Beloved, let us love one another … This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him … God is love … Whoever loves God must love his sisters and brothers (1 John 4:7, 9, 16, 21).

Community, Purpose, Love – our current theme—are connected … how?  Three equal terms, in sequence: we begin with community, proceed into purpose, eventually getting to (we hope) love?  Or three facets of one thing?  Or three Good Ideas with their interrelationship not explicitly spelled out?

This week’s passage, 1 John 4:7-21, helps us.  Community is certainly in there: John addresses his audience as “Beloved,” as “brothers and sisters,” and includes himself by the frequent use of “we.” Purpose is in there, too, as John calls us to know and intentionally do some specific things together.  But, to borrow from Paul, “the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13).

So John doesn’t start with us, he begins in God.  His first word in the passage is “Beloved.”  Before we all get together and start doing something, we have already been made something: we are the beloved of God.

Who is the God who loves us?  The God who comes to us, who comes for us, in Jesus Christ.  “This is how God showed his love: he sent his only Son that we might live through him.  This is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (verses 9-10).

Love is not a mood, or a mere affection or feeling.  “Love” does not mean that God is pleasantly disposed toward us, or harbors positive feelings about us.  God’s love says this: “Your good at my expense.  What you most need, what is and always will be the very best for you, I will provide, and I will bear the price of that provision.”

Being so loved, we are to love.  And while we will never be God, we will never love as truly and fully as God loves, we are nonetheless called into a life that says to our sisters and brothers in Christ, to our neighbors, even to our enemies: Your good at my expense.

Following Jesus, we learn to live like this: I will lay down my life for you.

Whenever it comes to relationships and community, we must guard against all that poisons those relationships and communities: co-dependence, manipulation, exploitation, authoritarianism, injustice, and numerous other toxins.  But we must embrace, day by day, situation by situation, relationship by relationship, the way of love: your good at my expense.

Yes, it can often feel like a kind of dying!  But it is, in fact, the only way to truly know God, to truly live.

What did you react to as you were reading?  What questions arose?  Take a few moments to note those reactions and questions, and then bring them into a conversation with God.