Redeeming Love (Good Friday)
1 John 4:7-19, 21
I don’t read novels, but thanks
to the encouragement of someone in our small group, I recently read a novel
entitled “Redeeming Love” written by Francine Rivers. (I should add that I read the book despite the
verbal abuse of some of the other guys in our small group because the book has
a “girlie looking” cover and it is a “girlie love story.”) It was one of the most powerfully moving
stories I have ever read in my life. It
has had a significant impact on me and has changed the way I relate to my wife.
The book
is a retelling of the story of Hosea set in the late 1850’s. It follows the life of a little girl named
Sarah who, like everyone of us, simply wanted to be
loved. She longed to be loved by her mother,
who was a prostitute and had never felt loved herself. She longed to be loved by her father, who had
his own family and resented her as his illegitimate child, and had even said it
would have been better if she had never been born. After her mother abandoned her, she was sold
into bondage to a man who forced her into a life of prostitution when she was
still a child. Her name was changed to
Angel, because of her bright blonde hair, but she felt like anything but an
angel. In time, Angel developed a deep
fear of being loved. She had been used
and abused in so many different ways by so many different people that she was
incapable of receiving love.
And then, Michael Hosea came on
the scene. God told Michael that he was
to marry Angel. The rest of the book is
about his attempt to demonstrate God’s love to Angel. She eventually agrees to marry him, but she
still does not trust him. He is
relentless in his efforts to love her.
She lies to him, mistreats him, and lashes out at him repeatedly. Unconditional love is what Angel longed for
deep within her soul, and that is what Michael offered her, and yet she
continued to resist him for years. In
fact, she left him once and returned to her life of prostitution. Then she left him a second time and ran away
from his love. Half of our small group
has read the book (that would be all the ladies and me) and we’ve all shared
how painful it was to read as Angel continued to pull away from Michael’s love. Why would Angel run away from being
loved?
At first glance,
it just didn’t seem to make any sense to me, but then I began to see how my
story is a lot like Angel’s story. The
deepest longing within my soul is to be loved unconditionally and lavishly. I want to know that I am loved no matter
what. I want to be valued, embraced, and
accepted. I want to be confident that
there is a person who knows everything about me – the good, the bad, and the
ugly – and still chooses to love me. I
want to experience a love that never fails or falters. I want to know a love that can always be
trusted. Deep within me I know that this
not merely a fanciful desire, but that it is the most fundamental need at the
very core of who I am.
Receiving
this kind of unconditional love is my deepest need, and yet, it is also my
greatest fear. First of all, I fear
being loved because I fear being judged and rejected. Angel, who at first was forced into a life of
sin, eventually gave herself up to it and lost all sense of right and
wrong. I may not have committed the same sins as Angel, but deep down inside of me I know
there are things about me that I don’t want anyone else to know. Not you and especially not God. There is pride and self-centeredness and
maliciousness. There are sins I’ve
committed that I wish could be stricken from my personal history. To be loved completely means I have to be
fully known by someone else, and that is dangerous. It makes me vulnerable. It puts me at the mercy of someone else, and
I’m not always sure I want to do that.
My relationships with other imperfect people have taught me well to fear
judgment, condemnation, and rejection.
The problem is
that when we avoid being fully known, we cannot be fully loved. We settle for a safe, but counterfeit kind of
love. We do this in a million different
ways. I’ve come to recognize one of my
own strategies throughout my childhood and high school years was to earn the
love of others by being good. I worked
hard to be good at school, good at church, good at youth group, good at
basketball, good at extracurricular activities.
I was successful, so people valued me, accepted me and embraced me. I was “loved” in a safe kind of way, but most
of those people didn’t really love because I didn’t give them the chance. I was partially known and partially loved. I wonder what you might do to be loved - to
be valued, accepted, and embraced without being fully known? Some pursue it through sex and pleasure. Some people have been known to pursue it love
through career advancement, social status, or financial status. It may be safer, but it doesn’t meet our
deepest need.
