How to Love God

 1 John 4:16-21

And we have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us.  God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.  By this, love is perfected with us, that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world.  There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.  We love, because He first loved us.  If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.  And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also.

Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity                                      6/22/25

How to Love God

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

The bookstore shelves are filled with volumes about how to be a good husband or how to be a good wife, or what true love is all about.  You wouldn't think we would need help with that, since we all feel that love – or nearly all of us.  The problem people have with finding the love of their lives, and then keeping the love of their lives satisfied in that state of being loved, is that we have been taught false doctrine by our culture and our public media.  This isn't religious false doctrine, but it is false doctrine none-the-less.  We oftentimes don't know what real love is.

Some people fancy that their hormonal response to another human body is love.  That is correctly identified as "lust", and while it can be entertaining for a while, it does not last for long - at least as the response to that particular body.  Young people frequently, and older ones occasionally, confuse infatuation with love.  Infatuation is delightful for a time, but it, too, fades over time.  True love is, at its weakest, a deep affection, which when it is coupled with the will to serve the welfare of the beloved, is the sort of love that can last life-long.  But even then, it takes deliberate work, thought, planning, and action.  It is not necessarily romantic at every moment.  It is not necessarily fun or even pleasurable at every moment.  Those characteristics surface now and again, and for some of us, frequently, but the dependance on the continual sense of romance or pure delight in love is fostered only by our enjoyment of those nice feelings, and the false doctrine of our society that says that love is supposed to be that way. 

Now, all of that is about love for a fellow human being, particularly one of the opposite sex.  And still, people get that all confused.  Our text, this morning, speaks of loving God, which is an entirely different sort of thing.  It is no wonder that people get confused about how to go about that sort of loving.  Our text points us in the right direction to understanding how to love God, and so that is our theme today, How to Love God.

First of all, the love of which John writes is agape – the spiritual, self-sacrificing sort of love, such as God has for us.  It is not the love of friendship.  God is not our friend in the sense of being our "buddy".  His love may be likened to the love of friendship because His will toward us is faithfully good, but philia – friendship love – is notoriously fickle. 

The love which are to we have for God is also not the erotic sort.  God loves us, but talking about God as a lover is often more confusing than helpful.  I have to admit that God uses the image of a lover in Scripture, as in the Song of Solomon, but it seems to best suited to illustrate the intensity of the love which God has for us, and which we might have for Him, not so much the quality of it.  Erotic love is most commonly not about the one we love as much as about our response - our love and our joy or pleasure, and so it is self-absorbed.  God's love for us is not self-absorbed, but focused on us, and He would have us love Him for Him, not for what we can get out of Him.

The best illustration, and the primary fact of the love of God for us is Christ Jesus.  His love is what brought Him to become one of us.  His love for the Father, and His love for us.  John 3:16 says, "For God so loved the world . . .".  He saw our need from eternity, planned our salvation, which required of Him accomplishing what is, by human reason, impossible.  He became man - fully human, and yet also true God.  Many theologians will say that God cannot be contained in finite human flesh, it is impossible, and yet God says, Colossians 2:9, "For in Him dwells the fulness of the Deity in bodily form."  He kept the whole law and will of God without exception or sin.  He took the burden of our guilt and sin and died in our place, paying the penalty for our sins.  God, who cannot die, found a way to die for us.

He saw our need, He planned our rescue, and He put that plan into action at great personal cost.  That is agape love.  That is the love with which we are to love God.  The one hitch in this plan, however, is that God needs nothing from us, "For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things."  God doesn't want us just feeling warmly about Him.  He doesn't want us feeling sexy about Him.  He wants us to love Him with the same sort of love with which He loves us.  He tells us that our love for Him flows out of His love for us – We love because He first loved us!

The secret of how to love God is by loving those God has given you to love – those He has placed around you to love by seeing their needs, planning for their rescue and welfare, and then putting that plan into action, even if it costs you something.  Even if it costs you everything.  Our love for our neighbor is also motivated and powered by God's love for us.  We love those who have no claim on us because God loved those who had no rightful claim against Him – us, sinners, now forgiven by God, and rescued for eternal life.

This love comes from being loved ourselves.  It isn't the product of fear, or terror, as so many of the sacrifices of old toward the false gods of the idols were.  We don't kill our children, or our livestock, to show God our love - or to assuage His anger, as pagans in the past did.  

