1 John 3:16–18
“[16] By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. [17] But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? [18] Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.”
We know love, we have felt loved, because God has loved us in his son Jesus. The cross is the most significant, singular event, and momentous occasion that displays God’s one-way love for us.
All of us abandoned Jesus (Jews and Gentiles, yes—even us, even though we were not there, they represent all of us).
Even God the Father abandoned Jesus the Son (“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” [Psalm 22]).
But in no way did Jesus, as Son of God or as son of Adam, abandon us. Jesus loved perfectly in thought, word, and action.
And so John moves from talking about God’s love, to Jesus’ death in action (an event that happened now long in the past), to action regarding the money we hold in our hands and withhold from others (a decision that reflects what we believe in not only talk but action, even right now).
How does God’s love abide in the one who refuses to love not just in talk, but in action? Well, the Bible’s hard word of law to us is: It can't. It doesn't.
Jesus laid down his life for us, which means that if he really did that for me, then it means practically that I’m going to become a person who lays down my life for others too. Not just in talk, but in action.
John spells this out for us by saying: What you do or what you don’t do with your material possessions is what you really believe inside your heart. You might say you love God with all your heart, or that you “believe the gospel,” but if you’re not someone who can give up cash for a friend in need, or be there for a friend in need—do you really know how much God has loved you?
This is a hard word to hear, I know. It’s most definitely a word of law, not gospel.
But it’s also a necessary word. It’s necessary because the gospel is true, and Jesus has fulfilled this law for all who believe. And because the gospel is true for me, and for you, the gospel has the power to change us from the inside out.
Jesus chose what would be best for you by being born as a human to live a perfect life for you and by going to the cross to die for you.
Each day, we are faced with opportunities to do what is best for others by giving up our resources, or our time, or our affection for the sake of other people. This is love in action, and it requires a greater source than we can muster up from within ourselves to continue to invest and pour out into others. But by giving up our rights for others, and by giving up ourselves for others, and by pouring out ourselves for others, we participate in that great mystery of losing one’s own life to find it.
There is always loss with this movement of self-giving and self-sacrifice, but there’s even greater gain because the one who loved us so much that he gave us his only son held absolutely nothing back from us.
In Christ, God has loved us perfectly, infinitely, and indefinitely.
Pause on that for a minute. Seriously. Go back and re-read that sentence and internalize this objective fact about you, if you are in Christ Jesus.
We already have joy, hope, and love abiding in us and gifted to us in Christ.
So, let’s walk and not just talk.
Let’s love others as we have been so widely and deeply loved. This is a kind of love that was not just a word, but an incarnate word. Love was enfleshed in Jesus. Love was embodied by Jesus. This is a love that was not God’s talking about how much he loved me or you, but he is still acting as a distant, far off, and far removed god. No, God never just said he loved us. God did love us. And there’s a big difference there. God loved us not just by talking about loving us, but by demonstrating his love for us.
As Jesus said before he did what he said his disciples should do, “No one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for his friends.”
So let’s love in word and deed, in talk and truth, in speech and in action, just as God has loved us and will always love us.
“Love does not think about doing works,
it finds joy in people;
and when something good is done for others,
that does not appear to love as works
but simply as gifts which flow naturally from love.”
