Daily lesson for April 21, 2015

Today's daily lesson comes from 1 John 4:

17 By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. 19 We love because he first loved us. 20 If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21 And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.

The opposite of love is not hate but fear. As John beautifully puts it, "Perfect love casts out all fear."  When we know and accept deeply within ourselves that we are loved -- that at the core of our being we are "beloved" -- then there is no fear.   Just a few verses before our lesson today, John says, "God is love."  God is love and we are loved ("beloved"); we do not know God until we know Him as absolute love and we do not know ourselves until we know we are absolutely loved. To know these things is to no longer fear God. For God's perfect (absolute) love casts out all fear of God.

But true love does not end with our being loved , but with our loving. True love always makes the receiver of God's absolute love into a giver also.  This too is the meaning of "perfect love".  It is love which is whole and complete -- love which flows in and through and also spills out. Love is not yet perfect if it does not spill out. It stagnates and putrefies.

A metaphor to help. The Dead Sea is dead because it has no outflow. It is what is called an endoric body of water -- meaning water comes in but is not released so eventually it dies. After many millenia, the silt carried by the Jordan River into the Trans-Jordan valley has stagnated and hardened and made what was once a living sea now dead.

We love because God first loved us.  But if we withhold this love from others -- if we give in to bitterness, resentment, hatred or anger  -- then the love within us calcifies and hardens and eventually ends in the death of our spirit within.  Knowing deep in our heart that we have not loved as we should, we calcify and we begin to yet fear God once more; God again becomes a God of wrath and vengeance. In other words, we again make God into our own image. 

God truly is love; and we are beloved. There is no fear in love because perfect love casts out fear. But the key to knowing and letting ourselves be beloved is to allow the love of God flow through us -- to our brothers and our sisters, our neighbors and even our enemies. To withhold that love is to calcify and die; to let it flow through us is to be a beautiful and beloved font of God's love in a dry and weary land.