Beloved, if God so loved us,
we also must love one another.
God demonstrated his love for us when "sent his Son as expiation for our sins". In doing so he set us free from those sins, which were always, though in different ways, failures of love. The extreme measures he took to accomplish this make him eminently lovable, as a bridegroom that spared no effort to save his bride.
No one has ever seen God.
Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us,
and his love is brought to perfection in us.
God is invisible. He is not like a creature where our good behavior may help them and our bad behavior may harm them. Thus, he expects us to demonstrate our love for him by the way that we love one another. This is a valid demonstration because in doing show we show love for what he himself loves. Also, when we do so, it means we allow God to have his way within us, since it is with his own love that we ourselves are called to love. The origin and means of our ability to love is from God. He himself guides us as we seek to love him, showing us how to love others for his sake.
This is how we know that we remain in him and he in us,
that he has given us of his Spirit.
The evidence of the Spirit at work within us takes the shape of lives lived with faith, hope, and charity, grounded in the basic fact "that the Father sent his Son as savior of the world". The Holy Spirit is the origin of our faith, since he reveals to us what flesh and blood cannot. He is the guarantee of our hope, since we possess him as God's love poured out, and the first installment of our eternal inheritance. He is the one who leads us to love, making us bear all the fruits of the Spirit in our lives.
We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us.
God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him.
When we agree with the Holy Spirit and acknowledge the truth, especially the truth about Jesus as Lord and Son of God, we grow in faith. When he convinces us of God's love for us we grow in hope. This is like the psalmists invitation to taste and see (see Psalm 34:8). The more we taste, the more we desire. Knowing the truth and desiring the truth tends toward living for the truth, which means cooperating with the charity God has placed in our hearts, letting it flow out to the world.
In this is love brought to perfection among us,
that we have confidence on the day of judgment
because as he is, so are we in this world.
It is interesting to note that confidence about the day of judgment is not an automatic and unshakable belief that Christians acquire at the moment of conversion. It is something in which we grow as we grow in faith, hope, and love. Then we see that things are working as intended, and it becomes increasingly unlikely, though not guaranteed, that we are free from self-deception. We are not promised an absolute certainty of our salvation. But we can have a moral certainty about whether or not our hearts are alive in charity. This isn't an abstract moral calculus so much as a conviction of the reality of our relationship with God and the transformation he is accomplishing within us. It will in fact look different for each individual. Some may perform highly visible acts of great love. The love to which others are called may be more hidden. Some will struggle in an obvious public way with sin. But even this does not necessary mean they are disqualified or that they are not undergoing transformation. Only God knows our hearts. Hence, only he can give us confidence about their condition. And we can only possess that confidence by growing in relationship with him.
There is no fear in love,
but perfect love drives out fear
because fear has to do with punishment,
and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love.
Fear of punishment is a valid motivation. It is reliably accessible even when we are not experiencing the consolation of God's presence. It is helpful to remember that hell is real and that people may in fact go there apart from the grace of God. This means that even if we don't feel sufficient love for others to help them receive the Gospel we may still be concerned enough for them to do so without the aid of those feelings. But the more we grow in love the less we will have to fall back on such fail-safes. We won't be motivated by our desire to avoid suffering, or because we want to feel certain consolations, or because we want to receive certain gifts from God himself. More and more we will desire the giver rather than his gifts. And the more we realize his goodness, the more convinced we are of his love, the more we will desire him for others as well.
But at once he spoke with them,
“Take courage, it is I, do not be afraid!”
He got into the boat with them and the wind died down.
What begins as a storm of conflicting and unreliable motivations gradually gives way to the peace of being rooted in that which is alone unshakable, where alone we can true rest: God himself.
Shane And Shane - Psalm 34 (Taste And See)
No comments:
Post a Comment