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[Silence] The following message for the moment is delivered by the Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled, "Love's Loyalty." Let us continue in worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of God's Word

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as it is recorded in 1 John, chapter 4. I begin the reading at the verse numbered 7. "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

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In this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

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No man has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his own spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world.

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Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him and he in God. So we know and believe the love God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. In this is love perfected with us, that we may have confidence for the day of judgment,

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because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, for fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love. We love because he first loved us.

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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. And this commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also. And may the same Spirit who inspired these words incline our hearts to their understanding.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. The song goes, "Love makes the world go round." And I don't know if that's true for everyone, but it is true for me.

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Let me illustrate that out of some experiences of just this last week, a week which was in no way exceptional. I received a note from a former student that I taught in his college days. Let me share one paragraph.

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"Dear Doc, Hello there. It's been too long since we've talked. Even so, I think of you often. In particular, this morning as I met with a friend, I remembered how when we were together at the college,

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you would often ask me if anyone had told me that they loved me that day. No one usually had. So you told me that you did. That was a wonderful thing for you to do.

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There is tremendous power in knowing you are loved." This last week I received a telephone call from California from a young couple who had been married 30 years. And now for the first time in their married relationship,

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temptations have attacked them, and they were seeking counsel. In the session meeting this last week, one of our elders suggested that she felt there was not enough love in our church. Another of our elders replied that he felt great love in this congregation.

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This last week, my dear friend Bill Lewis died. And as I went and sat with his widow, Clara, I reminded her of how every Sunday morning when Bill was able to do so, he would be standing just back here as I came down and prepared to go into worship.

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He always would have a little joke, a teasing remark, a blessing, something that touched and encouraged my spirit. And I told Clara how much I was going to miss him. And then just last night, I married two people on this spot.

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Now I'm just a few short of having married 500 couples, but I will confess to you that it is as much as a thrill for me today to look into their sparkling eyes and to see that miracle in which one plus one equals one, as it was when I did my first marriage service so long ago.

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Love makes my world go around. I am always, it seems, either seeking to advance it or repelling those things which are attacking it. But what is love?

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Permit me to share some of my thoughts about it with you this morning. I would suggest, first of all, that love is not just an emotion. It is far more loyalty to a promise. This young man, I suppose that across the years I've said to 2,000 students

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on 2,000 different occasions, "Has anyone told you that they loved you today?" And when they said no, if they said no, I said to them, "Well, I love you." Now, obviously, I cannot hold every one of those young people in equal affection and have the same fondness for them all.

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What I was doing was saying to them that they could always count on me to be loyal to the promises of love and that they could claim those promises from me whenever they wished to do so. That couple that called me from California, I haven't talked with them for 18 years. Now, that certainly makes it obvious that they are not close friends,

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that there are not ties of affection which bind us. But I said to them once that if they ever needed help, they should call on me and I would help them. And I showed my love by being loyal to that promise. The session meeting the other night, discussing whether there is enough love in our congregation or not,

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I'm sure we would all agree, since we do not all even know one another, that we are not tied together by an equal network of fondness and affection and emotional concern. The real question for us to ask is this question. Do we, in dealing with one another and with those who come to visit amongst us,

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do we always remain loyal to the pledge of love for each and every one of them? Bill Lewis, who used to stand back here to greet me, he was here the night in which I was installed as pastor of this church. And that night, the members of this congregation were called upon to take some vows.

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And one of those vows was that they would be loving and encouraging to me in my ministry. Bill made that promise, and he was always loyal to it. He kept his word. That's the reason I will miss him. This act of concern was his fulfillment of his promise.

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When this young couple stood before me last night to be married, I did not talk to them, when the time for the homily came, about romance. That kind of thing can become nothing more than sentimental drivel. What I talked to them about was being faithful to the promises, the commitments, and the vows

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which they had before God and others made on that spot at those moments. The reason so many marriages are collapsing today is not because there is any absence of passion or romance in the world. It is because so many people today feel no obligation to keep their word, to honor their vows. For someone to suggest that we can be equally fond of everyone is to suggest nonsense.

