The Search For Love
In this Advent season we have been exploring the biblical concepts of Hope, Peace, Joy, and (today) Love, and how we see all of these concepts at their fullest in the Christmas story of the incarnation of Jesus into our world as our Savior. Today our focus is on Love.
We all seek out love and feel the great blessing of it. But the sad reality is that many of the worst things that have happened to us have been done by people that we loved or who loved us. Our highest of highs and lowest of lows revolve around Love. So, we clearly need a better version of Love than what our world offers us. Simple phrases like “Love is love” really don’t cut it. It’s so broad that it essentially loses all meaning. So, let’s look at probably the most famous passage in the Bible to see how Jesus embodied perfect love.
Nicodemus comes to ask Jesus questions and Jesus introduces the need to be born again in order to achieve eternal life with God. It requires the special knowledge and work of someone heavenly, the Son of Man.
The question ever since the prophets was, who is the Son of Man? How do we get right with God when we can’t seem to follow the Law? How is someone actually born again to eternal life with God?
14 “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.
Context of Moses and the bronze snake being lifted up. Lifted up alludes to the cross but also simply means that the Savior needs to be made visible and accessible to be believed in.
16 For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.
The Origin of Love
The first thing we see is the Origin of Love. For God loved. Man can be born again and have eternal life with God because God loved. This wasn’t a meet-cute from a rom com where two people who both have some good qualities happen to meet each other and they discover that the other is someone they want to be with. God loves because he is loving, not because we are inherently loveable. The inclusion of “the world” also emphasizes this. John isn’t referring to the world like this is the Planet Earth documentaries that highlight how cool the animals and environments are and how diverse and beautiful our planet can be. He’s referring to the world as the fleshly, sinful world or people that live in opposition to the rule of their Creator. The world where greed, theft, murder, and brokenness are so pervasive. That is the world that God loves, because of who he is.
Sadly, we often balk at this. Because we want to feel that we are inherently loveable. For example, if your spouse or romantic partner asks why you love them, they are not going to be satisfied with you saying that you just love them because you are loving. They want to hear what about them that you love, that they are beautiful and fun and that they bring something to your life makes it fuller. This is why many people gravitate toward things like legalism or ritualistic forms of religion, because it gives us some feeling of agency or that we bridge some of the gap between us and God with our own merit and then God steps in to complete the deal. But we see here that it is God’s love that covers the whole gap.
Now don’t take this to mean that we should hate or demean ourselves. Instead, we can react like John does. He refers to himself in this Gospel as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” That’s not him bragging about Jesus’ best friend. He’s saying that the most important part of his identity is that Jesus, God in flesh, chose to love him even as a sinner. The love of God being rooted in His unchanging character gives us an unshakeable foundation for our life and faith. John writes this himself in 1 John 4
17 In this, love is made complete with us so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment, because as he is, so also are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love; instead, perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment. So the one who fears is not complete in love.
If God’s saving love had nothing to do with your and my good qualities and behaviors, then we don’t have to be afraid when our bad qualities and behaviors happen. God doesn’t love you more or less based on how good your quiet time was or how well you dealt with your anger or lust each moment. So you can grow in obedience to him not out of fear that He’s going to realize that you may not be totally loveable, but out of gratitude and assurance that He is infinitely loving.
The Action of God’s Love
I really prefer this translation saying “God loved the world in this way.” We are so used to “God so loved” and that leads us to focusing on the quantity of God’s love, that he loves us so so much. While that isn’t heretical or completely wrong, I think in this way is the more clear translation of the Greek here. Instead of focusing on how much God loves, it focuses on how God goes about loving the world, the manner of it. This gets to the beauty of Love itself. True love is not simply an emotional response or deep feeling. Love leads to action. We love by acting on the behalf of someone else, by serving and sacrificing. The affection and emotion should motivate action. So what action did God take as a sign of his perfect love? He gave. We’re in the middle of the biggest giving season of the year. Your house is probably full of gifts both for you and from you for others. Giving, when done right, is inherently sacrificial. You give a gift to someone because you want it to be beneficial to them or to bring them joy and happiness. You use your money and your time to obtain these gifts. Hopefully, you haven’t done this in order to insure that you get great gifts back from the recipients. At that point, it’s trade or transaction and not a gift.
So, the sequence we are seeing here is that there is a need for us to be born again in order to experience eternity with God. The solution to this is initiated by God’s perfect and essential love. God then acted out that love by sacrificially giving. We are getting a clear picture of how love works and who is really doing all the work when it comes to Salvation.
