“This is the message you have heard from the beginning,” writes John “that we should love one another.” (v 11)  This is the message.  “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” (v 16)  This is the message.  It may or may not be news to us, but may it always be new.  This is the message, and we will keep on speaking it and keep on hearing it as long as we have breath and as long as we have hearing.

Of course, it’s not simply about speaking and hearing.  It’s about responding in trust and with love.  “And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.” (v 23)

In the early centuries of the church (4^th century in fact), a story was told of John the Apostle.  When age laid its hand upon John and he became frail and unable to walk, he would be carried into the gathering of believer’s each Lord’s Day.  They would ask him to bring a message each week.  This was John the Apostle!  Each week John said the same thing to the people who gathered – “Little children, love one another.”   After some weeks, some people approached him.  Same sermon week after week.  They said to him, “Why do you always say this?”  John replied, “Because it is the Lord’s command, and if this only is done, it is enough.”

How much do we need to hear and live this message today?  How much does the world need to hear this message and know the invitation to live in the love of God today?  “Ball of Confusion” was released by The Temptations 55 years ago.  Ball of confusion.  That’s what the world is today.  I don’t need to list the reasons why this continues to hold true, and I suppose in many ways its always been true.  “The only person talking about love thy brother is the preacher” they sing.  So let’s go.  Let’s come before God and ask for help as we hear God’s word.

During these weeks we have we have looked at loving God with our minds (the renewing of our mind/our outlook), our hearts and souls (the part of us that goes beyond words/the seat of our emotions/wills/intentions) and this week our strength – our bodies, our physical selves.  Throughout this time we have been emphasizing two things.  The first thing is that we are not separating or compartmentalizing these three parts of ourselves.  We are talking about loving God back with the totality of our being.  The second is that the command “you shall love” is rooted and grounded in the truth that God is love and that God loves you.  To respond to God’s love with our “I love you back” is to present ourselves to God every day with an “I am yours.  Be in all I do and say this day.”  It is to let our minds and souls be saturated with the good news of Jesus; with the promises of God.  It is to live with hearts full of thanks and joy that goes beyond circumstances.  To respond to God’s love in Christ is to be brought from darkness to light, from death to life.  It means that the call on our lives is to glorify God with our body.  “For you were bought with a price,” as Paul writes, “therefore glorify God in your body.” (1 Cor 6:20)

Paul is writing to the church in Corinth.  There were a lot of problems in the church in Corinth.  Paul cites a slogan that was presumably going around in Corinth in v 13 – “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food,” and God will destroy both one and the other.”  The misconception here is an elevation of the soul or mind over the body, a type of mind/body dualism that put things of the soul or mind over things of the body.  With this kind of thinking in the church, people were arriving at the conclusion that how one satisfied bodily appetites did not really matter   In this case specifically it was sexual appetite and Paul is writing here of sexual morality for those in Christ.  “Shun fornication!”, writes Paul, and the fornication here is specifically sex with prostitutes.  Paul takes the opportunity to lay down some truth.  “All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are beneficial.  “All things are lawful for me,” you say, but I will not be dominated by anything, writes Paul. (v12) 

Paul takes the opportunity to lay down some truth about our bodies when it comes to our faith, and it’s really quite amazing.  I don’t know that there is so much a soul/body dualism around today, though it’s persisted in the popular imagination that sees Christians sitting on clouds in a heavenly afterlife playing harps and things.  It persists maybe when we want to separate spiritual matters from temporal matters.  It persists maybe in thinking it doesn’t matter what we do with our bodies as followers of Christ as God will give us new ones anyway; or it doesn’t matter what we do with the natural world because God is going to destroy it anyway.  Paul lays down some truths which show that matter matters; that the material is not immaterial; that we are called in Christ to glorify God (in other words make God’s ways known) with our bodies.  “The body is meant not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” (6:13b)  So when it comes to the love of God, let’s get physical.

This is wild.  It’s all rooted in Jesus.  Jesus is God made flesh.  This is why we make such a big deal of Christmas.  The word made flesh and making his dwelling place among us.  Jesus died and Jesus was raised, which is why we make such a big deal of Good Friday and Easter and continue to come to the cross and to the table week after week and month after month.  What does this have to do with our bodies?  “God raised the Lord, and will also raise us by his power.” (v 14)  The promise under which we live as followers of Christ is not some future disembodied existence, but being given (by the gift of God’s grace) new bodies in a new heaven and a new earth!  Jesus’ raised body is the first fruits of this resurrection of our bodies.  Not only that, Paul goes on, but “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” (15)  We are not Jesus, but we are joined to Jesus in a way that goes beyond my ability to articulate or even comprehend – mystic union in such a way that we are the body of Christ.  Letters of Christ.  Christ’s ambassadors in order that God’s ways be made known in word and deed.  “Anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him (because there is a spiritual angle here too!).” (v 17)  The Holy Spriit is in on this too because we’re always trinitarian.  We’re talking about the importance of our bodies – “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and not you are not your own?” (19)  God with us.  God’s Spirit within us.  A gift.  I am not my own, neither am I ever on my own, because of the God to whom I belong.  I was bought by God at a great price. 

