The Why of Christian Discipleship
We’re continuing our study of the letter of First John, a short letter written towards the end of the first century by the apostle John to a network of churches in and around Ephesus. John wrote several things in the New Testament and is probably the most expansive writer in the Bible, writing in three genres: Gospel, letter, and apocalypse. He wrote about Jesus’ first coming, second coming, and what life should look like for Jesus’ followers in between.
Today, and again next week, we’re going to look at why disciples love in 4:7-21. We’ll do verses 7-12 this week and 13-21 next week. This is the most concentrated section in the Bible on love, which is amazing coming from one who, as a young man was described by Jesus as a “son of thunder.”
The main point of verses 7-12 is that God wants us to love one another because God loves us. Specifically, God’s command to love is motivated by assurance and by sacrifice. First, we’ll see love motivated by assurance (vv. 7-8, 11-12). Second, we’ll see love motivated by sacrifice (vv. 9-10).
Love Command as Motivated by Assurance
In verses 7-8 and 11-12, John says that love is motivated by assurance. Why should Jesus’ followers love one another? To reveal that we belong to Jesus.
I said a few weeks ago that we all love love. Mark Dever says that nothing in our culture is more highly valued but more poorly understood than love. The culture wants us to think that love is that feeling of butterflies in our stomach when we’re romantically attracted to someone. There’s nothing wrong with romance, but the Bible says that romance isn’t the same as love. The Bible says that love is giving our life for the good of someone else. Out of that can come all kinds of romance and affection. But we mustn’t equate the two. Love is giving our life for the good of someone else. Love is a choice, not a feeling.
How do we know that this is what love is? Look at 3:16, “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us.” What’s love according to John? Love is serving people, not consuming people. Love is being on the look-out for how to help others, not on the look-out for how to use others. Love is a tangible sacrifice for the good of someone else. Love is painful, deliberate, generous, and sacrificial. Love is dying so others can live. Be wary of a love that costs you nothing. Are you more concerned with how others love you or how you love others?
In verse 11, John says that God’s love comes with a moral imperative, “we ought to love one another.” This isn’t a suggestion or best practice. The love command is a necessary result of God’s love for us. His love for us demands that we love one another.
The command to love one another isn’t an optional part of our walk with Christ. It’s fundamental, non-negotiable. Without it, you don’t have the real thing. Failing to love means failing to understand the gospel. When the gospel is truly received it changes us into people who love.
Love Makes the Invisible Visible
In verse 12, John says that love is how to make the invisible visible. Love amongst brothers and sisters in the church is how an invisible God becomes visible. It’s proof that God’s life is in us and that his love is being completed, or “perfected,” in us.
Love for other believers is one way we can be assured that we’re saved. Verse 7, “Whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.” Loving other believers proves that we’re born again and truly know God. Not loving other believers proves that we don’t know God (v. 8).
We’re supposed to love all Christians everywhere, but this command especially applies to other believers in your local church. The “one another” commands in the NT are for those who’re pursuing Jesus together in a specific time and place. How do you forgive, serve, or encourage Christians you don’t know? These commands only make sense in the context of a community of faith. This is one reason why church membership is so important, it tells us who we’re supposed to love.
The love command is the umbrella command that all the other commands fall under. Serving, praying, encouraging, forgiving one another are all ways we express our love for one another.
True love has to have meat on it. It’s not feelings. It’s tangible and visible. We know this because of how John describes the nature of God’s love in verses 9-10. He says in verse 8 that God is love, and then in order to not leave that as an ambiguous idea, he tells us what that means in verses 9-10.
Love Command is Motivated by Sacrifice
This leads us to the second motivation we have to love one another, the sacrifice of Jesus in verses 9-10. John is pointing us where to look to see God’s love. What does he point to? The incarnation of Jesus in verse 9 and the death of Jesus in verse 10.
God’s love is seen (“made manifest”) in the Father sending “his only Son into the world” (v. 9). God the Father chose to send the only Son he had into the world. This is amazing. Everyone’s favorite holiday exists because of this event.
Christianity is different from every other religion because God came to us instead of expecting us to come to him. Every other religion says you have to work for it. Christianity says its all about grace, about God doing for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves.
And the end of verse 9 says that God did it “so that we might live through him.” You may say, “But I’m already alive!” You are physically, but you’re born dead spiritually. This is why Jesus says you must be “born again” in order to enter the kingdom of God (Jn. 3:3). Spiritually speaking, until God works in your heart, you don’t desire him or want to honor him. You’re spiritually dead in sin. But God didn’t expect dead people to make their way to him. Instead, he sent his own Son to bring them to himself.
This “life” isn’t just a future existence in heaven. John says he wrote his Gospel so that we may “believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing we may have life in his name” (20:31). And Jesus says that he came so that “we may have life and have it abundantly” (10:10). There’s a life right now that Jesus has for us. Paul says the same thing: “To live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21), and “When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Col. 3:4). God loves us so much that he wants to give us a new life right now.
