Reverend Jonathan Waits
God Loved First (1 John 1:7-21)
February 16, 2025
Did you have a good Valentine’s Day? Guys, did you treat her right? Did you at least put a little bit of effort into doing something special? Do you know why we have a Valentine’s Day? It’s so Hallmark and Russel’s Stover can make obscene amounts of money selling cards and chocolate. It’s all a capitalist, corporatist plot to conform us to the social box they want us to fit into so they can keep making money off of us. It’s a scam! Or maybe it’s just a cynical effort to depress us for not doing enough to love our partners or to make us feel bad for not having a Valentine in the first place. Ever wallow in one of those particular puddles of self-pity? They can be a tempting line of thought this time of year, but, no, that’s not why we have Valentine’s Day. We have Valentine’s Day because hundreds of years ago, there was a pastor in Rome named Valentinus.
Most of what we once knew about Valentinus has been lost to history, but from what historians have been able to piece together, the likeliest story is that he ran afoul of the Roman Emperor, Claudius II. Claudius was trying to build up Rome’s army to be able to fight off the growing number of incursions from the East and the North and because having a big army made him look stronger. The trouble was, soldiers who were newly married—as most young men of military age then were—weren’t so keen on leaving their wives and families behind to go put themselves in harm’s way in order to defend parts of their Empire they had never visited and didn’t honestly care about very much. Because of his declining recruitment numbers, Claudius took the unusual step of banning marriage in Rome.
Well, for Christians, at least, marriage is kind of a big deal. It’s the best and most proper context for rearing and raising children. It’s the only morally permissible context for physical intimacy. It serves as a proclamation of the kind of relationship God wants to have with people. There were all sorts of good reasons to protect and defend the institution of marriage from these cultural efforts to undermine and even erase it from society. As a result, Valentinus took the courageous step of defying the Emperor’s order by marrying couples in secret. They knew about it, their families knew about it, but that was about it. Eventually, though, Rome found out what Valentinus was doing and put him to death for his flagrant violation of the Emperor’s command. His execution took place on or sometime near what we celebrate as Valentine’s Day. Valentinus was later proclaimed a saint by the church. The church also began celebrating his courage, his commitment to and practice of sacrificial love, and his willingness to be a martyr for the cause of Christ. Today, we buy flowers, cards, and chocolate and have dinner dates. That’s not quite the same thing. Getting love right, as Valentinus understood, is about more than flowers and chocolate. And if we want to get our marriages right, this is something we need to figure out.
This morning we are in the fourth and final part of our series, Back to the Basics. For the last few weeks, we have been having a conversation about marriage. Normally, when I’ve done this in the past with you, we’ve focused our attention on the obvious and clear marriage passages in the Scriptures. This time, we’ve taken a different approach. We’ve taken some more generalized wisdom and examined it through the lens of marriage. Our goal has been to address some of the foundational aspects of a strong and healthy marriage through the lens of godly wisdom. We have been going back to the basics in order to get marriage right.
Three weeks ago, we started with the fact that if our marriages are focused on someone other than God, we’re not going to get them right. If your spouse is your primary focus, you’re setting both of you up for frustration and disappointment. Properly loving your spouse means loving God first. Taking this idea a step forward in the second part of the series, because properly loving your spouse means loving God first, if you want to develop a more intimate relationship with your spouse, you need to first develop a more intimate relationship with God. If you want to get better connected to your spouse, get better connected to God. From there, last week, we shifted gears to our communication. If we can’t communicate well in marriage, we really don’t stand much of a chance of getting things right. When we talk right, our relationships work better. To this end, I gave you four rules for communication in relationships, but especially in marriage. How are you doing with putting those into practice? How many times in the last week have you said something to your partner about speaking your love language? Have you had any opportunities to practice assuming the best (especially when your partner wasn’t being such a good mate and you had to work a little extra hard to keep contempt out of your communication)?
