Christians Are People Who Love

Once upon a time, a Christian man died and went to heaven. He was welcomed through the pearly gates by the Apostle Peter. No sooner had the man arrived in heaven than he made a special request.

He asked Peter if he could, for just a moment, catch a glimpse of what hell was like in order that he might appreciate being in heaven all the more. So Peter arranged that, for just a brief moment, a window into hell be opened for the man to look in.

This is what he saw. To the man’s astonishment, he saw a long table, stretching into the distance as far as the eye could see. On the table were all sorts of delicious foods. But the people who were sitting at the table were very unhappy. In fact, they all seemed to be starving to death.

The man asked Peter why it was that in the presence of all this food, the residents of hell were so desperately hungry. Peter said, “Everyone is required to take food from the table only by using the special four-foot long forks that are provided. The forks are so long, though, that no one can get the food from the table to his mouth. That is why they are starving.”

As the window to hell closed and the man pondered what he had seen, Peter welcomed him into heaven’s banquet room. Imagine the man’s shock when he saw an identical table, laden down with identical foods in heaven’s banquet room.

But the people who were sitting around heaven’s banquet table were obviously happy and well-fed. The man asked “What do we use here in heaven to take food from the table?” Peter answered “We use the same four-foot long forks that they use in hell.”

“Then how is it that the people here in heaven are happy and well-fed, while the people in hell are starving to death?” the man asked.

“That’s very simple.” replied Peter. “In heaven we feed each other.”

There are three tests of a real Christian in the book of 1 John. We have already seen two. Let’s remember what they were:

1. the test of obedience:

1 John 2:3 We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, “I know him,” but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him.

Are you really a Christian? Do you really know Jesus? It’s going to show in your obedience to him. You’re going to walk the talk. Your Christianity is going to make a difference in how you live.

2. the test of truth

1 John 2:21-22 I do not write to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it and because no lie comes from the truth. Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ.

Being a Christian is a combination of belief and behavior. You start out in the Christian life by believing that Jesus is who the Bible says he is. You believe the truth about him. You cannot be a Christian if you do not believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Anointed One of God, the Messiah, the Savior.

But the Christian life is a lot more than just believing certain truths about Jesus. Your belief is going to impact your behavior. And that brings us to the third test of a real Christian…

3. the test of love, which we want to look at today:

1 John 3:11 This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another.

1 John 3:14 We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers.

The third test of a real Christian is that he loves others.

John 13:35 By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

There are four things we need to know about love in this passage:

1. A command

2. A caution

3. A confirmation

4. A character

The command is found in v.11: We should love one another.

A week from this Friday is Good Friday. Did you know that the day before Good Friday is called Maundy Thursday? How did it get that name?

The word “maundy” comes from the Latin word “mandatum”, from which we get our words “mandate”, and “command”. It was on the day before his death, in the Upper Room at the Last Supper, that Jesus gave his disciples the new command, the new mandate that is found in John 13:34:

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.

That is his mandate to us and to all his disciples… that we love one another. Now it should be immediately obvious that Jesus is talking about a different kind of love than the kind of love we usually talk about.

Most people think that love is a feeling. We talk about falling in love, or falling out of love, of being overcome with feelings of love, and so on. We say things like “I just can’t love that person. He rubs me the wrong way. I just don’t have any feelings of love toward him.”

Now if love is a feeling, you can’t command it. Feelings have a mind of their own. You can’t control them.

But this is not the kind of love that Jesus is talking about. He’s not talking about “feeling love”, he’s telling us to love one another as an act of the will. The love that Jesus says we should have for one another is a doing kind of love, not a feeling kind of love.

Jesus didn’t command us to feel love for one another, he commanded us to love one another. There’s a world of difference.

So what does this mean? What if there’s someone in your life who’s giving you a hard time, someone you’re having trouble loving, what should you do? Should you wait until God sends you some feelings of love toward that person before you love him?

No. You get busy, as an act of the will, as a conscious decision, to love that person. You take the initiative. Try to find some way to express love to that person. Now notice that I didn’t say try to find some way to express your feelings of love for that person. You can’t do that because you don’t have any feelings of love for that person!