Another part of
my resistance to being loved unconditionally, and therefore being fully known,
is that I fear the loss of control that comes when I allow myself to be
loved. This was one of the most
significant insights I received from Angel’s story. At one point, she finds herself beginning to
fall in love with Michael Hosea and she says to herself, “No. I can’t fall in love with him. I promised myself I would never love
anyone. I won’t let him have control of
me. He’ll only use it against me.” Our stories may differ in the details, but,
just like Angel, we have accumulated a trail of broken promises and dashed
expectations. We have experienced the
pain and disappointment of conditional love – parents who abandoned us, a
friend who betrayed us, a sister or brother who lashed out in anger, a teacher
or coach who wounded us with words, a coworker who stabbed us in the back, a
spouse who abandoned a vow to love, honor, and cherish us. To be loved is the greatest gift, but the
closer we get to someone the more deeply we can be wounded by them.
There are many
reasons we fear receiving God’s love, but I think the bottom line reason is
that we have not yet encountered the kind of unconditional love God
demonstrates in the cross. That was
Angel’s problem. She had only
encountered the conditional love of other broken people throughout her life. Her only point of reference for understanding
love was a life filled with pain, betrayal, and condemnation. She had every reason to be afraid of being
loved . . . and the same could probably be said of each of us.
That is why the
cross of Christ is so significant for us today.
God demonstrates His love for us in this: while we were still
sinners, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8). The cross is the culmination and expression
of perfect love. The cross is God’s plan
for redeeming our sin, guilt, fear, and woundedness. We fear judgment and rejection because God is
holy and we are not. God responds by sending
his son to take upon himself the consequences of our sin. God cannot overlook or ignore our sin, but
through the cross, God is able to forgive our sin. 1 John 4:10-11 says, “This
is love: no that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an
atoning sacrifice for our sins.” 1
Peter 4:8 reminds us, “Love covers over a multitude of sins.” Perfect love does not condemn us and brow
beat us with a heavy load of guilt.
Perfect love does not reject us when we are humble enough to confess our
faults and failures and sins. There is
no sin too great for God to forgive. God
does not embrace our sin, but he does embrace each of us.
We fear being
vulnerable and losing control, but perfect love does not twist our weakness
around for its own gain. In the cross,
the Lord of all creation makes himself vulnerable enough to die a humiliating
death so that we can know it is safe for us to be vulnerable in our
relationship with him. God does
not rejoice in our woundedness, but he delights in redeeming our
brokenness. I wonder what would happen
if each of us got honest with God about the sin we desire to hide the most? I wonder what
would happen if we gave God our deepest wounds?
I wonder what would happen if we let go of our deepest fears and simply
allowed God to lavish us with his unconditional love?
Donald
Miller, in his book Blue Like Jazz, says that
receiving God’s unconditional love is the key to happiness. He writes, “I have come to understand that
strength, inner strength comes from receiving love as much as it comes from
giving it. I think apart from the idea
that I am a sinner and God forgives me, this is the greatest lesson I have ever
learned. When you get it, it changes
you. My friend Julie from
Seattle told me that the
main prayer she prays for her husband is that he will be able to receive
love. And this is the prayer I pray for
all my friends because it is the key to happiness. God’s love will never change us if we don’t
accept it.”
It seems like
such a simple idea, but isn’t it often the simplest ideas that are the most
profound and life-shaping? Receiving
God’s love can redeem and heal our past with all our sin and pain and
woundedness. Receiving God’s love can
transform our present. It will change
our self-understanding. It will
transform our relationships, our thoughts, our attitudes, our feelings. Receiving God’s love fills us with
unexplainable joy and hope for the future.
Love is like the oil that enables the engine of our lives to run
smoothly as it is designed to do. Some
of you are familiar with the little chorus that simply says, “Love, love, love.
The Gospel in one word is love.” When we
come to understand and experience this, it can be a significant kind of
epiphany. In Miller’s words, “When you
get it, it changes you.”
I struggled in
preparing this message, in part, because I had a preconceived idea that I
wanted to focus on the significance of us receiving God’s love. I thought Good Friday is the perfect
opportunity for us to experience the lavish love of God. But the more time I spent in 1 John 4, the
more uncomfortable I became with preaching only about the importance of us
receiving God’s love demonstrated through the cross. If you look at this passage, it seems like
the ideas of receiving God’s love and loving others are inextricably
linked. In fact, receiving God’s love,
loving God, and loving other are almost used interchangeably. Who has been born
of God and knows God? Those
who love others. What is the
evidence that we love God? We must love
one another. Who is it that lives in God
and God in them? Only
those who live in love.