Well, at the end of the day, marriage is really all about God. It’s about our relationship with Him. It was designed from the beginning to be a reflection of our relationship with Him, and a proclamation to the world of the goodness and rightness of a relationship with Him. And I know it sounds at least culturally funny to say that since we are constantly told that marriage is all about love, but from the standpoint of the Scriptures, it’s just not. Except…our relationship with God is all about love. More specifically, it’s about His love for us as demonstrated through Jesus. So, in that sense, yes, marriage is all about love. If marriage is all about love, though, then we need to understand properly what love is if we are going to have a chance of getting it right. So, this morning, as we finish up our look at some of the basic building blocks of a successful marriage, and on this Valentine’s Day weekend, we are going to talk about getting love right.
If we are going to talk about love, there’s really no better guide for us than the New Testament author known as the love apostle. That would be the apostle John. And, conveniently, his first letter to the church in Ephesus which he pastored for a time, is sometimes known as the love epistle (which, yes, means the “love apostle” wrote the “love epistle”) since it gives so much attention to exploring the wonder and implications of God’s love for us. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy this morning, find your way with me way to the back of the New Testament to 1 John 4. We’re going to pick up near the end of the letter when John is talking about how love is the means by which we can come to know God.
Take a look at this with me starting in 1 John 4:7: “Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”
That’s a pretty direct start for this passage. If you want proof that someone is really following Jesus, look at how they love. Look at if they love. Of course, for John to say this means that he had a particular idea of what love is in his mind when he was writing. Knowing what this idea is seems like it would be pretty important to keep us from misunderstanding what John is saying here. I mean, given the way our culture talks about love today when love is mostly just thought of as strong feeling and emotion, everyone loves most of the one anothers around them, so everyone has been born of God. And yet, that idea doesn’t seem to resonate very well with where our culture is more generally, much less how most people in our culture are comfortable defining themselves.
So then, what does John mean by “love”? Well, I defined that for you last week, but let’s come back to it again here. I first gave word to this particular definition years ago when I was studying through 1 John for a sermon series I did then. The way John thinks about love has the power to be utterly transformational to our lives if we’ll let it. Love is an intentional decision to see somebody else become more fully who God designed them to be. While this intention on our part is often accompanied by strong feelings and emotions, those things are not the substance of love as John understands it. The intention to move somebody else in the direction of God is the substance of love. More importantly, it’s the image of love John has in mind here.
Let’s spell it out, then: Dear friends, let us be intentionally committed to moving each other in the direction of God’s image through Christ, because this is what He does with us. People who are committed to the same ends as God are His people. If someone isn’t intentionally committed to this, they don’t actually have a personal relationship with God because this is the very substance of who God is, and you can’t have a personal relationship with someone and not participate in the core substance of their character.
Every time you hear the word “love” in this passage (all 26 of them, if I counted right), this is the idea you need to have in mind. Love is an intentional decision to see somebody else become more fully who God designed them to be.
Let’s keep going in the text starting at v. 9 now. We understand all of this, John says, because of Jesus. “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his one and only Son into the world so that we might live through him. Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” Some translations use the word “propitiation” there, which sounds like a big, scary, theological word, but it really just refers to Jesus’ making things right between us and God by appeasing God’s anger over our sin by offering Himself as a sacrifice in our place. In v. 11, John gets to his point: “Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another.”
In the next part, John talks further about how we can know God’s love. There are three parts: our love for one another, the testimony of His Spirit in our hearts, and Jesus. Altogether, this trio makes a pretty profound proof of God’s love. “No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God remains in us and his love is made complete in us. This is how we know that we remain in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and we testify that the Father has sent his Son as the world’s Savior. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God—God remains in him and he in God. And we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him.”
This love God shares with us in Christ and through His Spirit does many things, but one of the more significant is that it gives us confidence in the face of judgment. When we are rooted in His love, the prospect of God’s exercising His wrath against sin one day doesn’t pose us any threat. His love in Christ is a shield. We are safe and secure in it. Therefore, we don’t have to fear like the world does. John goes here in v. 17: “In this, love is made complete with us so 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; instead, perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment. So the one who fears is not complete in love.”
John wraps up the passage by reemphasizing the necessity of our getting love right if we are going to be in a relationship with God. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and yet hates his brother or sister [that is, we choose to reject them and their needs in favor of our own], he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And we have this command from him: The one who loves God must also love his brother and sister.”
