How Christians should love
Key Verses: 2, 3, 10, 12, 15, 18, 21
There are people who will lie to you! I am sure that comes as a surprise to you. But the truth that can be even harder to hear is that some people who call themselves preachers, teachers, apostles, deacons, ministers, elders, or whatever other term you might think of, they can lie as well.
So how can we tell who is lying? A simple question answers it: who do they say Jesus is? If they say He is anything less than fully God and fully man, then don’t listen to what they have to say. As Jesus said it, a rotten tree can’t bring good fruit. Can’t! When someone denies Jesus’ fullness, then they start creating a theology from a very different starting point and with a very different trajectory. There is no way they can end up at the same location. Either God exists eternally in three persons, or He doesn’t. If you start somewhere else, your path is totally different. You get very different answers to fundamental questions.
When we start to argue with Scripture and begin to interpret what is said in a way that changes Jesus, we are in error. Jesus’ claims were radical. We can’t make Him any less radical. We can’t take away His claims of deity. We can’t explain away His miracles. We can’t wave an interpretive wand and stop His crucifixion and resurrection. No sleight of hand can explain what the disciples and 500 others experienced after His resurrection. No sociological explanation will suffice to account for the changed lives and the spread of the Church.
So when you hear these kinds of things, “Run, Forrest, run.” They are trying to deceive you. They are not preaching the Truth.
Notice how John weaves love and Jesus’ sacrificial death into the same thought. You can’t separate this kind of love from what Jesus did. The kind of love we are to have for one another springs from the reality of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Without that reality, our love is empty.
Some want to say that God really is boiled down to love. And that when we love, we are tapping into cosmic love. And since all religions (or so the teaching goes) have love at the core, they are all teaching the same thing. But Christianity puts Jesus’ at the core. Without Jesus in all His fullness, Christianity is nothing. A Jesus without His deity is an empty Jesus. He lied to us, or He deceived us, or He was nuts. And none of those make satisfying role models.
So love Jesus and love each other.
The Arnold Journey 