Action Heroes
(1 John 3: 16-24)
Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Yeah, I remember as a kid in the 50s and 60s being glued to our black and white television, being totally engrossed in the adventures of Superman. Mild mannered Clark Kent went about his life as a reporter with the Daily Planet but when some danger or crises arose that ordinary people or the local authorities couldn’t handle, he’d take off his glasses and transform himself into Superman using his special powers to save the day and a population that couldn’t seemingly save itself. And from there sprang a genre of new and improved action heroes with superpowers like Batman, the Incredible Hulk, Antman, Captain America, and so on. It’s turned into a multi-billion-dollar industry with everything from comic books to Saturday morning cartoons, to blockbuster movies. Some folks get so immersed in the culture that they even show up in costume to movies and fantasy conventions hoping to meet their superhero and maybe score an autograph or a selfie. Spoiler alert! These superheroes aren’t real folks. But there are mild-mannered superheroes all around us. We just don’t notice them or realize their selfless acts of love, mercy, and compassion.
And that’s what the Apostle John is talking about in our scripture reading for this morning. He’s talking about the superhero Jesus promised and how this superhero can use his superpower to turn us into present day action heroes fighting for truth, justice, and the Christian way wherever we see it. He’s talking about the love of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and how we can use that love and guidance to do amazing feats of strength in His name. Love, self-sacrificial love for others, is our superpower.
John starts out by saying: This is how we know love: Jesus laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. John is using this opportunity to reference back to what he wrote in John 3: 16: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they are both chapter three, verse sixteen. John gets right to heart of the issue when he states: But if a person has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need and that person doesn’t care—how can the love of God remain in him? Ouch! That stings. It stings because John is addressing Christians, those who profess to believe in God and love Jesus Christ yet don’t show it by their actions. It stings because like many of you I have attended more than one church that was full of self-righteous Christians who loudly professed their love on Sunday mornings, and such was the extent of their Christianity until the following Sunday. They think that the extent of John 3: 16 means that if they believe in God, that Jesus Christ was his beloved Son, that everything will be okay, and they will have eternal life when it is all said and done. Maybe so.
John wrote this letter between 85 and 90 A.D. from Ephesus as a pastoral letter to several Gentile congregations just before his exile to the island of Patmos. John is much older now and is probably the last of the surviving apostles of his time. And, as Jesus didn’t come back immediately as many people believed, John is probably witnessing a complacency in the church, and he wants to convey to this new generation of believers an assurance and confidence in God and in their faith. What John is saying is that loving other believers is the practical demonstration of loving God. Living a life of sacrificial love results in assurance before God when the heart, meaning here “conscience”, condemns the believer. My Wesley Commentary says that those born of God, whose nature is love, are prone to love each other; in fact, such God-like love is the community’s final exam of covenant keeping. John is reminding them of God’s new covenant He made through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to be their God, that they would be his people, and that they were to love others as they would want to be loved. Jesus’ mission to save the world reaches its climax not with words or speech, but in an act of self-sacrificial love. This is the Christian’s manner of spiritual love-making.
When the Apostle says “this is how we will know” he introduces evidence to support a claim. In this case, self-sacrificial acts of love toward each other assure both the community and God of their covenant relationship. This is what John meant when he said: Little children, let’s not love with words or speech but with action and truth. This is how we will know that we belong to the truth and reassure our hearts in God’s presence. He’s saying that real love is an action, not a feeling. It produces selfless, sacrificial giving. The greatest act of love is the giving of oneself for others, even someone you don’t know, you know, one of “those” people, or worse yet, someone you don’t like or care for.
The Apostle then says something that really caught my attention. He makes the observation: Even if our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts and knows all things. For me, I think John is talking about those times I chose to ignore a situation I could have done something about, rationalizing it in my mind that it wasn’t my responsibility, that I was too busy, that someone else should do it, that if they really wanted help, they’d do something about it themselves. Afterall, isn’t it written somewhere in the Bible that “God helps those who help themselves?” No, it’s not. We have to ask ourselves how do we escape the gnawing accusations of our consciences when we don’t do that which we know we should do in Jesus’ name? Well, we don’t do it by ignoring them or rationalizing our behavior, but by setting our hearts on God’s love, and then doing it with no questions asked or strings attached. And when we feel guilty, we should remind ourselves that God knows our motives as well as our actions. His voice of assurance is stronger than the accusing voice of our conscience and prompts us into righteous action. That’s exactly what John meant when he said: Dear friends, if our hearts don’t condemn us, we have confidence in relationship to God. We receive whatever we ask from him because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. Now that’s not to say God will give you a Mercedes Benz as Janis Joplin once asked in song. What it means is that if you are truly seeking God’s will, there are some requests you will not make. Your requests will be more in line with how you do God’s will and His way. They will be selfless rather than selfish. To believe “in the name” means to pattern your life after Christ’s, to become more like him by uniting yourself with Him. And, if we are living like Christ, we will love one another. This is what John meant when he said: This is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love each other as commanded us. The person who keeps his commandments remains in God and God remains in him; and this is how we know that he remains in us, because of the Spirit that he has given to us.
This awareness of the triumph of God’s faithfulness enables believers to pray boldly not only because of God’s irrepressible faithfulness toward his little children, but also know that when God finds evidence of a community’s covenant-keeping acts of love and confession of faith in Christ, God will readily answer its petitions. The combination of our hearts and abiding because of the Spirit suggests an internal moral compass that guides us to obey God’s commandment—similar to what the Apostle Paul calls “the law of the Spriit of life.” In this sense, then, it’s obeying God’s two-fold command to love each other and confess faith in Christ’s evidence of the Spriit’s presence that marks a people out as belonging to God. In fact, abiding in God by the Spirit is the condition by which a people can boldly approach God with petitions and receive from God whatever is asked in his name. This ask-receive formula envisages the reciprocity of covenant-keeping.
So, how can we lay down our lives? That seems like a big ask. Well, it’s by serving others, meeting their needs, with no thought of receiving anything in return, not even a thank you or a bless you. Yeah, I know it can be difficult and sometimes it seems easier to say we’d sooner die for others than truly live for them, as living for someone involves putting other’s desires first, even above our own. This mutual relationship, living in Christ as He lives in us, shows itself in Christians who keep these three essential commands. First, we believe in Christ. Second, we love our brothers and sisters, and third, we live morally upright lives. Our conduct verifies his presence to all who are watching. So, in closing, we have to ask ourselves: How closely do our action-hero moments of covenant-keeping say that we really love others as Christ has loved us?
Let us pray.
Gracious and loving God, as we walk with each other may we walk hand in hand, and together may we spread the news that You are in our land. Praising you for your unmerited love, your mercy, your grace, and your marvelous works is so easy and takes but little effort. The real work comes with us putting the love you have shown for us into action by deeds and services for others performed in your Son’s holy name. Move us to be keepers of your covenant, to not only love you and to be your people as you are our God, but to also unselfishly show others the love of Jesus Christ so that all may know that we are Christians by our love. In Jesus’ name, we pray, Amen.
To watch our service live, click link and passcode below;
Passcode: bf+9Fak^