Right before this, though, John says something especially significant that I want to camp out on for the rest of our time. Look with me at v. 19: “We love because he first loved us.” That really is the theme of this whole section. God’s love is the initiator in our relationship with Him. He doesn’t wait for us to love Him. He comes to us first and loves us first. Any love we have for Him is always and only a reflection of His love for us. If our love is going to mimic His love as John is clearly calling us to do here, then it has to be initiatory as well.
But I just said we don’t love God first. He already has that settled. So, how can our love be initiatory like His? By being initiatory with the people around us. That is, just like God loved us first, and didn’t worry about whether or not we were going to love Him back because it is simply in His nature to love, we need to love the people around us first, not concerning ourselves with whether they will feel or even act toward us in a particular way. We don’t need that from them. God’s love is enough for us. His love satisfies our need for love. So, we don’t have to look to the people around us to get love. We can just love them. We can love them first. This is all what love is. Love is meant to be given first, not received.
Now, I know some of you are already asking the question, but I hope the implications for this for our marriage relationships are obvious. If you want to get love right in your marriage, then your concern is not what the other person does or doesn’t do, think, say, or even feel. You’re not waiting on any of that. Your concern is simply that you reflect God’s love for you toward them by being the first to be intentionally committed to moving them in the direction of Jesus. If they respond to that in kind, great. Now you’re both pushing each other toward Jesus so you get there faster. That’s a win-win. But even if they don’t, or even simply don’t at first, you don’t have to worry about that. Their response is not why you’re doing it. You’re doing it because that’s what God in Christ did for you. Love is meant to be given first, not received.
And think for a second about how freeing this is. Imagine not needing to be loved by your spouse. This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t still love you, nor does it mean you don’t want them to love you. Of course you do. You should. But you don’t need it. You get your need for love satisfied by God in Christ. And because you don’t need their love, you don’t have to do silly things to try and force them to give it to you. You don’t have to manipulate them to get it. You don’t have to get angry with them for making you feel like you haven’t received it. None of that. You just get to love them and that’s it. Love is meant to be given first, not received.
To borrow another line from Gary Thomas (whose book A Lifelong Love factored into this series in a big way and is worth your getting a copy of to read for yourself), “Show me a person who thinks his greatest need is to be loved, and I’ll show you a person who often wonders if he married the wrong person. Show me a person who truly aspires to live a life of love, and I guarantee she is more contented in her marriage than the average spouse.”
Getting this right allows you to fully and truly love your spouse, and not just things about your spouse that allow you to get what you feel like you need from them. It’s frighteningly easy to fall into a pattern of loving a host of good things you appreciate that your spouse does, or that you wish your spouse would do more of rather than actually loving them. Getting God’s love right in our relationship with them fixes that. When we love like God does us, we’re not trying to get anything from them at all. We’re satisfied simply getting to actively and intentionally let His love flow through us to them. Love is meant to be given first, not received.
The more we give God’s love away, the more we are able to receive His love. Well, listen: if you are married, there isn’t anyone in your life to whom you will have more opportunities to give God’s love than your spouse. This constant self-giving on our part allows us to see our deepest desires satisfied in a way nothing else can or will. Because God’s love is our greatest need, giving His love so that we can constantly receive His love will see our need being met. If, on the other hand, we buy into the cultural notion that we need love from the people around us—and especially our spouses—then we are going to find ourselves desiring something that cannot ultimately satisfy our deepest desires. And, when we desire something that can’t ultimately satisfy us, when we manage to get it, we still won’t feel satisfied. This will lead to bitterness and resentment and do untold damage to our marriage.
But when we love like God does and seek out His love as our first and greatest need, everything else will fall into place in the wake of this. By making sure we are right with God, we will be able to be right with our spouses in a way nothing else will enable us to experience. Getting love right is the gateway to this glorious end. Love is meant to be given first, not received. Receive from God; give to your spouse. Not the other way around. Love is meant to be given first, not received. Get into the habit of loving like God and see what kind of a transformation this will bring to your relationship.