Belief Becomes Behavior

The scriptures referred to are 1 John 3:16-24, Acts 4:5-12 and John 10:11-18.

Sociologists point out that religions have 3 main components: beliefs, behaviors and belonging. If you were living in almost any ancient culture, regardless of your beliefs, your religious behaviors would consist mostly of making sacrifices to the gods. This was not because you believed the gods cared about you. You were feeding or appeasing them or trying to win their favor. Basically your local gods were like Mafia dons. They were powerful and you wanted to keep them on your side. They were, however, not particularly moral beings. Most of Greek mythology would disappear if Zeus could keep it in his pants. Human wars were just the earthly manifestation of wars between the gods. You did not look to the gods for moral examples or direction, only protection.

Ethical monotheism, the idea that there is only one God and that God is the source of moral standards and principles, originated with Judaism. For instance, practically every culture has a story of a great flood that almost wiped out humanity, but the reasons the gods do it usually have nothing to do with morality. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the gods are hungover from drinking too much and find the humans to be too noisy! That's the reason they try to drown them. Whereas in the Torah, the reason is “The earth was ruined in the sight of God; the earth was full of violence.” (Genesis 6:11) This was morally wrong because humans are made in the image of God. And afterwards God makes a covenant with Noah and his descendants that he will not flood the earth again and they will not kill one another. Instead they are to fill the rebooted earth with life. (Genesis 9:6-7)

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the emphasis is on how God wants us to treat one another with love. (Leviticus 19:18, 34) His people are to take care of the poor, the widow, orphan, the resident alien, and the disabled (Exodus 22:21-23; 23:6; Leviticus 19:14). We are to be honest in our dealings with one another. (Leviticus 19:11-13) God's main ethical principles are put forth in the Ten Commandments. (Exodus 20:1-17) Jesus summarized these in the 2 greatest commandments: to love God with all one is and has and to love our neighbors as ourselves. (Mark 12:29-31) When his people violate these commandments, God turns his face from them and lets them suffer the consequences of their sins. (Deuteronomy 31:17) This causes God's people to turn back to him (the basic meaning of the Hebrew word for “repent” is “turn back”) and so he turns back to them and rescues them. This happens repeatedly. It's the basic narrative of the Old Testament. (Psalm 106:43-45)

But God always warns his people first that they have done what is wrong. And it is always about those two greatest commandments. The people are either worshipping things other than God or just going through the motions when worshipping God, and they are also mistreating the disadvantaged. In Isaiah God says, “When you spread out your hands in prayer, I look the other way; when you offer your many prayers, I do not listen, because your hands are covered in blood. Wash! Cleanse yourselves! Remove your sinful deeds from my sight! Stop sinning! Learn to do what is right! Promote justice! Give the oppressed reason to celebrate! Take up the cause of the orphan! Defend the rights of the widow!” (Isaiah 1:15-17) The consequences for not loving God and our fellow human beings never come as a surprise. God always warns people to change their ways. God tells Jeremiah, “There are times when I threaten to uproot, tear down, and destroy a nation or kingdom. But if that nation I threatened stops doing wrong, I will cancel the destruction I intended to do to it.” (Jeremiah 18:7-8)

Still, people often think of God as unreasonable. Yet just after those verses in Isaiah he says, “Come now and let us reason together, says the Lord. Though your sins have stained you like the color red, you can become white like snow; though they are as easy to see as the color scarlet, you can become white like wool.” (Isaiah 1:18) In Joel it says, “Return to the Lord your God, for he is merciful and compassionate, slow to anger and boundless in loyal love—often relenting from calamitous punishment. Who knows? Perhaps he will be compassionate and grant a reprieve, and leave a blessing in his wake—a meal offering and a drink offering for you to offer to the Lord your God.” (Joel 2:13-14) God is always ready to forgive because God loves us.

We see God's mercy and compassion most clearly in Jesus. Paul, after talking about how extraordinary it would be for anyone to die for another person, except maybe if that person was exceptionally good, writes, “But God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8) In this instance God does not wait until we repent before he offers forgiveness. He acts first. He anticipates that people will, in response to his self-sacrificial action in Christ, repent and turn to him. God loves us and so we should return that love.

And in today's passage from 1 John, we read, “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” And here we see clearly the principle of ethical monotheism. We do these things because this is how God acts. God loves other people as well and so we should love them too.

Mentioning that we should lay down our lives for others may make us uneasy. We know, for instance, that at the time that the Revelation to John was written, Christians were being persecuted. (Revelation 2:10, 13) In fact the book of Revelation seems to have been written to assure Christians that while persecutions will happen, God will triumph in the end and so they should persevere. (Revelation 2:7, 11, 17, 26; 3:5, 12, 21)

But in 1 John we see a broader meaning is given to the phrase “lay down our lives for one another.” The very next verse asks, “How does God's love reside in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help?” The Greek describes this literally as the person “closing off his heart from” the person in need. So laying down one's life can mean not only giving up one's life for someone but giving up some of one's possessions to help. It is being open-hearted and generous to the person who needs help. It means helping not only with our treasure but our time and our talents. And if a person doesn't do as little as that, how can they be called a Christian?

