The Marks of a Disciple: Arms of Love

January 20, 2013

John 13:34-35
Pat Smith

What does love look like?

I’ve seen love and experienced it in many ways. My birth family, the Smiths and the Kings, loved me over the years and those who are still part of my family extend love to me as brother and uncle. There I find familial love. I have friends and acquaintances, you and others through the years. There I find brotherly love, the care of kindness and generosity that is the best of the human experience. I have received romantic-sensual love that I mistook for something more than it was or simply enjoyed for what it was. I have known for over thirty-six years the love of romance and the deepest stirring of my senses with the woman who has been my wife for more than thirty-five of those years. What a gift love is in all these forms! These loves are common to the human experience in every culture and every time. They are not guaranteed, but they are available to us all. Where they are part of our lives, there we see what love looks like.

We are three weeks into our series on the "Six Marks of a Disciple", six qualities we believe express well the resume of an apprentice of Jesus. you can look at the insert in your bulletin and find what Jim addressed the last two Sundays, a Heart for Christ Alone and A Mind Transformed by the Word. Our mark for this morning is Arms of Love. We are to exhibit love to others. In those settings of family, friendships/acquaintances/connection with every person with whom we come into contact, we are to show love.

Why are we to share love with others? Let's look at our texts for this morning.

We’ll project both texts on the screens, but I encourage you to find both passages and hold your place as we turn first to one and then the other. We start with the gospel of John chapter thirteen, verses thirty-four and thirty-five. What John shares with us in these two verses are words he heard Jesus say. This is an eyewitness account. Then, we will turn in the letter we know as First John to chapter three, verses sixteen through eighteen. As I prepare to read and you to follow along, we need to remember this is God’s holy word. [READ John 13:34 – 35 and 1 John 3:16 – 18]. Every time we read from God’s word, God desires that we would gain understanding by the Spirit. I pray that will be true for each of us here this morning.

So we are to love people who are on the Jesus way with us while also loving all people because the bible tells us so. How can we do this? I hope you were given a business card this morning on your way in. If not, you can get one on the way out after worship. Three words on on the card: share the love. We invite you to take one or more of these cards to carry with you as you go through the next week. Then, be open to ways you can share the love of God with someone else in practical ways. Here are a few examples:

Be kind to every person, smile, and treat others as you want to be treated. These three general suggestions will go a long way as we share the love.

You might:

Shovel/snow blow a neighbor’s walk or the sidewalk in front of your neighbor's house
During your next business lunch, arrange with your server to take care of the bill of another table.
If you like to cook/bake, prepare a meal as a surprise and take it to a friend/neighbor/relative
Pay for the items the person behind you is purchasing in a drive-through or at the coffee shop
Purchase a Target gift card and give it to someone you sense might need it
Let someone go in front of you in a checkout lane
Offer to babysit so a single parent can have time alone or so parents can have a date night
If you know someone in class is struggling to grasp the material offer to help

These are just a few of hundreds of ways the spirit of God might prompt you to show love to someone this week. If there is a way to leave your card as a signature for the person you have helped, do so. It might encourage that person to do something for someone else. One of my favorite examples of this concept of sharing the love in simple ways was my dad. He would occasionally cut flowers from his and mom's little garden, put them in some container, usually an old mayonnaise jar or coffee can, and leave them at people's front doors. So, go share the love!

Look at our texts again this morning. Look at each use of the word "love". It is a love that is costly, sacrificial love. It puts self aside for the sake of another. It is love that could demand or expect to be loved in return. It could love in spite of. But it does none of these. Its sole purpose is to give, to sacrifice, and to empty itself for someone else’s good with no need for anything in return, not even a thought of anything in return. It is a love that gives and gives with no need to replenish or rest. This love-at-all-cost love is displayed with no thought to personal gain. It is extended without condition. It just gives, deeply and without reservation, choosing to put self aside for the sake of another.

Jesus told a story about this love. The story begins with two examples of costly love's opposite. We are introduced to two brothers. One walked away from his own father as if his father were dead to him. He bolted from everything to which he was born. He wasted his life and his father’s goodness until he had nothing and was nothing. The other son remained physically with their father but along the way took a position of deep resentment so that any relationship that existed was one only of duty. This son was, you see, as equally ungrateful as the first, spurning his father as much as the first son ever did. Both these brothers were self-serving and apathetic to the core.

You might wonder where the costly love is in this story that Jesus told. Well, it is the love of the father toward his utterly undeserving sons. His heart surely broke in the ways he was viewed and treated by his sons. He lets them go. He watches for them. He welcomes them. He invites them. He extends his love for what it is—a selfless giving that in full awareness of his sons’ attitudes and actions proves what love is. All other loves have at least a touch of self-serving to them. The love of the father in Jesus’ story is empty of self.

We are all one brother or the other. We run from God or we resent God. We live in such a wretched state. God, in infinite mercy extends the gift of this costly, self-emptying love. One hymn writer expresses this in see words:

How deep the Father’s love for us,

How vast beyond all measure

That He should give His only Son

To make a wretch His treasure

In Jesus' story of the costly, sacrificial love of the father, one son welcomes the deep, deep love of the father and the other does not (at least as far as the story goes).

John makes clear that God loves this way. It is also love we who know Jesus are to give. In our gospel text Jesus tells John and the others that this costly love is the love they have seen in him. “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” How did Jesus live out this costly love?

At the heart of Jesus’ life was love of God and love of people. He affirmed the ancient words that were the heart of Jewish life from the time of Moses: “Love the Lord your God” and “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” In each of these phrases, it is costly, self-emptying love that is expected. So, the very first thing love looks like has to do with priorities. All of life, every relationship is filtered through our love for God and for each other.