But you can take the initiative and show that you care about that person. Do something nice for them. Extend an open hand of friendship. Do something for them that you would like them to do for you.

And you know what you will find? You will find that motion creates emotion. Whenever you begin to love someone as an act of the will, in obedience to the Lord’s command, you’ll find that pretty soon, your emotions will get on board. Your feelings will change toward that person. You will begin to have an emotional investment in the well-being of that person.

It may take a while, but sooner of later that will happen. It works in marriages. If the spark of romance has gone out of a marriage, the partners need to get busy being nice to each other. They need to take the initiative to show love and concern, and pretty soon the romance will be back.

It works in interpersonal relationships. Abraham Lincoln understood this principle when he said that the best way to deal with your enemies is to turn them into your friends. He understood that feelings of friendship just don’t happen, they take work. You have to take the initiative.

It even happens in your relationship with God. Perhaps you feel like the excitement has gone out of your walk with the Lord. Maybe you feel distant from God this morning. How do you get back to your first love? Do you wait for the feelings to come back before you make your move?

No. The answer is in the book of Revelation, chapter 2 and verse 5. The Church at Ephesus was a great church. They had great programs, they had great preaching, and they probably had plenty of parking.

But there was something they didn’t have. They didn’t have their first love for the Lord anymore. They had lost their zeal. They were just going through the motions. Their hearts weren’t in it.

So the Lord told them “Repent and do the things you did at first.” Start praying again. Start praising again. Start reading your Bible again. Don’t wait until you feel like it, just do it. Do it by faith. And your motion will create emotion.

Who do you have trouble loving this morning? Why don’t you decide, with God’s help, that starting today, you’re going to begin to love that person as an act of the will. Do it as an act of faith. Do it because Jesus commanded it. Do it for him.

And see if he doesn’t do a work in your life. See if he doesn’t bring healing in that relationship. See if he doesn’t change your emotions towards that person.

There is a caution in this passage as well. It is found in v.12

1 John 3:12 Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous.

Cain’s hatred for his brother Abel happened for two reasons. First, Cain was a child of the devil. He “belonged to the evil one.” Cain was following the devil’s script, not God’s. And anytime a person takes his cues from the devil, hatred and murder will result.

But secondly, Cain murdered Abel because he was envious of Abel’s standing with God. You remember the story in Genesis 4. These two brothers had brought their sacrifices to God. This was the very first worship service we read about in all of human history.

Think about that. The seeds of hatred and murder started to grow in church. And to this very day, some of the worst things people have done to each other, they have done in the name of religion.

Abel had brought a lamb from the flock. Cain had brought some fruit from his garden. And the Bible says

The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.

Why did God accept the one and not the other? Was it because God was playing favorites? No. The answer is in the book of Hebrews

Hebrews 11:4 By faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did. By faith he was commended as a righteous man, when God spoke well of his offerings.

Abel offered his sacrifice by faith. In Scripture, faith is always our response to that which God has revealed to us. When God says to do something and we do it, that is faith.

I believe that God had revealed to Cain and Abel what kind of sacrifice He was looking for. Abel obeyed the instructions, Cain did not. Abel brought a blood sacrifice. Cain brought his own works, the fruit of his own labors. God says to Cain in

Genesis 4:7 If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?

Cain must have done wrong. But Abel obeyed God and did what was right. It’s as simple as that. And Cain was seething with anger against his brother. He hated him because God had accepted him. So he killed him.

The word here in 1 John 3 actually means that he butchered him, he slaughtered him. He dismembered his brother. There was violence and malice in his heart.

What a tragedy! The first family torn apart by hatred and murder. And it began in church.

Never underestimate the power of hatred. If it takes root in your life, it can eat you alive. Bitterness and hatred have no place in the life of the authentic Christian. Such things are literally of the devil. Such things are the hallmark of death.

And Christians can often be the target of such feelings from those who are in the devil’s family. It is no wonder that John says in v.13:

Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you.

Thirdly, there is a confirmation given to us in v.14

We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death.

John tells us how a person can get from death to life in…

John 5:24 “I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.

