What Love

1 John 3:1-10

“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are” (1 John 3:1). What a great message to receive! God loves us enough to claim us, not just as a part of creation or even as servants, but God loves us with the love a caring parent has for a child. And that is what we are, children of God. What we receive from our Creator is divine involvement in our lives, sustenance for the journey, light for the darkness, hope for the crisis, encouragement for the challenge, shelter from the storm, and so much more.

Our world has a great many definitions for love. Too often it has come to be associated with lust or desire, overshadowed by the need to control one another, seen as a sort of narcotic. But the love that God has for us is a self-giving love, one that seeks what is best for us and what is best from us. Imagine Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians 13 set alongside those from 1 John. We are God’s children and so we experience God’s love as patient and kind, not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. We discover that God’s love bears all things. We are assured that God’s love never ends.

No, we are not specs of cosmic dust or grains of sand on some universal beach. Not in God’s eyes. We are loved, and that is the greatest news of all.

Prayer: Lord God, we cannot fully understand your love for us, but help us to embrace it and to share it with others that all may know you as a gracious parent. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

“Getting To Know You…”

1 John 3:1-10

“The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know God” (1 John 3:1). I wonder about this verse in light of our contemporary culture. I realize that when it was written there was an enormous majority of people who had never heard of Judaism, let along Christianity. But what does this passage mean today?

The fact is that there are few people who do not know something about the Jewish and Christian faiths, but the issue lies in how that knowledge the way people live. A list of the 10 best speeches in history ranked Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” as number 2 (right behind Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech). Jesus’ “speech” was ranked second purely because of it’s value as moral instruction, not because it was spoken by the Son of God. How many people in the western hemisphere do not know the significance of Easter and Christmas? Yet where is most of the emphasis placed? On gift giving and retail sales. When the Cadbury Co. can say “No bunny knows Easter like we do” it provides an interesting commentary. And the familiar Christmas song “Here Comes Santa Clause” includes the line, “Say your prayers to the Lord above, ‘cause Santa Clause is coming tonight.” How have those two concepts become related? I even remember a time when one of the major oil companies used Noah’s Ark as a promotional giveaway: fill up the tank and receive a set of two animal figures.

The world knows about God. But the world—and too many people of faith—seem content to allow a skewed version of the story of salvation to pass as truth. Easter and Christmas remain profoundly significant without gifts or major purchases. Jesus is the Word of God incarnate; what he says is life-giving not merely instructive. And the stories of faith should do more than prompt consumer choices. They should compel us to reexamine who we are and what we hold as essential. So maybe it isn’t that the world doesn’t know us, maybe it is that we do not know ourselves.

Prayer: Lord help us to live as your people and not according to the world’s version of who you are. Amen.