After our twelve weeks in the letters written by the Apostle John, this week our discussion was about overall impressions or questions resulting from our study. What was John wanting to communicate in these letters he wrote to a church he cared about deeply?
One of the first comments in our group was that John, probably the last surviving member of the Twelve, knew his time was short. He may have been the last eyewitness of the ministry of Jesus during the incarnation, and he wanted to share the impact of his first-hand experience with the church. This week is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the night before our group met I had watched a documentary that included interviews with some of the few remaining survivors of that experience. The impact of John’s words would have been similar to the impact of those military veterans. It’s one thing to hear reports of an event, but the testimony of an eyewitness carries another level of weight. John’s letters communicate that weight to his readers, both then and now.
Other characteristics of John’s letters came up in our discussion. He certainly had a deep affection for the church and the individuals in it. He repeatedly called them his children or his little children or his beloved. At the same time, his affection was not an indulgent leniency or sentimental “anything goes” permissiveness. He offered encouragement balanced with cautions, affirmation but with definitive boundaries. Not all beliefs and not all behaviors were equal. Apparently John had not heard of political correctness. Some outlier beliefs went “too far,” and some self-centered behaviors were definitive denials of genuine faith. John loved this church too much to permit them to wander into heresy or to watch them stumble into sin.
One of the themes that characterized much of all three letters was the question, “Who is on our team?” Antichrists, deceivers, misguided leaders were among the people, and some members had already left the church, probably following other erroneous teaching. John described the relational realities and practical support that grows out of genuine faith. He defined doctrinal boundaries to help recognize untrustworthy teachers and counterfeit spirits. He provided guidelines for who should (and should not) be welcomed to preach or teach in the church. Discerning true Christian belief and teaching was critical for the fledgling church, and John wanted them to know clearly, “Who is on our team?”
A theologically central theme in 1 John reflects one of the main reasons the letter was written: the nature of God and the person of Christ. Confusion and controversy resulted in distorted depictions that muddled the relationship of the Father and the Son, and distorted the human and divine natures of Christ. The language John uses both in the gospel he recorded and in these letters establishes the foundation for understanding the multi-personal nature of God and the dual nature of the incarnate Christ. The Holy Spirit is mentioned but the emphasis in the letters is on the primary issues of the Father and the Son.
One person in our group shared a concern about a particular verse: “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love” (1 John 4:18). The problem is that even love often involves fear. We talked about what kind of fears might be part of even loving relationships: fear of losing a friend, fear of conflict, fear of not meeting expectations, fear of exposure, fear of love not being returned, fear of abandonment. One person summed up several of those fears: a fear of what might happen to damage or end the relationship.
That variety of fears might be summed up under the heading Larry Crabb calls our “core terror that our longing to live fully as men and women will never be realized, and that we will remain personally empty and relationally disconnected.”[1] That core terror in each of us can dominate our relational interactions with others. Self-protection and risk avoidance become paramount and become self-defeating. Genuine intimate relationships (i.e., the kind of love that John is describing) inherently involve self-disclosure and risk taking. John’s letters are examples of those characteristics. What if the people he loved reacted badly to his letters? What if they rejected his exhortations and challenges to them? What if his openness caused them to back away from their commitment to him? Living out of our core terror results in relationships controlled by those kinds of questions, a “fear that justifies self-protective relating, even though often denied and unfelt.”[2]
John says love casts out fear, or, more accurately, perfect love casts out fear. Our love is not perfect, therefore, we have the fear. The practical question is, “What can we do about it?”
Perhaps the main cause of our fear regarding relationships is that we expect too much from them. If we depend on the relationship with others to provide the fulfillment and joy and satisfaction in our lives, no wonder we might be controlled by the core terror of losing the relationship. Perhaps that is why John follows his statement about fear with the great reassurance, “We love because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Our relationships, our love for (and from) others are incredible blessings from God. Those relationships reflect the love God has for us as well as the love eternally existing in the Holy Trinity (John 17:11, 21, 22). Our common mistake is to confuse the blessing of those relationships with the true source of our fulfillment and joy and satisfaction, knowing God Himself. As we grow in our relationship with God, we will be more able to reveal and risk ourselves in love for others in spite of very real fears. Seeing Him more clearly will make us more reliant on Him (“gazing on the beauty of the Lord” as David desired in Psalm 27:4). C. S. Lewis captured this transfer of dependence as the state
“…where all blessed creatures need and know that they need nothing but God and are therefore set free to love one another disinterestedly. And so your love shall be like His, borne neither of your need nor of my deserving but of plain bounty. I think those are drawing near to heaven who in this life find that they need men less and love men more and delight more in being loved without being needed.”[3]
This is not to minimize the value and need for human relationship. The goal is to reduce the controlling effect of our core terror as we engage others. John (and most of the New Testament) makes clear the centrality of relationships. As Lewis said so powerfully, love that is not dependent on the other person is liberating, it frees us to love “disinterestedly” – not motivated by our own interests or controlled by a core terror. Lewis clarifies that love for God and for others are not mutually exclusive choices: “Divine Love does not substitute itself for the natural— as if we had to throw away our silver to make room for the gold. The natural loves are summoned to become modes of Charity [i.e., love, agape] while also remaining the natural loves they were.”[4]
Growing in our relationship with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit begins to free us from the core terror that controls us. That freedom enables us to love others in ways that reflect and display the infinite and self-giving love of the Triune God. As we know that He has loved us we become less dependent on others for our fullness. Even when we don’t feel that immediate joy or satisfaction or fulfillment we can be a people “giving from trusted fullness rather than grasping for demanded fullness”[5] from others.
[1] Larry Crabb, Fully Alive: A Biblical Vision of Gender that Frees Men and Women to Live Beyond Stenotypes (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 2013), 79; Kindle Edition location 1159.
[2] Larry Crabb, Fully Alive: A Biblical Vision of Gender that Frees Men and Women to Live Beyond Stenotypes (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 2013), 79; Kindle Edition location 1159.
[3] C. S. Lewis, “The Four Loves; Read by the Author” (audio recording, Word Publishing, 1994); Cassette 2, “Agape” at approximately 20:15. Note that this audio recording contains a significant amount of material not found in the printed edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, Inc, 1960).
[4] C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 2012), 133; Kindle Edition location 1595.
[5] Larry Crabb, 66 Love Letters: A Conversation with God That Invites You into His Story (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2009), 208.