Beloved First & Behavior Second: How does the Gospel order our welcome? ~ 1 John 4:7-21

⁷ Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹ This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. ¹⁰ This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹ Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. ¹³ This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. ¹⁴ And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. ¹⁵ If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. ¹⁶ And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. ¹⁷ This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. ¹⁸ There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. ¹⁹ We love because he first loved us. ²⁰ Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. ²¹ And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister. ~ 1 John 4:7-21

In rock climbing beta is everything. Beta refers to information necessary to complete a climb, specifically hand and foot placement and the order in which one should do it. You can be really strong, mentally tough, and yet have the wrong beta and be unable to complete a climb, particularly more difficult ones in which precision is of utmost importance. Your hands and feet moving precisely to the right place at the right time and in the right order can be the difference between being able to move up or spinning off the wall – which also has a name – it’s called barn-dooring. This reality of order is also true when seeking to understand the welcome that God extends to us and the welcome that, we are told, we must extend to others. So our text from 1 John will serve as our beta for welcome.

1.    “Beloved” – the order is everything!

 The NIV translators of 1 John do something that I find a bit frustrating. They take a word from the Greek and in their effort to make it understood unfortunately make it mundane. They translate Ἀγαπητοί (the first word in vss. 7 & 11) as “friend.” Ἀγαπητοί, however, literally means “beloved.” Its root is agape - love. It’s the first word in our passage this morning, the first word spoken in John’s soliloquy on “love,” and the first word one needs to hear in order to understand welcome rightly. The order is everything. Before you do

anything, you are “beloved.” Before you are asked to believe anything, you are “beloved.” Before you repent, before you are transformed – you are “beloved.” Before there is a “how,” a particular behavior that you are asked to do, there is a who – “beloved.” Before you can welcome others you must also learn that you are welcomed yourself.

 This is more than a sentimental remark. To understand love, to experience it rightly, to show it faithfully, is not mustering up some feeling, it’s acknowledging a chronology – that God has always loved you. God does not say you are “beloved” if you first become law abiding, or respectable. We are NOT beloved, John tells us in vs. 10, because we “loved God” but because God “loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” So God’s love does not wait for people to come asking for love and forgiveness. God already has and always will make the first move – loving broken, hurting, sinful people before they ask for it or even acknowledge their need for it. So our belovedness is not contingent on our response to God. God loves you 525,600 minutes of every year, regardless. You will never be able to welcome well until you realize that.

 You are beloved BEFORE you believe or accept anything. But there is something for you to believe and something for you to do because there is something you need – your sins need to be atoned for and your love needs to be transformed. Love does not believe nothing and mean anything. This is why theology is important and why we can’t simply use the term “love” and imagine that we are all saying the same thing. We know what love is by understanding who God is as a “lover” first because God is love and love comes from God. In vss. 9-10, 14, John grounds our “belovedness” in a story of belovedness- that God loves us and aims to save us from our sins. Beloved doesn’t mean that you don’t need saving, that you don’t need atonement. It does mean, however, that you were loved before you even knew that you did.

 So you do not need to become a Christian to be beloved. You become a Christian because you already are beloved and recognize your need. Yet, that is not the whole story, John tells us. We are not simply a community of belonging, a group of beloveds. We are also a community of transformation, who understand that God transforms us so that we can love one another.

 2.    Beloved, become a Christian in order to be “beloved” for others.

 One does not become a Christian to make God love him or her. That is already taken care of. One becomes a Christian in order to love God back and in order to love others in the way that God wants. You become a Christian, in part, in order to be “beloved” for others.

 How does one become a Christian and how does that help us love others? And the answers and order are once again critical, according to John. We become a Christian by acknowledging Jesus, by receiving the Spirit, and by living like Jesus without fear and hate.