In ancient Israel, they offered their flocks and cattle and grain in sacrifices as part of their faith, demonstrating their trust in God to supply their needs in a world that often lived on the razor's edge of disaster and need.  Even then, the true power of their sacrifices came from the one sacrifice of His Son, promised but not yet accomplished, as they showed their faith and love for God by obedience and by spending their substance on worship.

We don't worship God, in our modern world, from the same precipice of daily need as the ancients did.  We are abundantly rich in that regard!  The sacrificial system for forgiveness of sins has been done away with by Jesus' death on our behalf.  The resurrection proclaims the love of God and the fulness of forgiveness and salvation to us.  The truth of it is witnessed to us by the Word, and supplied for us in the holy Sacrament, as we receive His true body and blood for our forgiveness and spiritual refreshment.  Our acts of love, and our spending of our substance on the welfare of one another - and our other neighbors - is our sacrificial giving to God, just as in the ancient days, demonstrating our belief in His love for us, and our trust in His guidance and provision for our needs.

John tells us in our text how that love effects us.  It gives us confidence in life and in the face of death, comforting us.  We say that God loves us.  Do we believe it?  Can we trust that love?

We say that God will provide.  Do we trust Him?  Could it be that our surplus is how God would provide for others, working His love through us?

We confess that in Jesus Christ we have everything we need.  Luther confessed it.  I preach it.  Do you confess it?  If you do, how does that confession work out in your life?  

If you do not confess it, why not?

We say we love God.  God says, love Me in those I give you to love.  Serve Me by serving those I place around you in need.  Give to Me by giving to those in need around you, starting at home, and in the congregation, and working out from there.  This giving is not supposed to be just money either.  That is what stewardship is about - managing all that God has given you wisely, for His purposes and not merely your own.  That it comes from a heart of love for God is what we express in our stewardship principle, stated in the words of 2 Corinthians 9:7, "God loves a cheerful giver".

That this love for the neighbor is how we love God is pointed to by John in our text,   If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.   

Of course, God views love and hate in far more black and white terms than we like to look at it.  Either you love, or you hate.  Indifference is hate according to the standard of God's Word.  But in this text, I think God is talking about hatred in terms we understand.  If we cannot love those we can see, who are real and tangible and right there before us, but actually hate them and are hostile to them - we then are not able to actually love God, whom we cannot see or touch or hear according to His natural voice.  Our brothers, fellow saints and members of the body of Christ right here with us, are our first field of service and love to be given to God.  If we cannot love them, we cannot really love God either.

We kind of see that in the religious cons we see in the world.  On religious TV, we see them taking, begging, crying, hustling - but we don't see them serving, helping, or giving.  They want to reach out and touch us, but the part of us they want to touch I keep in my back pocket, ordinarily.  And they are willing to falsify the Word of God and teach false doctrine to do it, to manipulate me and you.  If my money is worth more to them than the Word of God and truth (and remember, Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life") they prove the saying of John, * * they say they love God, but hate their brother - by teaching him something of a counterfeit gospel, and in doing so, they really hate God, too.

Now, I know that this teaching isn't going to make me or you popular.  John reminds us also that we are as Jesus was in this world.  He was welcomed for what they could get out of Him, but despised for who He was, and hated for His holiness.  The world looks at us the same way.  Give them your money, or your time and effort, and they will love you.  Give them the Gospel, and they will tell you to keep your religion to yourself - and, as is happening in our public media with increasing frequency, they will malign you and call you and extremist and say that your religion is the cause of war and division and hatred and intolerance.  Because as He is, so also are we in this world.

As uncomfortable as that is, it should comfort you by demonstrating for you the truth of the Word of God, and by reminding you that you belong to Him, because Jesus said they would hate you if you were His.  The comfort is not, of course, due to the hatred of the world.  It is due to the love of God and the salvation which He has poured out on us.  The hatred of the world just confirms that we are recognizably part of the body of Christ.  The other thing that would confirm our participation in Christ is the love for God which we see in the Lord's Supper.

So, how do you love God?  By taking Him at His Word, and trusting Him to keep you, and to save you, and by loving Him by loving those He has given you to love.  This love is an act as much of the will as of the emotions.  Only those moved by the Holy Spirit, can do it willingly. That is how to love God.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

(Let the people say Amen)