"If someone should say that, ‘I love God’ and his brother he may be hating, a liar he is. For the [one] not loving his brother whom he has seen, the God Whom he has not seen he is not able to be loving."
-Love is not just a word, it is a verb. It is not a profession or a platitude. It is demonstrated, or it is not love. Love does not consist in words. John is saying, real love is from Missouri, the show-me state. Words are powerful, yes. They convey a certain message, yes, but love is much much more than mere words. And when it comes to love, actions do speak louder than words. Words are cheap. When you really love someone, you show them. You demonstrate it.
-But here’s the rub - very difficult it is to demonstrate one’s love for God. Because you’re talking about Him Who is unseen. There is no direct way to demonstrate my love for the Lord. And so in this instance we find that there is a divinely-appointed surrogate. A substitute, one who takes the place of the Lord in this wondrous waltz of heavenly love. And that is my brother. Or my sister. Gender makes no difference. Or age. Or skin color, or education, or intelligence. This person, these people are God’s divinely appointed stand-ins for me to show my love for Him. We love the Lord by loving one another. It starts and ends here. Because, as John states in no uncertain terms, any profession of love for God which does not love my brother is simply false.
-And hatred? Hate is way out. Here there is a zero-tolerance policy. Hate in my heart towards a brother or sister in the Lord is incompatible with a heart which has embraced God’s love. Diametrically opposed. What does hate look like in the body of Christ? Certainly hating my brother would include things like unforgiveness, bitterness, ill will, intense dislike. But we could go a step further and ask whether hating my brother could simply look like lack of love, not going out of my way to lay my life down for him or her. Anything which I allow to fester and lurk in my heart which keeps my brother or sister at arm’s length, at a distance such that I don’t have to deal with them. It is the brother or sister whom I go out of my way not to love but to avoid. And meanwhile the body of Christ languishes in disunity, hamstrung like a wounded racehorse. Is not a chain no stronger than its weakest link? Who are we kidding? Jesus said go, be reconciled with your brother. And no doubt in those early home-based churches there was no avoiding an estranged brother. Forced to sit face-to-face, the tension and distance would have been obvious to all. Not so in Christendom, in our modern mega-church. Surely the body of Christ, His beautiful bride, lies broken and disjointed and infected, covered with the festering sores of hate and disunity, countless separations and church-splits and disputes layered on top of a go-to-meeting and get-my-fire-insurance mentality which lets me zip in and zip out and live my life in such a way that we barely even have to look at each other, much less transact any serious spiritual business. I pretty much never have to do much more than give my brother a polite handshake and some mild pleasantries once or maybe twice a week. I certainly don’t have to do the kind of life with him which would actually give me the opportunity to really demonstrate sacrificial love for him and force me to make any needed peace with him. Brothers and sisters, surely things ought not be this way. Surely there is a better way. Surely we can do better. We must. We need to relocate to Missouri...
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