Loving Each Other -- A Message for July 7, 2024

 

Scripture 1 John 3:16-24 

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.  

If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?  

Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. 

This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence:  

If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before. God  

and receive from him anything we ask, because we keep his commands and do what pleases him.  

And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us.  

The one who keeps God’s commands lives in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us. 

Here ends this reading of the Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Amen 

Let us pray.... 

Sermon                                           Loving Each Other 

Over the past few weeks in our worship services, we have been working our way through the First letter of John from the New Testament. This letter is not a part of the Bible that most of us are uber-familiar-with – in our worship services, we are more likely to hear stories from Jesus’ life or the stories from the Old Testament about Abraham and Sarah’s travels, David’s trials, or the prophesies of Isaiah. Each week, most of us only set-aside one hour to worship God and we are more likely to read the lesser-known stories and letters in the Bible on our own time. 

The first letter of John is attributed to an author Biblical scholars call “The Elder.” Their letters were intended to be passed from little church congregation to little church congregation in the Roman region of Asia – modern day Türkiye. So, the letters were not written to a specific group of people but were intended to be a more general letters of encouragement to many little groups of people. 

The Elder was concerned that the stresses of being little groups of Christians living amongst a larger population of people with other beliefs and religious practices would cause so much stress to the Christians their churches would break apart. He or she cautioned them against falling away from their shared faith. They worried about the people within the churches having good relationships with each other – she was afraid that conflict would lead to church members feeling demoralized and discouraged. The people within the churches needed to remain united because they had to support each other against the outside pressure on their group...the governing authorities and their neighbors were becoming more and more hostile to Christians. Christians were being arrested and killed by the Roman authorities who ruled over this region. 

The portion of the letter we are focusing on this morning encourages Christians to look out for each other. The Elder writes that all Christians are adopted into the family of God – men or women, wealthy people & slaves, Greek or Turkish or Israeli or Egyptian -- no matter our backgrounds, we are all brothers and sisters in the family of God.  

The Elder writes it is our responsibility to care for one another. We are supposed to share our resources with brothers and sisters who are struggling. The Elder was focused on cohesion and unity within the group.... if people within the group were in need, it was the responsibility of the others in the group to help alleviate those needs. 

When this letter was written, Christians were a little group living surrounded by neighbors who were not Christians. Fast-forward 19 hundred years or so, Christians are a bigger group living surrounded by neighbors who are a variety of faiths or not. We have churches and Christian communities scattered throughout the world. In our country, most churches are like ours – a smaller group of people who worship together in a place that was designed for a bigger crowd. We are becoming more and more like the churches the First Letter of John was written for – small congregations that are under stress from the outside world and from within. 

Therefore, we need to listen to the advice of the Elder. It is important for us to remember we are all brothers and sisters and who have been adopted by God. We must strive to have unity among ourselves – just as biological brothers and sisters disagree, so do Christian brothers and sisters. As much as possible, we must work to have a good relationship with each other and remember we are in this together. When people within our congregation suffer, we must join together to support each other. I have witnessed members of Trinity excel at this. If someone is struggling to find a new job or is looking for a new home to rent, we are called to put our personal feelers out among our social networks and help. When one of us is recovering from surgery or undergoing cancer treatments, we are called to bring them soup and good books to read. When our young people are applying for college or volunteer jobs, it is our work to write them letters of recommendation.  Whatever struggles we face, we are called to work together on behalf of each other.  

Each day, we are called to work to be faithful Christians in the world. In this portion of 1^st John, the Elder reminds us that we are called to believe in Jesus and to love one another as Jesus loved us. Let us strive to be loving in our thoughts, words and deeds towards each other and as we live our lives out in the world.  

Amen.