This sermon on 1 John 4:16-21 contrasts worldly love with God’s true love, urging us to abide in His Word and serve others not out of fear, but because He first loved us. Drawing from the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, it shows how abiding in God transforms our hearts, destroys idols, and frees us to love sacrificially. Real love begins with God and is revealed through Christ.
Faith Lutheran Church in Pinellas County is located at 1620 Pinehurst Rd, Dunedin, FL 34698. It can be contacted at (727) 733-2657. https://faithdunedin.org
Transcript
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, last week I was away attending a wedding of one of my nephews out in Sun Valley, Idaho.
It was an extremely beautiful event set in the wonders of God’s creation in the hills overlooking the ski resort.
And during the ceremony, the officiant and the couple made vows to each other, and in these vows and in the ceremony, they spoke much about love.
They did, however, not speaking of God’s love for us, but of the emotion of love that a man and a woman might feel toward one another.
St. John writes, God is love.
And he who abides in love abides in God, in God in him.
As beautiful as the setting and as beautiful as the wedding, as beautiful as the bride and the groom may have been, for me that service was incomplete.
If you wish to understand love, you first have to understand God.
True love.
Love, as you and I were created to feel, requires that you abide in God and have God abiding in you.
We must start by seeing how God wants to be loved, as he reveals to us in his law.
You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
Now, in my many years on this planet, my travels and visits, aside from seeing a few little Buddhist statues, or maybe when we visited a Hindu temple, seeing the statues to their pagan gods.
And more recently, I think the Norse gods, the Odin and Thor and stuff like that are becoming popular.
But we don’t tend to have false gods, statues or idols to them physically in our hands.
We do, however, have many such idols in our hearts.
And one of the foremost idols we have is this notion of human love.
I will argue that Valentine’s Day is the high holiday where this pagan god is worshiped.
The angels in heaven, the angels that worship with us here this morning must look in derision at those little babies on the cards, you know, the ones with the wings and their little heart-shaped arrows.
These mighty warriors of God would not dare be caught flying around in a little diaper.
They would not be passing out candy more likely to give your beloved the diabetes than to engender feelings of true love.
I remember as a child in school having to pass out cards to all of the other kids in the classroom.
You couldn’t leave a single kid out on Valentine’s Day.
That sentiment of love in those cards was as false as those protesters today with their rainbow flags.
When we elevate the human emotion of love to this point where it is the focus of weddings, holidays, or an entire month, we’ve made it into an idol.
True love abides in God.
True love remembers the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
We keep it holy as we abide in God’s word.
This is the rebuke that Father Abraham gives to the rich man in Jesus’ parable today.
When the rich man begged him to send Lazarus to warn his brothers to avoid going to hell, Abraham says to him, they have Moses and the prophets.
Let them hear them.
As the rich man pleads with him, no, Father Abraham, but if one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.
Abraham replies, they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rise from the dead.
To abide in God and his love means that first, we must listen to Moses and the prophets, to the word of God, every word.
The rich man had heard Moses and the prophets.
He know this because he calls Abraham father.
Yet he did not abide in that word.
He did not have faith.
He did not trust in God above all else.
How do I know this?
He’s in hell.
He’s in hell because he did not love as God commands him to love.
He did not love as God has loved him.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
The rich man had received many good and gracious gifts from God.
He was formed by God in his mother’s womb and given life.
He had a family which included at least five brothers, and he appears to love.
He’s been blessed with a nice home.
He’s been given wealth that enables him to dine sumptuously, every single day.
He’s received many, many good things in his lifetime.
All this, God does for him only out of fatherly divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in the rich man.
For all this, it is his duty to thank, praise, serve, and obey God, to abide in his word.
Yet, he does not.
He does not abide in God’s word.
He does not love his neighbor as himself.
The poor man, Lazarus, at his doorstep, is exhibit one in the prosecution’s case against him.
We don’t know anything about this man named Lazarus, other than that he was hungry, sick, homeless, and that he loved God, that he abided in God’s word, for he goes to heaven and he dies.
We don’t know how he became to be in his circumstances, the circumstances in which Jesus cites in this parable.
Was he an alcoholic?
Was he a drug user?
Maybe he’s an ex-con who couldn’t get a job.
Perhaps he’s mentally ill.
He could be a veteran suffering from PTSD.
Maybe he lost everything he had on Wall Street or at a casino.
It doesn’t really matter, does it?
This man had heard Moses and the prophets.
This man abided in God’s word, and if he had come to his circumstances because of any sin, he had repented of those sins and been forgiven.
He was saved.
A person’s circumstances in this life, the trials and the tribulations they face, do not define them as a person.
God does.
God creates them and God redeems them.
God loved Lazarus every bit as much as he did the rich man, even though he didn’t give Lazarus nearly what he had given the rich man.
But Christ died for both of them.
Christ died that their sins would both be forgiven and that they could abide in him forever, in his mansion with many rooms.
What Lazarus lacked in his unhappy life on earth is now abundant for him in heaven, and so much more than he could have ever imagined or asked for.
Lazarus was a servant of God, a servant who had been placed on this rich man’s doorstep as his neighbor that the rich man might have that opportunity to demonstrate God’s love to him.
Just as Jesus would later instruct his disciples, when you give a dinner or a supper, do not ask your friends, your brothers, your relatives, or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you back and you be repaid.
But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you shall be repaid at the resurrection of the just.