Therefore…Glorify God in your body.  Our culture has a way of valuing certain kinds of bodies.  What Paul is describing means that in Christ, our bodies have value.  No matter our age of health status.  Our bodily existence in Christ is to make Christ known.  The power of the risen Christ at work in us.  The power of the Holy Spirit at work in us.  This is an all of life thing.  This does away with any thinking that faith is a private matter, something that is just between me and God.  It’s between all of us as the body of Christ together (metaphorically speaking) and it’s between us and everyone we encounter as we go through our days.  As someone has said, “Christ’s reign must be demonstrated in every area of our lives, and there can be no area of life reserved for personal desires and practices that conflict with the sanctification that God has declared over us.”

“You are not your own,” Paul declares.  In not being my own, I find freedom.  Life in Christ, belonging to Christ is not simply being prohibited from, but being freed for.  For what are we made free?  We bring it back to John’s words.  “Little children, love one another.”   Love is the first fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22), the virtue which goes on over all other virtues (Col 3:14), and the greatest of the three gifts that abide – the one that never ends and the one we are nothing without. (1 Cor. 13:2, 8, 13)

In Christ we are made free to love.  At the cross we see what love looks like.  Why do we speak about living in the shadow of the cross?  Why do we come back to the cross time and time again?  Why do we remember Jesus’ sacrifice again and again at this table?  Why did Paul say he was Paul determined to proclaim Christ crucified?   “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us…” (1 John 3:16a)  We have been talking about loving God with our minds – our minds being renewed, being given by God a new way to perceive, a new outlook.  We talked about loving God with all our heart and soul, that part of us that goes beyond words, the inner seat of our wills/intentions/emotions.  We are talking today about love being expressed in bodily action. The cross is God’s love being expressed in action in response to our need – humanity’s need for rescue, for wholeness, for deliverance, for forgiveness.  A way being made to live in loving fellowship and communion with God and with one another.  Treasure above all treasures. Gift above all gifts. Given freely by God in Jesus.  We’ve been talking about this verse in 1 John from the beginning – “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1 John 4:10)  Jesus, the example and enablement of the love of God.  Jesus, the message and the medium of God’s way-making love.  The Psalmist sang “You open your hand, satisfying the desire of every living thing.” (Ps 145:16)   On the cross we see the open hands of God extended in sacrificial love for the world that God had made.

How else could we live but in the same open-handed posture?  “- and we ought also to lay down our lives for one another.  How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” (1 John 3:16b-17)  The love of God is more than a feeling.  The love of God is more than words.  We need to be getting this right in the church.  We are peculiar people in Christ in Christ’s church.  John Stott wrote of what love looks like in the church: “…followers of Jesus Christ, who have ‘passed from death to life’, hunger for Christian fellowship. They do not ‘give up meeting together’ (Heb. 10:25), but delight to worship and pray together, and to talk together on spiritual topics, while their personal relationships with each other are marked by unselfish and caring love.”

“Little children, let us love not in word or speech but in truth and action.”  John is not discouraging kind, comforting or encouraging words here.  Love looks like something.  The essence of love is self-sacrifice which has been perfectly made known in Jesus.  His followers are called to the same.  John gets quite specific here, which is good.  We’re not simply called to an unspecific general love for capital “H” Humanity.  Few are called to sacrifice their lives for another, thought of course this is not unknown.  John’s words are for everyone and here they are again – “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the worlds goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?”  Let us love not in word or speech, but in truth and action.  Talk is cheap. Love is not simply a sentiment and not simply words.  Love that is only words is not love at all.  The love of God in us seeks the good of others, and leads to activity on their behalf, even to the point of it costing us.  Someone has said that love is the giving impulse.  The expression of love is found in the giving of time, material goods, money, ourselves.  Recognizing that all is grace – all is God’s gift.  The literal meaning of the Greek in v 17 is reflected well in the King James Bible.  The bowels of compassion being the splanchna – the deep visceral care for others – “But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?”

“Little children, love one another.”  The message hasn’t changed.  So dear family, let us love in deeds and in truth.  May our coming to the table today signify our willing participation in the body of Christ as the body of Christ in the world.  May the self-sacrificing, giving, open-handed love of God be reflected in all we do.  Beloved of God, may this be true for us all.  Amen