We love God by yielding ourselves through heart and mind, the first two of what we refer to here at ZPC as “Marks of Discipleship”. Jim led us to understand that “A Heart for Christ Alone” and “A Mind Transformed by the Word” is the right place to start. It is only with hearts and minds focused on God can we possibly understand what Jesus did and said about our relationships to people. If our heart is right, if our mind is the mind of Christ, our love will reflect Jesus more and more.

That brings us back once again to what a life of costly love for others is. Jesus told John and the others, “Love as I have loved you.” We can look back over the whole three years of Jesus' public ministry and see how he loved. He loved when he told people to turn from their selfish ways and yield to God. He loved when he told people that those who knew how far they were from God were actually the closest to God because in that realization they were acknowledging their need of God. He loved when he pointed out the corrupt, hypocritical ways of the religious establishment who were desperately in need of God but could not see it. He loved when he told Nicodemus he must experience a rebirth. He loved when he told a woman he was living water that she could have. He loved with every story about the real, true kingdom of God. He loved when he shared that God’s ways were not about outward appearances but, no surprise to us at ZPC, about heart and mind.

He exhibited this love through specific actions of acceptance and care and healing. He talked with people to whom no one else would speak. He exhibited care and concern for mothers on the way to bury their sons. He responded to an officer of the occupation forces who asked him to heal his daughter. When diseased people who were considered unclean called out to him, he listened and healed them. He played with children, honored women, welcomed the opportunity to interact with the powerful, related honestly to the poor and in every case, was motivated by a heart for compassion, seeing all people as if they were sheep without a shepherd, lost and in need. In no moment was it any clearer than when, on the same night he said "love one another," he took the form of the lowest servant in the household pecking order and washed John’s feet and those of the rest of the disciples. Jesus’ love was servant love,

So, how have you lived servant love, costly love, for your wife or your husband lately? How have you lived servant love, costly love, for your parents or your children? What about with your students or teachers. How about with your employees or your employer? Have you been servant, costly lover to people you pass on sidewalks, see in parking lots, who shop in your store, who go to church with you? Can you picture the last time you stripped off every vestige of self, wrapped yourself up in nothing but Jesus’ love and did something solely for someone else’s sake like Jesus?

John goes on to tell us that Jesus didn’t leave this kind of costly love in the upper room on the night he was betrayed. He also exemplified it fully when he submitted himself to the Father’s will and faced deep humiliation in a very public and painful way on the way to, and then hanging on, the cross. He could at any moment have called it all to a halt, put on the breaks, announced it was time to step back into full control of the universe. He chose to keep all those possibilities under control and allow the worst to happen. He was degraded. People ridiculed him, beat him, spat on him, whipped him and belittled him. He took it all so he could show people then and us now what love looks like. It is costly. It is sacrificial.

Already the winner of three Golden Globe awards, the film version of Les Miserables is the story of one man in chains who finds his way to forgiveness, mercy, grace and oh, yes, costly love as he lives an increasingly unchained life for the sake of others including the misguided and his sworn enemy. In the finale, as he leaves this life to enter into his fully just reward, he and two women who also sacrificed themselves for the sake of those they love sing these lyrics. First, Val Jean to his adopted daughter, Cossette:

On this page

I write my last confession

Read it well

When I at last am sleeping

It's a story of those who always loved you

Your mother gave her life for you and gave you to my keeping

Then, with Fantine, her birth mother and Eponine:

Take my hand

And lead me to salvation

Take my love

For love is everlasting

And remember

The truth that once was spoken:

To love another person is to see the face of God

Each of these three fictional characters laid down their lives in costly love and their testimony rings true. Look at John’s words in his letter again:

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for one another. If any one of you has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in you? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.

“Without you showing costly love, the world will not know love.”

Maybe it starts with “Forgive me.” And then, step into a life of selfless love!

The apostle Paul writes of costly, sacrificial love in chapter thirteen of 1st Corinthians. He lists first things we can accomplish for God. Here is this impressive list. In our service for God we can:

Be Eloquent
Make God's will known
Bring understanding
Bring solutions
Make things happen
Give all to the poor
Endure hardship

But, Paul writes, we can do all this and more and do it without an ounce of sacrificial, costly love. And that would make all these good deeds empty.

He continues with a list of characteristics that describe this love. This morning I am going to share a list of sacrificial, costly love's opposites. See if any of these characteristics describe you. Are you ever:

Impatient
Unkind
Envious
Boastful
Proud
Put others down
Insist on my way
Easily angry
Remember wrongs
Celebrate misfortune
Delight in falsehood
Harm
Distrust
Hopeless
Give up

When any of these characteristics describes our attitude or actions or feelings toward a brother or sister in Christ, it is an indication that we have just fallen short of love. In those moments we are not what love looks like.

Gary Burge, Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, points out that the greatness of the Father’s love is actually a rather shallow translation into English. The real force is that this love comes from another country, one of astounding distinction, where love doesn’t mean what it means in our land, like a voice coming from another universe altogether. He writes, “God’s love is so unusual, so unearthly, so unique to our experience, that we barely expect its result.” I would say we would not expect it at all. The result of this other worldly love is that we are now named with God’s name with a permanent place in the family, a permanent place at the table of the Ruler of the universe. This makes us an enigma to the rest of the world. And herein is our best clue to what it means to be God’s arms of love.

What does love look like? It looks like Jesus. It is to look like you and me.