Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, July 14, 2024
by Dr. Miles Hopgood, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: Love is not abstract or ephemeral, but concrete and lived. We know that God is love because of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, and from this we learn the true meaning of what it is for us to love one another.
Within the genre of love songs, there is the somewhat melancholy group of ballads which wrestle with the nature of love and our uncertainty about it. Sometimes, the cause for this question is the emergence of new feelings and desires that we can’t quite describe. “Is this love that I’m feeling?” asks Bob Marley. “I want to know.” Marley wants to share his shelter, his room, his bed with someone. Is this love, or is it something else? Other times, the question arises from deep hurt surrounding disappointment with love. “What is love?” asks Haddaway, continuing with the earnest plea, “Baby, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more.” Other times, the question testifies to a desire to overcome heartbreak and give love another go. “In my life, there's been heartache and pain, I don't know if I can face it again,” admits Mick Jones of Foreigner before crying out, “I want to know what love is!”
Sadly, 1 John is not a power ballad, but it still has something to say about love that is as poetic as any of the lyrics above. “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:8). We too want to know what love is, and here we are given the answer. Were the chapter to stop there, we would just have an overly saccharine pop number. Where this idea finds its truth and depth is in what follows. “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us,” (1 John 4:9-10a). Here the author builds on the themes about love from Chapter 3. God’s love is not an abstract love, coming to us from far off like the words of a sympathetic chorus cheering you on. The truth and action of love referred to earlier (3:18) are God’s incarnate and self-giving for us in Jesus Christ. This is what it mean for God to love us.
Just like the children of God that we named in 1 John 3, we too are meant to be like God in this way. That is also an aspect of love we learn about in these verses. “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. […] We love because he first loved us” (3:11, 19). Just as our joy is completed in sharing the good news with others, God’s love finds its completion in us as it makes us into instruments through which God’s love is experienced and known. The revelation that God’s love is incarnate and self-giving reveals the character of our love as well.
