Leithart
1 John 4:7-8: Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
Let us Pray
Heavenly Father, You have eternally loved Your Son with the love of the Spirit, and You have revealed that love by sending Your Son to be a covering for our sin. Pour out that love on Jon and Lindsey, we pray, that their life together may be a continual manifestation of the eternal love that You are. Through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You in the eternal communion of the Holy Spirit, ever one God, unto ages of ages. Amen.
More than any other passage in the New Testament, 1 John 4 surveys the whole spectrum of love. John exhorts us to love one another, but he doesn’t merely exhort.
The foundation of John’s exhortation is the declaration that love is the very nature of God. “God is love” – that can only be said of the God of the Bible, the God whose name is Father, Son and Spirit. Allah cannot be love. The distant Deist God of the 18 th century cannot be love. The pantheistic God of ecological idolatry cannot be love. The Unitarian God of American civil religion cannot be love. These gods, these idols, cannot be love, and their love for men, if it can be expressed at all, cannot express what they are in their deepest reality. But the true God, the living God, the God revealed in Jesus and in the Scriptures, is love. He’s eternally and essentially love because He essentially and eternally lives in a communion of love, joy and peace, as the Father loves the Son through the Spirit, and the Son responds in love to the Father through the same Spirit. God isn’t play-acting when He comes to us as our gracious Father, our loving Bridegroom, as the Spirit who is love. He’s not adopting a pose, or clothing Himself in alien colors. God is the love He manifests; the love He manifests is God.
The supreme display of the God who is love, of the Love that is God, is the gift of the Son, who is the Light of God coming in flesh. “In this is love,” John says, “not that we loved God but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” To say “God is love” is correct, but imprecise. God is a certain sort of love, the certain sort revealed in the story of Jesus. In Jesus, in the gospel, we receive the great good news that the living God not only shows but is self-giving love.
This gives us a rich context for understanding what marital love is all about. The love that God is, the love that God displays in Jesus, is the model for the love that you, Jon and Lindsey, should cultivate for one another. You’re called to love one another with the same self-giving love. But God’s love is not just a model for yours. John says, “the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in Him.” God’s love is not only the model but the source of your love for one another, and you can love as you ought only if you abide in His love.
John says something even more remarkable. No one has beheld God at any time; God is light, unapproachable in His brilliance. But when we love one another, abiding in God as He abides in us, His love is perfected in us, and His ineffable light shines in and through us. As you abide in the God who is love, your marriage becomes a parable of the self-giving love that God is. When you abide in Him, your marriage will be a bright living icon of the gospel. As you remain in Him, your marriage displays the kaleidoscopic love of the invisible God of Light.
In modern English, “love” typically refers to an emotion or set of emotions, and I want to reflect on that aspect of love for a few moments. Christians often dismiss this equation of love with emotion. Love, we like to say, is about action, not feeling. But that’s a very one-sided response. When we deny that love is an emotion, we’re assuming that emotions are the same as sensations or feelings. Love, we think, is that tingling we get just here, the warm feeling just there, the breathless exhilaration we experience when we catch the aroma of that familiar perfume. If emotion is no more than feeling, then of course love is more than an emotion, because love is more than that tingling, that exhilaration.
But what we need to question is that whole, diminished idea of emotion. An emotion is not a feeling so much as an evaluation, an interpretation, a personal, intense assessment that something or someone counts very deeply for me and therefore gives direction to my life (Robert Solomon). You can decide that something has value without experiencing emotion. But when something has intense personal value, then your evaluation takes an emotional form. Anger is the determination that some word or gesture counts as an insult; grief evaluates some event as a loss; indignation interprets some action as unjust; fear counts something or someone or nothing as threatening. And love, the emotion of love, is not just feeling but involves valuing your beloved, treating his or her happiness and welfare as your own. To love is to value your beloved, and to value all that you share together. To love, to experience the emotion of love, is to invest a relationship, a trust, an intimacy with surpassing personal value.
If this is love, if love is an emotion in this sense, then several things follow. One is that love is not, as we tend to believe, a fleeting flush of feeling, over which we have little or no control. If the emotion of love is a judgment about another’s value to us, then we’re responsible for loving wisely, for loving well. We’re responsible for our loves, not victims of carousing sensations. And this means that genuine love is always faithful love. Love isn’t something we fall in an out of at a moment’s notice, but an abiding frame of mind, a continuing orientation for life.
If this is love, if love is an emotion in this sense, then love is also a decision, a choice, a commitment, an election. We make our beloved beloved when we value her as beloved, and we persist in love when we stick with that valuation. This is what the doctrine of election is all about: God sets love on us and by doing that He constitutes as objects of love. His love makes us His beloved. Human love works the same way. Love is always electing love. Our emotions, including emotions of love, are decisions about what color the world, our world, is going to be. Shakespeare had it right: Love sees not with the eyes but with the mind.
If this is love, if love is an emotion in this sense, then love, the emotion of love, provides the lens through which you must learn to see one another, especially when you encounter those irritations that invade every marriage. You can’t put two sinners into intimate proximity without creating many opportunities for conflict and hurt. For sinners, the course of true love never did run smooth. But all the rough places, all the annoying habits, should be viewed through the lens of love. Love, the emotion of love, is the commitment that you will see virtue in one another, and that you will celebrate faults as well as charms in the context of your commitment to love (Solomon).
If this is love, if love is an emotion in this sense, then your entire world is reshaped by your love for one another. Emotions color your whole life, not just the thing or event that provokes the emotion. We get angry because of a particular offense, but anger colors everything red. For the envious, all the world is green. Grief begins with a particular loss, but often expands to cast a melancholy shadow over even the brightest mo
ments.
Your love should have that same scope. It’s not enough for love to kick in when you’re out for a romantic dinner. Jon, everything you do from now on – every site you survey, every time you shoot a shotgun, every tree you take down with your new chain saw – everything should be colored by your love for Lindsey. Lindsey, everything you do from now on – every flower arrangement, every meal you cook, every time you straighten up the apartment, again – everything should be tinted by your love for Jon. The biblical phrase for this is “one flesh”: Your love, and your loving commitment in marriage, means that the two of you are no longer two, but live an inseparably single life.
At the end of Paradiso , Dante has a vision of the Trinity. He writes, “within that brilliant and profoundest Being/ of the deep light three rings appeared to me/ three colors and one measure in their gleaming/ as rainbow begets rainbow in the sky/ so were the first two, and the third, a flame/ that from both rainbows breathed forth equally.” This triple ring, this triple rainbow, Dante concludes, is “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
The apostle John says that no one has beheld the triple ring, the rainbow-on-rainbow of the God who is love. But he also says that love has become visible, first in Jesus and then in our love for one another, which is a gift of the Spirit of Jesus. Jon and Lindsey, our prayer, and our confident hope for your marriage is that the Light that is God, the Light of the God who is love, will be refracted in your marriage in all its polychromatic glory, in a love that is musical in its ocular harmony (Christopher Smart).
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Let us pray.
Almighty God, Father, Son, and Spirit, You are Love, and You have shown Your love in the gift of the Son to be our Savior and Lord. Give us grace by Your Spirit, to abide in Your love. We pray that You would especially manifest your love to and through Jon and Lindsey. Fill them with Your Spirit, so that their love for you and one another will display the light of your love in its diverse splendor. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.
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