The Extent of God’s Love
Don’t worry if you love the translation of “God so loved” because this text clearly also talks about the quantity or extent of God’s love when it tells us what God gave, His one and only Son. The amazing love of God motivated Him to give his absolute best. He gave an essential aspect of himself. Restaurants or business often do giveaways to customers. They might comp a drink or appetizer or a store like Ulta or Sephora might give away a travel mascara. It's nice to get something for free, but the store can make that up on the margins. But God’s gift of his son is like if the restaurant gave you a 3 pound tomahawk ribeye or whole King Crab or if Ulta gave you a whole set of Nars or Urban Decay (insert expensive makeup). You’d be blown away, because that truly costs them something. That’s the give we have in Jesus.
In chapter 1, John does this amazing job of trying to describe how unique and magnificent Jesus is. He has been with God eternally, He is by nature God, He is the source of all light and life in Creation. And it is this person who took on flesh and lived with us. And he didn’t just give us the gift of his special, bodily presence on earth. He gave up his own life by dying on the cross to save those who were still actively sinning against Him and would continue to do so. Focusing on the infinite value of the Son of God communicates the extent of God’s love far more clearly than just saying that God so loves us.
The Goal of God’s Love
so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
This ups the stakes of what God’s incredible love actually accomplishes for us. It shows us that there is a horrible outcome to avoid. Being born again and achieving eternal life isn’t just an upgrade to our life, like how we reach the highest level that is possible. That would mean that we are in a neutral place that can only get better by accepting God’s love. But we already established that we are part of the world, that is actively rebelling against God.
What the outpouring of God’s love through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus did for us is to take perishing or dying and having to face the full penalty and consequence of our sins off the table. We can live in the relief and freedom of knowing that our worst outcome is no longer a threat to us, we are no longer enemies of God.
Romans 8:1 “There is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus”
1 Corinthians 15:55 “O death where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory?”
This is the Good News of the Gospel. But we need to finish out the passage to see why this great gift isn’t always accepted, and why we don’t see the love of God cherished and put into practice across the world.
18 Anyone who believes in him is not condemned, but anyone who does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God. 19 This is the judgment: The light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil.
The Conflict of Misguided Love
The theme of God’s light overcoming darkness is pervasive throughout Scripture. It starts all the way back with Creation. It is a huge theme in Psalms and the Prophets (especially Isaiah) and John focuses on it in all his books. The problem for us is that the darkness of trying to live without God isn’t something that is imposed on us without our consent. All of us love parts of it. We kinda like being our own god sometimes. So, everyone is fighting this battle in their hearts between the perfect Love of God for them and their own love for the darkness of the world.
For skeptics and unbelievers, this may mean that they never want to receive God’s love and forgiveness. They either don’t think that they need it or are unwilling to submit their lives to God’s love at the expense of giving up their closely held love for themselves and the world.
Even for Christians who have believed in who Jesus is. We still experience this lifelong conflict between our two loves. Because here is the truth of it, our love for ourselves and the darkness of the world has been with us longer than our love for God. We loved darkness first, before the light of God’s love broke through thanks to the work of the Holy Spirit and believers who faithfully shared the Gospel with us. So that is why the Christian walk can be difficult and often feels like this tug of war back and forth (Paul In Rom 7:15, I don’t do what I want, and I do what I hate).
So to answer Nicodemus’ original question, How are we born again, especially when we know that we have these conflicting loves within us? Firstly, we need to acknowledge that this is only accomplished by the active and perfect love of God on our behalf. And then we are called to believe in Jesus, in who is really is and what he came to do out of love. Believe is repeated 7 times from verse 10-19 of John 3. Believing is how we are born again away from perishing and into eternal life with God. This goes beyond just mental assenting to the truth about Jesus to acting on it and living it out.
Needing to open Christmas presents is a good illustration of how this works. Someone has already earned the money or skills needed to buy or make a gift for you. They have acquired the gift, wrapped it up, and brought it to you. But it doesn’t matter how awesome a gift is if you leave it under the tree and refuse to open. You will not benefit from it, even though all the work has been done for you to receive it. If you currently believe, the gift is there for you. You can accept it today and start to experience the love and light of Jesus in your life.
For Christians: First, find your peace and rest in this love of God. This can be a restless season, but we have a sure source of rest in the love of God that comes from his perfection, not our weakness. We can see the grand plan that is spelled out throughout Scripture and the immeasurable scope of God’s love in Christ.
And then, like any other gift that we receive, we get more benefit and joy when we use a gift as much as possible. Don’t act like the love of God is on the shelf or shoved in some drawer. We who have experience God’s perfect love need to do our best to imitate and replicate that love to the world around us. 1 John 4 expands on this:
7 Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.
19 We love because he first loved us. 20 If anyone says, “I love God,” and yet hates his brother or sister, he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21 And we have this command from him: The one who loves God must also love his brother and sister.
This is the heart of our “Love the Few so we can love the many” code. Let’s not squander this incredible gift but use to its fullest.