If God is Love, and we are God's children...

Last week I spoke at the Valentine's chapel for the 1st-2nd graders. I didn't feel inspired to talk about one of the many legends of St. Valentine, and I wasn't particularly thrilled with all I read about the fact that it is yet another Roman holiday that was "Christianized". Week before last, God began planting seeds of what He wanted today's focus to be. Sometime last spring I really became taken with the description of LOVE in 1 Corinthians 13. I think this passage is so familiar that we have become desensitized to its message, but there is some pretty amazing stuff in it. Setting aside the fact that if you read it in context, it is actually referring to how you use your gifts, today I just want to focus on the definition of love. I did not move this into essay form...it's just the notes I wrote for chapel.

Here we go.

1 John 4:7-8

7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

There is a fun holiday coming up next week. I bet you can all tell me what it is. Valentine’s Day is a day of celebrating friends and family and eating lots of chocolate. It is a holiday to celebrate love. But I don’t want to talk today about Valentine’s has to say about love. The Bible has a lot to say about Love, and one of the most important things it says to me is found in 1 John 4:7-8. Let’s work backwards in these verses to see exactly what they say about love, and what they teach us about our part in love.

Verse 8 tells us that God is love. Verse 7 tells us that everyone who loves is born of God…that means we are His children. Think about your parents. Each of us has characteristics or traits from our parents. I get my brown curly hair from my mom, and my brown eyes from my dad. We don’t just have physical traits from our parents, but also personality traits. I have my dad’s sense of humor, and my mom’s aversion to conflict.

So if we are God’s children, that means we are going to have characteristics of God. The Bible tells us lots of ways that God made man in His likeness, but today we are focusing on the characteristics of love. If we are God’s children, then we must love each other and others.

But what does this really look like? What does it mean to have God’s characteristics of love? Let’s look at 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. I know you all know it, but we are going to read through it a special way today.

4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Now, what did we learn about love and God from 1 John 4? That’s right! We learned that God IS love. So let’s reread these verses and replace God’s name everywhere we see love:

GOD is patient, GOD is kind. GOD does not envy, GOD does not boast, GOD is not proud. GOD is not rude, GOD is not self-seeking, GOD is not easily angered, GOD keeps no record of wrongs. GOD does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. GOD always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Ok, so we are starting to get a pretty good idea of what it looks like to be God’s children, right? If we are God’s children then we are going to exhibit or show these characteristics. Let’s look at a few of them a little more closely.

Does anyone know what it means to be patient? It means to go through troubles calmly and think carefully before making decisions. When we have patience with others we are usually showing respect.

What about the 2nd characteristic listed? I know all of you in here are kind to your friends and your family. But how often do you go out of your way to be kind to someone you don’t know, or maybe someone who you may not be friends with?

Let’s look at what it means to be proud, self-seeking, and boastful. All of those things go together…and the Bible tells us that LOVE and therefore GOD are none of these things. So we should try to avoid them too. When we are proud, self-seeking or boastful it basically means that we think more of ourselves than of others and even of God. We can forget that God gave us the talents and abilities to do things, and ignore people in our lives who help us. To be proud and boastful means we want all the attention on us and to get credit for everything. The Bible tells us that instead of focusing on ourselves, we should consider others more important than ourselves, and that we should remember that everything comes from God…not anything we have done.

We just talked about a lot of characteristics or traits of God’s love. I’m going to tell you a short story and I want you to see what characteristics you hear either right or wrong:

Mrs. Smith’s class was in the middle of practicing their math drills. They were all going really fast around the room, until she got to Timmy. Timmy had a hard time in math and it took him a long time to answer. The class waited a few seconds and when Timmy didn’t answer, Denise started waving her hand in the air saying “Ooo ooo ooo!!” She knew the answer and wanted Mrs. Smith to give her a chance to show everyone that she was smarter than Timmy.

In that story was Denise showing Timmy patience? Do you think she was being self-seeking and boastful wanting to show the whole class that she knew the answer and Timmy didn’t?

The next 2 characteristics are 2 of the reasons I am most thankful to God and why I love him so much. 1 Corinthians says love (or GOD) doesn’t get mad easily and doesn’t keep score. I know sometimes I get mad about little things, but this scripture tells me that I should be patient and stay calm. It also tells me that I should forgive others and not hold things they have done to me against them. When people are mean to us or say hurtful things it is often hard to forget. But God wants us to have love instead of bitter feelings towards each other.

We don’t have time today to talk about the remaining characteristics of Love and God that Paul writes about in 1 Corinthians. But I hope you’ll spend time with your teachers and your parents talking about ways you can show Love like God has shown us love.