Love One Another

The Letters of John revolve around a simple command: Love One Another.  It’s not John’s command.  It’s something John heard from his dearest friend right before that friend died a horrible death in John’s place.

“Love one another” is something Jesus says at the last supper.  Jesus and his disciples sit around a table enjoying Passover, the feast commemorating the miraculous way God spares his people from certain death.  At a certain point in the meal Jesus sets down his napkin and says,

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.  (John 13:34, 35)

Have the disciples even registered Jesus’ words?  Peter says immediately, “Lord, where are you going?”  This is because Jesus prefaced the command – the center of the Christian life and, it turns out, the center of the entire universe – with a statement that seems, in the moment, more pressing:

My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.

Jesus and Peter have this exchange:

Jesus: Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.”

Peter: Lord, why can’t I follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.

Jesus: Will you really lay down your life for me? Very truly I tell you, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times!

And here we get to the heart of Jesus’ command.  A simple, impossible command: Love one another.  For us, love is a feeling.  Deep affection.  All-consuming passion.  All too fleeting.  For Jesus, love is an eternal commitment to the giving up of his very life. 

Peter declares, in the moment, that he would give up his life for the object of his affection.  How many minutes has it taken for him to forget that it was Jesus, not Peter who stripped to the waist and washed the waste of the day off his friends’ feet?  How many more will it take for Peter’s all-consuming passion for Jesus to be replaced with an all-consuming passion for his own security?  Love is not a feeling.

Decades later John – the beloved disciple of Jesus – recalls this exchange as the words and actions of Jesus coalesce for him on the page.  Love is not a feeling.  It’s a force.  It’s the force through which the universe was made. 

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.  The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. (1 John 1:1-2)

That force took on flesh, and in the flesh spoke and showed and served up love in dimensions not seen since the beginning.  And through him a way was made – a way out of life in two dimensions into three; out of life in black and white into life in vibrant Technicolor.  Life as it was always meant to be lived.  Love.

So John, a lifetime later, repeats the command that was almost forgotten.  A command so old it predates human existence.  A command so new it undoes the current world order and ushers in a new one:

Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard.  Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and in you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining. (1 John 2:7-8)

Love one another.  As I have loved you – laying aside my pride to meet your basest needs; laying down my life to preserve yours – so shall you love one another.

This isn’t a marching order.  It’s an invitation.  We respond like Peter because we’re afraid of what we stand to lose.  Jesus knows what we stand to gain.  Trust him.  Trust that your act of (and your active) self-sacrifice will change someone else’s life; your life; and the world.  Love one another.  

How to Do Justice

This week's Gospel in Life topic is justice.  Tim Keller connects the concept of justice to the Hebrew term shalom.  Rather than limiting shalom to its closest English equivalent, "peace", Keller defines it this way:

“Shalom means total flourishing in absolutely every dimension: physically, relationally, socially, and spiritually.  It’s the way things ought to be."

He goes on to say,

“Justice is bringing shalom.  It’s love in action.  And it’s something we owe our neighbor.”
Fair enough.  But how do you take an idea so abstract and sweeping and turn it into something you can do?
Ann Voskamp provides a fantastic starting point.  Please take the time to read her post.

"10 Real Ways You Could Really be the Change in the World" (on aholyexperience.com)

Redeeming Work

This week our "Gospel in Life" topic is work.  We were created to join God in the eternal task of giving shape, order and beauty to Creation.  The practical trajectory of God's redeeming work is restoring our God-like capacities to create and cultivate, even as God restores Creation itself.  As such, we can offer all our work as a contribution to God's greater work of bringing order and light to chaos and darkness.
For more on the topics of work and rest, check out the following two links.  The first is a sermon by Tim Keller.  The second is a remarkable article about Sabbath rest by a journalist and author named Judith Shulevitz.  It's the best contemporary defense of the ancient practice of Sabbath I've read, and is well worth your time.

http://sermons2.redeemer.com/sermons/work-and-rest

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/magazine/bring-back-the-sabbath.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm

Gospel Connections

 Our congregation has spent two weeks discussing the ways authentic Christian community translates into compelling outreach.  In this video Tim Keller explains the two essential components of gospel ministry - that is, "word" and "deed".  It's a great complement to our study, and well worth watching.

Assessing Our Idols

Our "Gospel in Life" topic this week is idolatry.  Coincidentally, Ann Voskamp just posted a great list of resources for dealing with the idols in your life.  Follow this link to read her reviews of six books that are worth checking out.

Two Lost Sons and a Missing Older Brother

Passage: Luke 15:11-32

Yesterday we dealt very briefly with the "Parable of the Prodigal Son" as part of our "Gospel in Life" study series.  Where we barely scratched the surface, Tim Keller has taught extensively on the parable.  If you have time, follow the links below and listen to each sermon in his series:

"Give me Mine"

"He Came to Himself"

"To Be Called Your Son"

"And Kissed Him"

"We Had to Celebrate"

"The True Older Brother"

Work and Pray for the City

Passage: Jeremiah 29:4-7

I’m reading Mohsin Hamid’s, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.  It’s a novel disguised as a self-help book, with each chapter devoted to a different step of the process of dragging oneself out of poverty in a developing country.  I just finished a chapter entitled “Work for Yourself”.  In it the author points out that a successful entrepreneur must realize that he or she is not in business for his or her clients.  If you really want to be successful, he says, you work for yourself.

This week our church began the series “Gospel in Life”, by Timothy Keller.  The first lesson opens with a study of Jeremiah’s “Letter to the Exiles”.  In this prophetic word, God tells his displaced people to make a hostile foreign city their new home.  And God adds this imperative:

…seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.

God gives his people the exact opposite instruction of that of Mohsin Hamid’s fictional narrator: “If you want to prosper, work for others.”

God’s command is radical – as radical for us as it was for the exiles.  God’s purposes for us – to “prosper us and not to harm us” – are integrally linked to God’s purposes through us – to restore peace and prosperity and so reveal himself to an unbelieving world.  As God’s people we have to fight the instinct to look after ourselves first.  And instead devote ourselves – in service and in prayer – to a world that is foreign; hostile; and in desperate need of restoration.