We all know that there are certain physical characteristics that are totally unique to each individual. Your fingerprints, for example, are entirely unique—no one else has fingerprints exactly like yours. The pattern of your iris, the colored part of your eye, is totally unique. So is your DNA. But did you know that your heartbeat is completely unique too? Every person on earth has a different heartbeat pattern, or “cardiac signature.” Your cardiac signature cannot be altered or disguised. So, if someone can measure your “cardiac signature,” they can identify you, even in a big crowd of people.
In fact—and this is pretty scary to me—the Pentagon has built a laser that can identify people by their heartbeat from 600 feet away. There are positive uses for this technology, of course. Doctors could monitor your heart health from far away. This laser could also be used to track criminals or terrorists from long distances away. (1) But, again, for those of us concerned about privacy, the thought is a little disconcerting.
Did you ever imagine that your physical heartbeat—your cardiac signature—could be so distinctive? Now, let’s apply that to our faith,
We don’t need a laser or any advanced technology to tell us what a Christian’s “cardiac signature” looks like. Our scripture lesson for this morning, from First John 3: 16-24 makes that clear. The heartbeat of the Christian is to love others with the sacrificial love of Jesus. Not a warm and fuzzy feeling. Not with good intentions or encouraging words. But with loving actions. Actions that cost us something. As verse 18 reads, “. . . let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.” Talk is cheap, the writer of this passage is saying. Real love is costly.
Our epistle lesson for the morning was written to encourage church people to be more loving toward one another and to those in need. If we can’t do that, John tells us, we’ve missed the very heart of the faith that Christ gave us.
A few months ago, I told you about a conversation that Al Lingren, a professor at Garrett Theological Seminary, had with his teenage son. You may remember that Lingren’s son asked his dad, “Dad, what is the toughest thing God ever tried to do?”
Now they teach you a lot of things in seminary. But they don’t exactly cover this question. Lingren wracked his brain for an answer, then asked his son, “What do you think it was?”
The boy said, “Since taking science in school, I thought the creation of the world might be the hardest thing God ever tried to do, and in Sunday school we got to talking about some of the miracles, and I thought the resurrection might be the toughest thing God ever tried to do. But, after thinking about it some more, I decided that the toughest thing God ever had to do is to get us to understand who He is and that He loves us.” (2)
I repeat that story because I think that young man was onto something. “. . . The toughest thing God ever had to do is to get us to understand who He is and that He loves us.” How did God get us to understand who He is? First through the Law and the prophets. And then through coming to us in the flesh, in the person of Jesus Christ. And how did God get us to understand that He loves us? By giving His Son to die on the cross and rise again to save us from the penalty of sin and death.
John, the disciple of Jesus who wrote these verses, knew that if he didn’t make it perfectly clear what Christian love looks like, we would try to define it for ourselves. He doesn’t give us that option. In verse 16, he writes, “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.”
The essence of Christian faith is love. That is where we begin this morning. Listen to some selected words from this chapter: “Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the children of God . . . For this is the message that you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another . . . This is how we know that God loves us, because He laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for one another . . . Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”
Friends, that’s the Gospel: “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to love, is it?
Many years ago, Jeffrey Collins was director of a nonprofit group called Love & Action. This is an organization that ministers to AIDS patients and their families.
Collins tells of receiving a phone call at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon as he was trying to leave the office. Collins had just worked a sixty-hour week. He was exhausted and wanted to ignore the phone. But he answered it anyway.
The voice on the other end of the line was Jimmy, a client of Love & Action. Jimmy was very sick and very scared. Collins confesses that his first emotion when he answered the call wasn’t compassion, but anger. He really wanted to go home and rest. He wanted a couple of hours at the end of the week when no one needed him. Many of you know exactly what that’s like. But Collins knew that God’s calling isn’t dependent on how we feel, but on how badly someone else needs our help. So, Jeffrey Collins headed over to Jimmy’s house to check on him.
Jimmy was on the sofa, shivering and feverish and covered in vomit. The smell was horrible. Though he was very careful not to show it, Jeffrey’s anger and annoyance grew. As he knelt down and scrubbed vomit out of the carpet surrounding the sofa, Jeffrey prayed an angry prayer to God. But here’s what came out of that experience.
A friend of Jimmy’s named Russ came in to find Jeffrey kneeling beside the sofa cleaning up Jimmy’s vomit. With an astonished look on his face, Russ said, “I understand! I understand!”
“What Russ?” Jimmy asked weakly. What do you understand?
“I understand who Jesus is,” Russ said through tears. “He’s like Jeff!”
That night, Jeffrey prayed with Russ as Russ committed his life to following Jesus. In spite of Jeffrey’s resentment, his loving actions brought another young man to Jesus. (3)
It isn’t always easy to love. We tend to withhold love until someone passes our “approval test.” We love those who we think are deserving of our love—which is exactly the opposite of Jesus’ love. He didn’t love us because we were easy to love or we deserved it. He loves us with the very love of God.
Just as Christ laid down his life for us, so ought we to lay down our lives for others. That means loving all people—even those who misuse us, and that means doing good to all people—even those whom we may not approve of, and that means leaving our comfort zone from time to time for acts of extraordinary concern. The essence of Christian faith is love.