Verse 9 says that one reason we know God is love is because God, who is spirit, put on human flesh in order to give us new life spiritually, and a brand-new life. Not a new way to live, but a new life. God sent us this new life in Jesus because he loves us. God didn’t send a concept of love into the world. He sent himself.
“To Be the Propitiation for Our Sins”
Then John says in verse 10 that God’s love is seen in Jesus’ death. He uses some language here that we need to think about. This word “propitiation” isn’t a word we use anymore, and it’s only used three times in the New Testament. Your version might translate it “sacrifice of atonement.”
The Greek word is hilastrion and it means “to turn away wrath, to appease or satisfy anger.” What verse 10 is saying is that the Lord pays the debt to justice himself. I’m following Tim Keller’s outline here from a sermon he preached on Romans 3, the only other place in the New Testament where “propitiation” is used.[1] There are three things to consider here: God’s justice, paying a debt, and the Lord doing it himself.
God’s Justice
God’s wrath is his anger against sin and evil. It’s his settled opposition to what’s wrong. It’s not crankiness or a bad temper. God can’t let evil things go, justice must be done. But people don’t like the idea of an angry God. Many downplay this idea and focus on the love of God. But we can’t pit anger and justice against love and goodness. Why? Because it’s love in our hearts that makes us angry at injustice.
Keller tells a story of a woman who was struggling with how the wrath and love of God relate. She was watching two people she loved very much sink into drug abuse. She said, “I felt fury in me and wanted to shake them. ‘Can’t you see,’ I said to them. ‘Don’t you know what you’re doing to yourself? You’re becoming less and less yourself every time I see you. Don’t you know what you’re doing to the people around you?’ Real love stands against the deception, the lie, the sin, that destroys. Anger and love are inseparably bound in experience. And if I, flawed, narcissistic woman that I am, can feel this much pain and anger over someone’s condition out of love, how much more a morally perfect God who has made them? Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference.”
Her point is that the reason God is so angry at the sin and evil that’s destroying the human race and the world that he made and loves, is because he’s so full of love and goodness. If he weren’t, he wouldn’t care. The more you love, the more angry you get at sin and injustice. People say they hate a wrathful God, but then you don’t have a loving God. Modern people don’t like the idea behind propitiation, but to pit love against justice doesn’t make sense.
Paying a Debt
When someone wrongs us, there’s only two things to do and both entail suffering. One thing we can do is find a way to hurt them. But if someone wrongs us and we pay them back and make them suffer, evil wins. How? We become a harder person, more cruel, and it’ll be easier to pay back someone the next time. And if we pay people back, they’ll never see the truth of what they did. They’ll want to pay us back, then we pay them back, and on and on it goes and evil wins. So if we make them suffer and pay the debt, evil wins.
The other option is to forgive. What does that mean? It means that we suffer. We bear the loss of getting even, money, reputation, or whatever. This is the only way we stay soft-hearted instead of hard-hearted, the only way evil doesn’t win, the only way the perpetrator will ever see the light.
When a wrong is done to us, either they suffer or we suffer. The debt can’t be willed away, it has to be paid through suffering.
If the debt can’t be willed away but must be paid through suffering, then how much less could an absolutely just God let the sins go that are destroying the human race? God is doing on the cross cosmically what we have to do individually. He’s paying the debt to his own justice. People say, “Why can’t God just forgive us?” But we can’t just forgive either. Forgiveness always entails suffering.
The Lord Pays the Debt Himself
In Greek mythology, people sacrifice their own kids to appease the gods. We see that as awful, primitive, and barbaric. Many think that God is some angry deity who just needs to be appeased. But here in First John we see that God himself “sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (v. 10). God pays the debt to justice himself.
The Trinity boggles our mind but is a huge help here. God is one God in three persons. On the cross, it was God himself coming in the form of Jesus Christ and not demanding our blood or our child’s blood but shedding his own blood. It’s the opposite of paganism and barbarism.
Jesus is “the propitiation.” He’s not the propitiator, making use of something outside of himself to avert God’s anger. He’s the propitiation. The righteous one is also the offering. God takes his own punishment.
Do You Understand this Love?
There’s nothing else like this message in the entire world. This message frees us from trying to perform for God. It empowers us to forgive those who hurt us. It quenches the deep ache in our soul. It satisfies our heart with a love that we long for. It compels us to love people. A God this loving is worth following, worth worshipping, worth sacrificing anything for.
Why do disciples love? Because God loved us and sent Jesus to give us life by dying for us.
John says that if we really understand this love, it’ll start to change the way we think about others, it’ll change the way we treat other people in the church. We’ll move toward them with tangible love. “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (v. 11).
Have you really understood this love?