Jesus, love incarnate himself, reveals that the love of God is not transactional.
The son of God came to pour out his lifeblood, his precious, priceless blood and calvary, to win your soul back from sin, death, and the power of the enemy.
He did not redeem you with gold or silver or precious gems by which he could be repaid, but with a gift of his love, which no man and no woman can ever deserve nor repay.
This God’s sweetest love, who on us his grace has bestowed, invites us to the wedding feast of the lamb in his kingdom, at his table, where all of your sins are forever forgiven, where they are washed away.
Here, abiding in his word, in his love, the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind are healed and raised to new life, given blessing upon blessing in his name, given a gift they can never, ever hope to repay, a gift that he now asked them, only that they share with their neighbors.
God had poured out grace upon grace to the rich man.
Not so that he could simply feast sumptuously every day, not so that he could hoard them, not so that he could build a bigger barn, not so that he could gorge himself on rich dainties from the tribe of Asher.
And we see this at the wedding of Cana, by the way, when Jesus creates so much wine, so much more wine than the people there could ever drink, he doesn’t do it so they can get loaded.
Jesus gives these manifestations of God’s love, he gives them to the rich, he gives them to the people at Cana, that they might in turn share his love, share every manifestation of that love with their neighbors, especially with Lazarus.
Lazarus is that neighbor that God put at this man’s doorstep specifically so that he could demonstrate God’s love to him.
The rich man didn’t have to go to North America, he didn’t have to go to Europe, he didn’t have to travel to Asia to find some poor child who’s hungry, whose belly’s distended by hunger so that he could do some nice thing, maybe he could have, but God put a neighbor right on his doorstep for him to serve.
When Jesus tells you to invite those who cannot repay you to your table and that in doing so you will be blessed because they cannot repay you and you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just, Jesus is not advocating works righteousness.
John teaches us as much in his epistle.
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear because fear involves torment.
But he who fears has not been made perfect in love, we love him because he first loved us.
We serve our neighbors because we love them.
We don’t serve them because we fear going to hell.
If you believe in Christ, every single one of your sins has already been paid for.
You have nothing that you can do to pay for a single one of them yourself.
You can’t do it.
No matter how many poor people you feed, no matter how many Lazaruses you give all your money to, that won’t get you into heaven.
Your faith in Jesus Christ alone has done that.
But we can give Lazarus everything we have, everything that we’ve received, not to avoid going to hell, but because we know that we are going to heaven, where we will never thirst, hunger, or sorrow again.
We can give without fear of being impoverished or being hungry or thirsty, because faith trusts that our Father in heaven will continue to give us our daily bread.
If not in this life, then in the next.
Faith trusts that even should we lose our lives, goods, fame, child or wife, that these all be gone, yet our victory has been won, and the kingdom of heaven will be our inheritance forever.
This faith then frees us.
It frees us to live and to love as God has called us to do.
He who loves God must love his brother also.
Jesus commands us to love one another, to love our brother because he loves our brother.
He poured out his holy precious blood to redeem our brother.
He died for the sake of our brother, for the Lazaruses of this world.
If he loves them, how can we not?
This love though, does not always look like the love that the world expects.
The world expects that Lazarus, and the world in this case is evidenced by the rich man.
The world expects that Lazarus would have mercy on this rich man and dip his finger in the waters to quench his thirst.
The world expects that Lazarus had warned the rich man’s brothers.
Unless they repent, they’re going to join him in hell.
The world expects signs and wonders.
They expect these things because they have rejected the word of Moses and the prophets.
The world expects tolerance for sin.
The world expects tolerance for wickedness.
Pro tip, God does not.
Consider God’s command to the Israelites upon their preparation to enter the promised land.
You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations, which you shall dispossess, serve their gods.
On the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree, you shall destroy their altars, break their sacred pillars, burn their wooden images with fire.
You shall cut down the carved images of their gods and destroy their names from that place.
You shall not worship the Lord your God with such things.
Well, you shall seek the place where the Lord your God chooses, out of all your tribes, to put his name for his dwelling place, and there shall you go.
Love begins by abiding in God’s word.
Abiding in God.
Abiding in the place he’s called you to be.
Today we carry out this commandment, but I’m not telling you to go to your neighbor’s house and chop his little Buddha into little pieces and light it on fire.
I’m not telling you to do that.
Please, don’t take what I’m saying that way.
To be obedient to God, he wants us here in worship.
He wants us to worship him.
He wants us to remember the Sabbath, not misusing his name, not forsaking to gather together as he’s commanded in person.
Because here, he forgives your sins.
Here, you are forgiven in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Because God forgives you.
He wants you to hear it from the mouth of his servant.
Here, you have the waters of life poured over your forehead, washing you clean of every sin.
Here, you receive his body and blood in person, in the flesh.
He comes to you as no other God can possibly hope to do because they are dead gods and you serve the living God.
He’s commanded you to do all this.
We serve him taking the cup of salvation and call it on the name of the Lord.
But abiding in his word means that we have to remove the logs from our own eyes.
We do have to go into our own hearts and chop down those idols and utterly destroy the false gods in our own hearts to make room to abide with God and he with us, that we may learn to love as he has loved us.
It means rejoicing.
It means rejoicing because God has spoken to us by Moses.
God has spoken to us through the prophets, and in these last days, God has spoken to us through his son.
We rejoice because God has chosen to abide in us, in our hearts, in this place, in this time, so that we may learn to love as he has loved us.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.