Learning Love                  1 Peter 1:22-23

 

Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart. 23 For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.

 

 Some children wrote letters to God. "Dear God, I bet it is very hard for you to love everybody because there are only 4 people in our family and I can never do it." Nan.

   

Here's another, "Dear God, You said we should love everybody. You've never met my brother George" Sincerely, Mary.

    

Love is easy to discuss among Christians as a general principle but when we bring it home to individuals that can be another matter. Is it possible to love someone, but not like them?  Is it possible to like someone and not love them?

 

Peter reveals  some things about love in his letters to the churches.

  

    Last week we wrote about the reverence we need toward God. Peter was pointing the readers once again to the tremendous work of God and the marvelous salvation that is ours by his grace.

    

We are not redeemed with things that pass away and are temporary, but rather with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.  Christ indeed is sinless. There was no need for him to die for any crime or wrong doing. That is why the Jewish readers would understand the implication of the sacrificial lamb killed in the temples for their sins so that blood covered their personal wrong doing.  The picture was vivid now that God took that place in the person of his own son, Jesus Christ.

   

1 John 4:9-10 "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. This is love; not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins."

   

When we say love is spiritual, we must acknowledge three things First, Love is initiated by God through the death of Jesus for you. He loved you.  He redeemed you; He bought you.  This is what we are proclaiming by communion. The blood was the price; the broken body was the offering. It was for your sakes that Jesus came from Heaven. It was love that initiates from God, not from us. That is what we reverence Him. That is why we worship Him.

  

Secondly, that love from God it to be responded to by his followers.  We receive His love and love Him back. The greatest of all the commandment is to 'love the Lord your God with all your heart or mind or soul your strength." Without love of God and love for God we do not understand what real love is. It is spiritual.

   

The third thing about spiritual love is that the Spirit of God does something within us that allows us to be the vessels through which His love now flows. Here is where we come not to the passages of today. When one commits themselves to obey the truth they receive from God His Spirit. They have been born again.  We are new creatures in which the Spirit of God lives.  That is spiritual love.  It is not something that comes and goes. It is permanent. It is holy it is living and active.

    

Edward Rogers, in his book, That they might have Life says, "I began to feel that there was something subtly and tragically wrong in any emphasis on the agony of the cross which dimmed the brightness of the Resurrection, any suggestion that it was endured pain rather than overcoming love which secured man's salvation. Is it the darkness that covered the earth at noon, swirling round the pain and anguish of the Cross? Or is it the dazzling, mysterious early-morning brightness that shone from the empty tomb?" The cross was a means to an end. The end was the glorious life of love planned for us in Jesus.

    

Salvation begins with us as a decisive act but has an ongoing response.  It is an imperishable seed. The word of God takes root within responsive soil. We want to be Holy because He is Holy and Holy love is spiritual love. It is reflecting the character of our creator.

    

We can only understand love if we begin to understand it as a gift from God received and desire to share it to others. Unless we know the author of love, all other expressions are mere imitations and temporary.