 Acknowledging Jesus and receiving the Spirit (vss. 13-15). First, to become a Christian is to acknowledge Jesus as Savior and Lord. It’s to recognize that God loved us, John tells us, by sending “his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him” (vs. 9). God in Jesus Christ makes amends for us. And John says in vss. 14-15, “And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. ¹⁵ If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God.” Essentially, one becomes a Christian by “welcoming” God. When that happens, we are then empowered by God’s Spirit to be able to love others in the same way that we were saved. Love according to John is not merely a choice but a pneumatic reality (vs. 13). “This is how we know that we live in God and God in us: God has given us God’s Spirit.” And God’s Spirit is responsible for the actual change of heart and change of life. Notice how we are to love like God, which means that we are also to love others first before they change or perhaps behave as they should. That doesn’t mean that behavior doesn’t matter. It means that we are not the ones who transform others – God by his Spirit does. Our job is to help people recognize their “belovedness.” But it’s not simply acknowledging Jesus and receiving the Spirit. We are also to . . .

 Live Like Jesus (vss. 16-17). Unwelcome and patterns of unlove are typical human responses – to love only our own, to fear the stranger, to scorn the enemy. If John is right, we shouldn’t imagine that we can “love” as God intends on our own power or with our own thinking. We need Jesus not simply as savior but also as our model for welcome. We need to be saved not simply from our sins. We need Jesus to save us from “cooties.” You remember “cooties,” right? Those

imaginary germs that children use to play infection games in order to mark and exclude others. It’s when playground talk sounds like the CDC tracking an Ebola outbreak somewhere. Psychologists, however, show this behavior to be hard-wired in us and modeled for us by others. Adults, in other words, play cooties as well. Think of all the adjectives we use to convey feelings of revulsion about people we don’t like. We call people creepy, slimy, icky, rotten, repellent, nasty, awful, bad, vile, gross, nauseating and revolting. These words reveal social emotions which link a germ-like avoidance with our social world. These feelings are the battle ground of hospitality. Let me give an illustration. Psychologists brought people into a laboratory to show them an old sweater. They told the participants that the sweater was once owned and worn by Hitler, and they invited the subjects to put the sweater on. Would they be willing to do that? And if they did, how would it make them feel? Most people refused to put the sweater on. Those who did put it on said they felt icky and uncomfortable wearing it. Participants didn’t believe in actual cooties but they acted as if they didn’t want to wear or be near Hitler’s sweater because they might become morally polluted. We know this is irrational; that evil isn’t a germ that contaminates us like a bacterial infection. Jesus models for us a way of life that challenges this germ-infested spirituality. Jesus, it turns out, would have put on the sweater. He welcomed the marginal, blessed them, ate with them, loved on them. The Gospels are extended object lessons on how to love and respond to people. The Apostle Paul in Romans will sum this up very precisely in Romans 15:7, “⁷ Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”

Without fear and hate (vss. 20-21). We now live in a world where it seems that one’s faith in anything is determined and illustrated by the purity of one’s life and the willingness for the pure to call-out anyone for wrong doing and grind them into dust. In this context, to “hate” is seen as one’s religious duty and the clearest signal that one is devout.  John, however, suggests that the quality of one’s Christian faith is not determined and illustrated by the purity of the practitioner but by the consistent expression of love in the face of fear and hatred. “Whoever lives in love” - love defined by Jesus’ life and death and our willingness to believe and follow – “lives in God, and God in them.” (vs. 16). You cannot love God, John insists, if you hate others (vs. 20-21). Fear and hatred, however, seek to undo God’s welcome. They turn

us into monsters. Who is the real beast in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast? It’s not the beast, but the guy screaming, “Kill the beast!” Who is the real monster, Frankenstein or the mob carrying pitchforks? It’s just like Nietzsche once warned: Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.

Beloved, we must beware of the temptation to rely upon hatred and fear as religious motivators. They have a certain allure but they are hoaxes like many of the internet hoaxes that generate a lot of angst and effort but serve unhelpful ends. According to John, the most ironic oxymoron is a hateful Christian.