Perfect Love
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When I was younger I liked to play the original Super Mario game. One of the difficulties of that game is that there was no save, there was “checkpoint”. You had your lives, and if you lost them it was game over. You had to go all the way back to the beginning. Console get unplugged? Too bad, start over.
Oftentimes the games you play now you don’t have that same issue. You die and then you re-spawn. You save your progress and you come back later. There is a part of the game that is particularly difficulty, you have unlimited opportunities to attempt to succeed at the task. That is a nice feature to have. What it gives you is no fear. You can try something, even if it is risky, because you know that you will have another chance. Even if you die of emotional damage you have another chance.
It is a lot like God’s love, like we will see today. Last week we talked about what it means that God loves us, today we are going to look at how important it is that we live in God’s love. How it can help us to lose fear we might have in our lives and push us to deeper love for others.
God is love
God is love
This starts by stating not just that God has love, but that He IS love. We talked about this a few weeks ago. To say someone has love is to say that they have the capability of loving. Everyone, even the person we might conceive as the worst person in the world, has the capability of love. Whether it is love for a spouse, for a family member, for a pet. To say God IS love is to not just state that He has the capability of love but that He can never be anything but loving.
But God’s love is not just any love, it is also a perfect love. A perfect love that casts out fear. What does it mean that love casts out fear?
-It says that there can’t be fear because “fear involves punishment”.
-That any fear comes from a place of a negative consequence. Even if not rational, every fear comes from a place of believing there is a threat. And in fearing this threat you punish yourself before you even begin to suffer
-God’s love isn’t perfect because it ignores we have sin or pretends we are perfect. God’s love is perfect because His work of love in sending Jesus to die was so that we may be forgiven of the sins we have committed and have no fear of judgment. Perfect love doesn’t accept sin and failure, it overcomes sin and failure.
-In fact what God’s love allows us to do is be unashamed about what Christ has done for us. When we go before God on the day of judgment we don’t stand before Him confident in how amazing we have been, we stand confident in what Christ has done for us. If we had to explain all that we had done then we would be condemned before God.
-What John says is that this love God has for us means that we cannot live in fear of God’s judgment if we are a believer and we aren’t in this love if we continue to fear His judgment because it means we haven’t become fully convinced that His love can cover all of our sins.
-”Does this mean that if I ever have doubts about my salvation then I am not saved?” Well, no. I think John Calvin puts it well. “Fear is not cast out in such a way that it does not assault our minds, but it is so cast out that it does not disturb or hamper the peace we obtain by faith.… When anyone fears (that is, has a disturbed mind) it is the fault of unbelief. For when the love of God is properly known, it calms the mind.”
-So it means we have confidence even when we have doubts.
-This is one of the most incredible truths that we could be told, because it tells us that we don’t have to live out lives in terror every time we make a mistake. It means we don’t have to get angry at ourselves for not being a perfect student or a perfect son or daughter. It means we can free ourselves to seek our best even when it means we might fail. Going back to the video game analogy. Sometimes you will make a mistake in a video game, but that mistake doesn’t mean you can’t complete the goal, it doesn’t mean you will never finish the game, it doesn’t mean you just quit and never try. Because you know the game gives you forgiveness. God’s forgiveness is even greater. Now, if you never learned from your mistakes in the game, if you kept trying to do the same thing even though it didn’t work, if you got angry and said it was the games fault that you couldn’t finish it then you wouldn’t complete it. But as long as you continue to grow and learn, as long as you play by the rules of the game, even if you have moments of frustration, you can get to the goal. That is the promise we have in a God who drives out fear from us.
God’s love gives us confidence
God’s love gives us confidence
God’s love encouraged us to love others without fear. There can be fear in loving others. Fear of rejection if you are asking someone out. Fear of humiliation if you do something embarrassing. And many other things
But we do not have fear in loving others because God first loved us when it would seem as the most embarrassing thing that you could imagine. “Love those sinners over there? Those screw ups?” Yet He loves us anyways.
How many of you know who Ashton Kutcher is? Did you know he has a twin brother? But his brother actually has cerebral palsy. A disorder that gives you weakness in your muscles and makes it difficult to move or grab things.
Something that wasn’t commonly known until in a 2003 interview Ashton Kutcher shared that his brother had cerebral palsy. His brother said originally that he was angry but later said that him doing that was the “biggest favor he’s ever done because he allowed me to be myself.”
See, when we view others as screw ups, a mistake, less than us, not as important. When we prioritize our friends feelings over other peoples feelings. When we make things about us and ignore what other people are struggling with. We are telling them that they need to be better than what God made them to be. That they need to change so that they can be loved. But God loves us just as we are, with all our warts and our mistakes. He allows us to be who He meant us to be not by ignoring them or by saying that we are perfect but by saying His love is enough to love us even when we are broken.
This is how we are to love others, as God has loved us. We aren’t called to love the perfect people but the broken people. Perfect love drives out fear, but is also drives out hatred. We can’t hate someone and also understand God’s love for us.
Because when we understand just how much God has loved us. When we recognize all the things that God has forgiven us for, and yet we are not able to love someone who has done something minor against us, then we are showing we really don’t understand how much God loves us or we don’t care. It means that we would rather hang on to our anger towards another person rather than let go and be thankful for how much God has loved us.
Or even more, our hatred towards others is just ignoring the fact of the terrible things we have done to others. To act like someone has done something so much worse to us than we have done to another person even though all of us could probably think of terrible things that we have done to others.
But loving others doesn’t just mean tolerating others. It means actively showing our love to those around us. If we are unwilling to love others, if we refuse to show kindness and compassion towards those around us.
If we can’t show this towards others than we truly don’t have love for God or understand His love for us.