When I was a youth, we learned a song that made memorizing 1 John 4:7 & 8 quite easy. The verse is,
Beloved, let us love one another,
for love is of God; and everyone that loveth
is born of God and knoweth God.
He that loveth not, knoweth not God for God is love.
Beloved, let us love one another. 1 John 4:7 & 8.
Through the years, I have not forgotten the song, but I have had to work on trying to begin to comprehend what God is love might mean and have to do with me in my day to day living, and when I can, loving.
I gained help from some who reflect on our human experience in deeper ways than I can. One is Frederick Buechner. In Beyond Words, he wrote of love’s stages:
The first stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love. The middle stage is to believe that there are many kinds of love and that the Greeks had a different word for each of them. The last stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love.
The unabashed eros of lovers, the sympathetic philia of friends, agape giving itself away freely no less for the murderer than for the victim (the King James Version translates it as “charity”)—these are all varied manifestations of a single reality. To lose yourself in another’s arms, or in another’s company, or in suffering for all who suffer, including the ones who inflict suffering upon you—to lose yourself in such ways is to find yourself. Is what it’s all about. Is what love is.
Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless. It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and mostimpregnable stronghold that is the human heart. It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent.
To say that love is God is romantic idealism. To say that God is love is either the last straw or the ultimate truth.
In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion, but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as easily produce a cozy emotional feeling on demand as you can a yawn or a sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end, even if it means sometimes just leaving them alone. Thus in Jesus’terms, we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them. In fact liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest friends.
When Jesus talked to the Pharisees, he didn’t say, “There, there. Everything’s going to be all right.” He said, “You brood of vipers! how can you speak good, when you are evil!” (Matthew 12:34). And he said that to them because he loved them.
This does not mean that liking may not be a part of loving, only that it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes liking follows on the heels of loving. It is hard to work for people’s well-being very long without coming in the end to rather like them too.
Remembering that God is love is easy. Living out a love for those I may not like and who may more than dislike me may take a lifetime. If you’d like to learn the 1 John 4 song, click this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dErdZ0STqs8