And he tells us here in 1 John 3:14 how to know that you’ve crossed over. Love for one another in Christ is the confirmation. If you are loving others, you have crossed over.

There was a young man named Duncan McColl. He was a British soldier in the Revolutionary War. It so happened that in the course of one of the battles that McColl was given a very dangerous assignment that would bring him under the barrels of the American guns.

As he carried out his mission, an American officer commanded his men to hold their fire. The officer told his men that he believed that that British soldier had work for God to do.

History proved that officer right. After the war, Duncan McColl went into the ministry and settled in Canada, along the St. Croix River in New Brunswick, just over the border from Maine. He founded a church in St. Stephen, NB. Members came to worship from both sides of the river, Americans and Canadians worshiping alike.

When the War of 1812 between the British and the Americans came, McColl taught his members that they were brothers in Christ. He taught them to love one another. So they ignored the war and they continued to worship together. And they are worshiping together in that church to this very day.

That church set an example for those two communities and today St. Stephen, New Brunswick and Calais, Maine are bound together with ties of brotherhood and good will that stemmed from Duncan McColl and his little flock of Christians. They were people who took seriously God’s command to love one another.

Love is the confirmation that you are a real Christian.

Finally, there is a character whose example we are to follow as we love one another. The character is Jesus Christ. You all know what John 3:16 says. But look at 1 John 3:16:

1 John 3:16 This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.

John 3:16 says that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. And 1 John 3:16 says that in that giving, there was a laying down. Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.

Mabel Shaw was a missionary in Africa many years ago. One day, she made a visit, on foot, to a leper colony. It was quite a journey through the African bush. She stayed with the lepers a few days, ministering to their needs, and then she was about to return home.

But but just before she left, news came in that the road on which she had to walk was unsafe. There was a pride of lions in the area, and for Mabel to walk home alone would be very risky.

Mabel was determined to go ahead anyway, even though her friends in the leper colony tried to persuade her to wait. Finally, when they realized that she was determined to make the journey, one of the lepers spoke up and asked if he could go along with her.

Mabel was dubious. The man was weak and feeble. She knew that he would be of little help in time of danger. She tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted on coming. Finally, she asked him “Even if you came with me, what do you think you could do if we were attacked by the lions?”

And the man answered with quiet dignity, “I have a life to give.”

Love is having a life to give and being willing to give it.

There’s an old story about a young couple who were in love. They were sitting on a park bench in the moonlight one night. The boy turned to the girl and said “Alice, I love you so much, I would die for you.”

And Alice said, “Oh Harold, you keep saying that and you never do it.”

Not many of us will ever be called upon to die for love. But we need to understand that the kind of love that Jesus demonstrated is not always a matter of life and death. It has some practical everyday dimensions to it as well. John gives them to us in verses 17-18:

If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.

Shakespeare said “They do not love that do not show their love.”

Sir Ernest Shackleton was a great British explorer. He’s best known for his expeditions to the Antarctic. On one of those expeditions, he and his party came within an eyelash of starving to death.

They were holed up in a hut in the midst of a tremendous Antarctic blizzard that had lasted for two weeks and showed no sign of letting up. Their food was running out and they could not travel back to their base. Each man was down to a ration of one biscuit per day.

They were all asleep one night when something woke Shackleton up. Somebody was stirring in the darkness of the hut. Shackleton could just barely see that one of the men was reaching over to one of the other man’s mess kits.

His heart pounded as he waited to see what the man would do next. He feared that he was about to witness an act of treachery.

But then he saw the man reach into his own pack, take out his own biscuit and place it carefully into his friend’s mess kit. The man lay down and went back to sleep, unaware that Shackleton had seen his anonymous gift of love.

Real Christians love like that. They love because Christ commanded it. They love because they know that the desperate alternative to loving like Christ is hating like Cain.

They love as a confirmation of the fact that they have crossed over from death to life. And they love the way Jesus loved, laying down his life, setting aside his priorities and his prerogatives, sacrificing his own convenience and safety, taking the initiative in order to reach out to us.

Christians who love God also love each other. May that be true of us today.