And that church, through technology and personal relationships, reached out to people who were formerly in evangelical churches and now have left. And within a few months, one hundred twenty people who were formerly dechurched were worshiping in their church. For most people, it was simply an invitation. Wow! Somebody cares. For some people, it was trying to reprioritize and not totally order their lives around sports or some other event on Sundays. For some people, there’s deep hurt, and it may mean listening for a long time. It may mean bringing them to church leaders who can repent or apologize or pray with them, where there’s real harm, real harm done.

But what is interesting about this research is it’s coupled together with some new research out of a Harvard professor who surprisingly discovered that there is a correspondence between the decline of church attendance and the rise of hopelessness, loneliness, anxiety, and depression. And this professor had not anticipated that, that there’s a link. And so, we who are privileged to be a part of a very imperfect, but very loving church have an opportunity before us. And I challenge you to think about this this week. Are there people you know who maybe over the next few weeks you could pray about? For some, it’s simply sending a text. For others it might be drinking a cup of coffee or having over for a meal. For others, it may be helping them get reconciled with people. But what would it be like if God’s people who are swimming in his love just said, “Who could I reach out to who might be in a state of being really brittle, maybe even bitter?” They might even dump a bunch of toxicity on you as they pour out what’s in them. But when you’re full of the love of Jesus, you can take risks. You can love people who hate your guts and differ with you. What might that look like, and how might God use that? Would you consider doing that over the next week or two? Homework. We’ll have a test next week.

Let’s pray. God, we are blown away by your love. We thank you. Fill our hearts with awe, the way you’ve loved us. I pray for anyone in here who does not know your love that today they would see how much you love them and then, Lord, what a joy it is to pass that on to other people. We pray in Jesus’s name. Amen.