1 John 2 – the perfection of the love of God

1 John 2 is much longer than 1 John 1 which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, and it contains a wide range of themes and ideas – sin (again), forgiveness (again), light & dark (again), warning of anti-Messiahs, and encouragements to abide in God. It’s well worth reading and meditating on.

But as we’re thinking about the love of God, I want to highlight the first half of verse 5 – Whoever obeys Jesus’ (or God’s) word, truly in this person the love of God has reached perfection (that’s one translation, click the link to see a couple of others).

This verse, and actually quite a lot of this chapter, is quite striking and challenging, because it links our actions (obedience to God) with the perfection or completeness of the love of God. How, we wonder, can God’s love depend on what we do? Aren’t we supposed to be saved by faith, through the free gift of God, not by our own works?

I think we can say a couple of things. First, ‘love of God’ here probably does not mean God’s love for us, but rather our love for God. This is reflected in a couple of the translations at the link above. In this case, John is not saying that the quality of God’s love for us is affected by what we do. Elsewhere, he says that God is love, so it would not make sense for an inherent characteristic of God to be dependent on our actions.

Secondly, and following on, John is again saying something incredibly practical (as we saw at the start of 1 John 1). Our love for God is not fully expressed in our belief that Jesus saves us (although he does) or in our expressions of praise to God (which are right and proper as demonstrated in the Psalms). It is in our obedience to the word of God, our walking each day as disciples, our ‘loving our neighbour’ and extending care and hospitality to those in need, our standing for truth and justice as revealed by Jesus, that our love for God is made whole.

One practical step CCC has taken is to register Connection Point, our weekly coffee-and-cake drop-in,  with ‘Warm Welcome Space’ which is an organisation supporting churches and other organisations to give a warm welcome to those struggling to afford to heat their homes this winter. We hope this will let people know about Connection Point and that they are welcome to spend time in The Point.

God’s love for us and the world, which is shown in Jesus, and our love for God are closely linked, and our love for God is the appropriate response to God’s love for us. Let’s allow this to change us as we continue to explore the love of God and 1 John.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is creativity anyway?

Image
Two childhood memories: One: "Our family is not creative!" I remember being told this in response to my frustration with my ineptitude with paints and pencils.*  I'm sure the intention was to encourage and let me know that I was not alone - that it was not important.  But the effect was that I grew up believing that I could produce nothing of any worth, even to myself, in the creative line.  To this day, I have a visceral pit-of-the-stomach reaction to any suggestion that I should express myself through any artistic medium. Two: "Write a story - it can be about anything at all, let your imagination run wild!" said my English teacher.  Imagination was something else I knew I didn't have, and any attempt to write a story led me into an inescapable paradox: For every idea in my head of a storyline or character, I knew its source in something else I'd seen or read.  This meant it had to be rejected as not a product of my imagination and thus unsuitable for i
Read more

1 John 4 – Abiding, loving (and testing)

This letter of 1 John has themes that come around again and again. So in chapter 4 we read again about the opponents of Jesus (which John calls antichrist), the love of God, our sins, and the idea of abiding with God. In this letter these themes are intertwined, and John seems to be saying that they can’t easily be separated. We can’t look at one of these and then move onto the next. To gain a fuller understanding we must keep turning the ideas over and over. So, thinking about others people John gives a simple test: what do they think of Jesus? ‘Every spirit that confesses that Jesus has come in the flesh is from God.’ Perhaps you’re starting to think about Christmas. What happened at the first Christmas is really important, John says. Baby Jesus was God born in human flesh, and that is really important to who Jesus is and what he did. John goes on to say that this sending of Jesus into the world was a revelation of God’s love, and through Jesus we have life because Jesus was
Read more

The original foster care story at the heart of Christmas

Image
This yea r’s   John Lewis Christmas advert   shows a fa mily preparing to welcome a teenager into their home as foster carers. The foster father’s attempts to learn to skateboard are part of his preparation for the arrival of a teenager into their home. This focus on the foster  father  is welcome. Approximately 40% of foster carers are male, but research shows that male foster carers are often seen in a negative light in contrast to female carers. Negative experiences The experience of male foster carers is that negative assumptions are often made about their ability to care for children and possibly even keep them safe. Male carers report being treated like a ‘risk to be regulated’ [1]  and feel that ‘the stigma of being a male foster carer runs deep… you are often portrayed as someone to fear.’ [2] Male carers also experience being seen as secondary to their female partner carers, who are assumed to be the main carers of the children. Even social work professionals admit to ‘resorti
Read more