It is easy to
profess our love for God. We have sung
songs tonight affirming our love for God and our gratitude for Jesus’ sacrifice
on the cross. But the challenge is to
demonstrate our love for God where the rubber meets the road – in the difficult
relationships in our lives. To receive
God’s love and to love others are two sides of the same coin, so let me pose a
few questions that may uncomfortably probe the significance of this
principle. Is there anyone whom you are not actively loving right now? Are you choosing to love those who have
wounded you in the deepest ways? Have
you forgiven the most vile of offenders in your
life? Is there anyone toward whom you
harbor anger, resentment, or bitterness?
We cannot love
God in isolation from other people. To
love God, by definition, requires us to love others – especially those who
deserve our love the least. And the kind
of love we are talking about is not just some warm fuzzy, sentimental kind of
love. We are talking about loving others
in the same way that Jesus demonstrated his love for us on the cross. This love is selfless, sacrificial,
unconditional, and extravagant.
This is the way
I want to love Jodie and Caleb, but I confess to you that, far too often, I
fail miserably. I want to be
selfless. I want to always put their
needs and desires before my own. I want
to offer them the perfect combination of tough love and tender love. I want to be a source of strength and
encouragement and constant support. I
don’t want my sin or pride or my fears to get in the way. I desperately want to love unconditionally .
. . . and yet, I know I fail to live up to that hope
and expectation. I think this passage in
1 John gets at the root of my problem when it comes to loving others. I too often make the mistake of starting with
me – my desire to love others. But the
apostle John sets the record straight. “We
love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Only when we constantly turn to God to be
filled with his love do we have any hope of loving others less
conditionally. We will not ever love
perfectly, but in receiving perfect love, we are able to grow closer and closer
to following the example of Christ.
The way this passage talks about loving God and
loving others it is sometimes hard to determine which comes first. Is it the
vertical dimension or the horizontal dimension that comes first? I think my answer is “yes.” By that, I mean that the two come together in
the cross. God’s redeeming love offered
through the cross is our only hope of overcoming our guilt and fears, and it is
our only hope of being able to offer redeeming love to others.
Angel
resisted God’s love expressed through Michael Hosea for years, but slowly God’s
unconditional love began can to melt away the thick layers of guilt, pain, and
fear. Slowly, but surely, God’s love
began to redeem Angel from her place of pain and misery and isolation. She confessed her sin and was able to receive
God’s gracious forgiveness. At the same
time, she chose to forgive people who had committed unimaginable sins against
her. It was as if she was set free from
a prison that had held her all her life.
And it was all because she had finally trusted God enough to receive His
love. She became a new creation. Her tough, calloused exterior was replaced
with a radiant, joyful demeanor. Her
vengeful, selfish attitude was replaced with a forgiving, selfless
lifestyle. She traded self-imposed
isolation for love-filled, grace-filled relationships. She traded the monotony of merely existing
for the joy of pursuing a newfound mission for God. And she finally returned to her husband, Michael
Hosea. Once she had received God’s love,
she was able to receive her husband’s love and to love him with absolute
abandon. One of the evidences of God’s
redeeming love in Angel’s life is that she finally revealed to Michael her real
name, which she had kept hidden for years.
She allowed herself to be fully known as Sarah. Sarah was so transformed by God’s redeeming
love that she was literally unrecognizable to people who knew her as
Angel.
Good
Friday brings us to the foot of the cross of Christ. The cross is where we
surrender all that hinders love and receive all that enables love to
flourish. This makes sense because the
cross is the center of the Gospel and the love is the Gospel in one word. If I had to use two words, I would say the
gospel in two words is Redeeming Love.
My prayer for us on this holy Good Friday is that we may experience
God’s redeeming love like never before, and that we may be those who offer
God’s redeeming love to others.
As we transition
to time for prayer and worship, I want to encourage us to respond to the
invitation of the cross to experience God’s redeeming love. As Mark plays quietly for a few moments,
let’s invite the Holy Spirit to connect the truth of God’s Word with our lives.
In what way do we need to experience the redeeming love of God offered through
the cross? Do we need to be redeemed
from the guilt of sin, the power of sin, wounds from our past, broken
relationships, unforgiveness, bitterness . . . The cross is not just about us
receiving love, but about giving it away.
Both are equally necessary to fully experience the power of the cross
and the joy of the resurrection. You are
welcome to come forward and kneel before the cross or at the altar. You are welcome to sing or continue in
prayerful reflection. Let’s not let this
opportunity pass to receive God’s love afresh tonight. We may never be the same.