That brings us to something else that is important for us to realize. Love is our primary witness to the world. How will the world know we’re Christians? By our love. If the day comes when the Christian church is as loving as its Master, the world will beat a path to our door. John asks, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help?” And the answer is, it doesn’t.
Frances Havergal was an English poet, pianist and hymn writer in the mid-1800s. Her most famous hymn is probably, “Take my life and let it be,” which begins with the words, “Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee.” In each verse, Havergal offers some part of her life for the Lord’s service. Take my voice, take my hands, take my feet, take my love. She asks God to use every part of her life to make a difference for others.
The fourth verse of this hymn begins, “Take my silver and my gold, not a mite would I withhold.” And Frances Havergal really meant it. In her journal, she wrote of packing up a jeweled cabinet that belonged to her family, along with other ornamental pieces worth a great deal of money and sending them off to the Church Missionary Society to be used to fund missionaries in other countries. She noted in her journal that day, “I don’t think I need tell you I never packed a box with such pleasure.” (4)
How do we know that Frances Havergal had a heart like Jesus? Because she willingly, joyfully gave away her most expensive treasures for the sake of sharing the message of Jesus with strangers in another part of the world. She saw brothers and sisters in need, and she was determined to help them. Love is our primary witness to the world of our faith in Christ.
Many years ago, Pastor W.A. Criswell told of visiting a Wycliffe missionary camp in a remote district in Peru. He watched a small amphibious plane come out of the Peruvian jungle and land on a nearby airstrip. Two young women came off the plane. They were covered in insect bites that had become infected and turned into open sores. Their condition looked miserable. But the young women didn’t complain.
They were missionaries, and they had chosen to serve in a remote part of Peru, sharing the message of Jesus with an indigenous community who were violently opposed to outsiders. If the Wycliffe organization had sent men to preach and teach to these people, they would have been killed. So these young women volunteered to serve there. And every so often, when they got too sick from the insect bites, they would return to camp for a couple of weeks for medical attention. And then they would head right back into the jungle. They gave up their comfort and their safety for the joy of sharing the love of Jesus with others. A few months after the young women began their ministry there, the leader of this indigenous people gave his life to Christ. (5)
Love is more than just an emotion or a feeling. Love is feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned. Love is not a passive verb, but an active one. And it is the primary way we share Christ with the world.
Love is our primary witness to the world. As the saying goes, “People don’t care how much we know until they know how much we care.” But there’s one thing more that we need to see.
Love is a gift from God. There’s a bumper sticker that reads: “Perform an unnatural act—love somebody.” And it’s true. Pure love is not an attribute of humanity, but of God. Our nature is to strive for survival, to strive for our own well-being. God’s nature is self-giving love. The closer we are to God, the better able we are to love others. John writes, “And by this we know that He abides in us, by the Spirit that He has given us.” That Spirit is love.
There is an old episode of the TV show “The Twilight Zone” in which a gambler dies. He wakes up in a room full of gaming tables. And no matter what game he plays, he wins. A gambler’s dream comes true! This must be heaven!
But as the gambler goes from table to table, winning every game easily, he comes to realize that he didn’t wind up in heaven at all, but in hell. You see, he had everything he ever wanted, but he didn’t have anyone to share his winnings with. (6)
Love is a gift God gives to us. And it is multiplied and magnified when we can give it away, when we can love others with the same sacrificial love that God showed to us.
In a very old cemetery in England, there is a weather-beaten tombstone for a man who is not in any way famous, as far as I know. But he must have been a powerful force for good among those who knew him. Under his name and the dates of his birth and death is this simple epitaph, “In the worst of times, he did the best of things.”
That sounds like Jesus, doesn’t it? “In the worst of times, he did the best of things.” In the face of persecution and injustice and torture and humiliation, Jesus faced his death with courage and grace, even forgiving the men who hung him on the cross. And he willingly suffered his awful fate to show us how far God would go to prove His love for us.
The words John wrote centuries ago are still true for us today, “And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he commanded us.” When the love of God truly abides in our heart, we are able to look into the faces of others and see God’s face.
Love is the essence of Christian faith. Love is our primary witness to the world. Love is a gift from God. We love because God first loved us. Only as we abide in God can His love abide in us.
1. “The Pentagon has a laser that can identify people from a distance—by their heartbeat” by David Hambling, Technology Review, Jun 27, 2019, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613891/the-pentagon-has-a-laser-that-can-identify-people-from-a-distanceby-their-heartbeat/.
2. From a sermon by Robert L. Allen.
3. Cited by Pastor Joe Wittwer, “Love is a verb,” https://lifecenter.net/sermons/2014/love-is-a-verb/.
4. “Frances Havergal Wrote ‘Take My Life and Let it Be’” Christianity.com, https://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1801-1900/frances-havergal-wrote-take-my-life-and-let-it-be-11630571.html.
5. Dr. W. A. Criswell, The Cross and the Crown, https://wacriswell.com/sermons/1979/the-cross-and-the-crown-3/.
6. From a sermon by Jimmy Davis. Source unknown.