So he continues, “Little children, let us love, not in word and speech, but in truth and action.” So we know that even in the first century there were people in the church who talked the talk but didn't walk the walk. And one of the biggest problems we have today is that people have ceased to believe that Christians mean what they say when they claim to be followers of Jesus. Because they are reluctant to lay down any parts of their lives or any privileges they have for the sake of others. That means their behaviors are at odds with their beliefs. As James says, “...faith without works is dead.” (James 2:26)

Jesus said, “If anyone wants to become my follower, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23) He also said, “Whoever does not carry his own cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:27) And remember, our cross doesn't mean our own troubles. Jesus carried his cross not for himself but for us. Our cross is the burdens we assume for the sake of others. As Paul puts it, “Carry one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” (Galatians 6:2) And what law is that? Jesus said, “My commandment is this—to love one another just as I have loved you.” (John 15:12) He said that on the night he was arrested and sent to the cross for us. As it says at the beginning of our passage in 1 John, because Jesus laid down his life for us out of love, we are to do the same for one another.

We see this in our passage from Acts. Peter and John were arrested by the Sanhedrin, the very people who had arrested Jesus and turned him over to Pilate to be crucified. These were the people from whom the disciples were hiding in the locked room on that first Easter. Yet here they are boldly telling them that they healed a man who couldn't walk in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, a man who couldn't stay dead because he was the Christ, the Messiah. Their faith wasn't a private matter of praying by themselves. Their beliefs, that Jesus was in fact “the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead,” compelled them to behave in the way they did: helping others and proclaiming this good news. (Acts 3:15) They were no longer afraid of death, nor reluctant to lay it down for others.

And in this they were behaving like Jesus, who, in today's passage from John's gospel, says, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” The disciples did not understand what Jesus was saying at the time. But after his resurrection, they got what he meant. The hired hand may run from the wolf, as indeed the disciples did at Jesus' arrest. But like a good shepherd faces the wolf at the cost of his life, Jesus faced the forces of pain and death and in the end overcame them.

Had Jesus not been raised from the dead, his followers would have eventually disappeared as did those of John the Baptist. Paul encountered a dozen of John's disciples at Ephesus but there are none today. (Acts 19:1-7) It was the risen Christ who gave Peter and the rest the courage to spread the word, despite the risk of death. And if the disciples hadn't put their beliefs in the risen Jesus into action, we wouldn't be here.

Unfortunately the church in North America and Europe is shrinking. I believe that is because we have divorced our behavior from our beliefs. Studies have shown that most Christians do not live very differently from those who don't believe. And people have noticed this. We may proclaim the gospel with our lips but we do not put it into practice in our lives. And that more than anything else has turned people off to Christianity. They don't see a lot of real Christians in the world. As Carl Jung said, “You are what you do, not what you say you will do.”

G.K. Chesterton said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” It's like sobriety. As they say in A.A., it works if you work it. But when we hit difficulties, we begin to doubt ourselves, lose heart and give up. What we need is a spirit of boldness.

And that is what we are given. Because of what God did for us in Jesus, we are saved from sin and death. And knowing this truth, our passage says, our hearts do not condemn us. John's letter continues, “Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness from God; and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.” The Greek word translated “boldness” also means “confidence” and “resolve.” We can be bold because, as Paul put it, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31)

Notice that we can ask anything from God because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him. If a soldier is ordered to go on a mission, he will be provided with whatever he needs to fulfill that mission. He will not be provided with anything in the world he happens to desire. Just so, we can ask God for whatever we need to fulfill the mission he has given us. That does not mean he will give us winning lottery numbers or a supermodel girlfriend or movie star boyfriend. As it says in James, “You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, so you can spend it on your passions.” (James 4:3) But if we need it to do God's will, we can ask and we will receive it.

And what are our orders, so to speak? “And this is his commandment, that we should believe in his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he commanded us.” Trust Jesus and love one another. But remember we must love not just with our words but with our actions, as Jesus did. He healed people; he fed people; he made a real difference in people's lives. And if in Jesus' name we make a difference in people's lives, they will be more likely to be drawn to Jesus.

Finally our passage from 1 John says, “All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them.” The word translated “abide” means to “reside” or “stay.” If we put our trust in Jesus and love one another, we reside and stay in him and he resides and stays in us.

“And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.” We tend to think of the Holy Spirit as passive but he is dynamic. After Jesus was baptized in the Jordan, the Spirit drove him into the wilderness. (Mark 1:12) After that we are told, “Then Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee” and began his ministry. (Luke 4:14) The Spirit raised Jesus from the dead. (Romans 8:11) Before he ascended, Jesus told his disciples, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you...” (Acts 1:8) We are not to sit on a mountain like some guru, waiting for people to come to us and receive wisdom. We are to go out, as Jesus did, in the power of the Spirit and show his love in all that we think, say and do. We can do it “...because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” (Romans 5:5)

Huey Lewis and the News did a whole song about the power of love. They sang that the power of love could “make a bad one good, make a wrong one right...” and that while it may seem cruel sometimes “...it might just save your life.” We know that God so loved the world that he sent his one and only Son to save our lives, which meant he would end up dying, painfully, at the hands of those very sinners he came to save. Jesus knew his mission would become a suicide mission. But he trusted God and believed in his promise to raise him again on the third day. And so he acted on that belief. He went to the cross out of love for us. And if we really believe that Jesus laid down his life for us, then we ought to lay down our lives for one another.