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For someone to imply that you can turn affection on or off like a faucet, that's to speak in a silly and irresponsible manner. Love, in its essence, is commitment to a principle, not an emotion. It is a promise made to God and others which one seeks to live out. There's a story about a church that had a small group that prayed regularly.

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And they prayed every week for some time that God would lead some sinner into their midst whom they might save. And their prayer was answered. Two weeks later, the town reprobate appeared. He was loud, he was obnoxious, he was disruptive of the entire meeting. For four weeks he was there until one of the members of the group stood up in the prayer meeting and prayed as follows,

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"Oh Lord, forgive us for not telling you what kind of sinner we had in mind." Now that, you see, is being guided by one's emotion. But we are called upon, as those who love in Christ, to be motivated by our devotion. Three years ago I was walking up Oliver Avenue late one night, and there was a drunken man lying in the gutter.

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Now as I went over and helped to pick him up and smelled the way he smelled, and listened to his obscenities and blasphemies, I did not feel particularly fond of him. What is more, when he vomited on me, that did not aid my feelings of affection for him. But what I was doing was being loyal to a commitment that I have made to God and others,

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to love God with my heart, my soul, my mind, my body, and to love my neighbor as myself. When the Bible speaks of love in its highest meaning, it means a love which endures in spite of the behavior of the one being loved. It is to love someone not because they are what you want them to be, but because you will love them regardless of what they are.

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And that is essentially an act of loyalty. It is living up to your vows, not your feelings. I would also like to suggest to you this morning that the greatest example of love as loyalty is to be seen in the love of God. 1 John chapter 4, a portion of which I just read in your hearing, is one of the grandest descriptions of love in all of the scriptures.

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In it we are taught that God is the source of all love. We are also taught that as we know God better, we will be enabled to love more. The passage goes on to teach us that God's love is best seen in the person of Jesus Christ, and that this love, when it is seen and accepted, drives out all fear.

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And the passage concludes by reminding us that our love is to be a response to God's love for us. The words which sum the whole matter are these, "We love because he first loved us." Now when you look at the life of Jesus as it is recorded on the pages of scripture, you will not find him going about making a lot of fuzzy, warm moments, focusing on feelings and emotions.

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You will find him accepting the commitment that he has made to his father and to others, and fulfilling that commitment even to the cost of his own life. There are many illustrations of that which I might advance. Let me use a very simple one. About five years ago in France, there was a young minister who preached one morning,

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and in the course of his sermon, he made reference several times to the love of God. Now in that church, it was the custom following worship for there to be a discussion of the sermon. And someone asked this young pastor, "How would you define the love of God?" And he looked at the person and he said, "If you and all of you others will be here in the church at 7.30 tonight,

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I shall tell you what the love of God is." At 7.30 that night, quite a crowd gathered, and they were surprised when they entered the church to see that all the lights were out, there were just a few dim candles lighted. The young minister entered the chancel and slowly and deliberately extinguished every one of the candles,

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except for a tall white candle which he held in his own hand. He then walked over very slowly and deliberately to a picture of the crucified Christ that was painted upon one wall of the sanctuary. He held up the candle so that the flickering flame illuminated the nail-pierced feet of Christ.

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Then he lifted the candle higher so that its light fell upon the wounded side and the torn hands of the Savior. And finally, standing as high on his tiptoes as he could, he lifted that long taper so that its gleam fell upon that cruel crown of thorns crushed down on Christ's brow. And then slowly he lowered the candle, having shown this love that went to such lacerating ends.

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And he blew the candle out, and in the darkness he said, "This is what the love of God is." There are no skills we have which can caliper the compassion of God. There are no paragraphs we can fashion which can make it plain. There is no sentence long enough to encompass everything that is true of God's love.

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And there's no collection of thoughts which we can gather together in order to grasp the depths of its meaning. We simply see it in Jesus Christ. The one who dies in absolute loyalty to his Father and to those in the world who themselves are disloyal to God. And when you see that, and you let that penetrate to the center of yourself,

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then and only then are you led to love as he loved. We love because he first loved us like that. When you've experienced that, when it possesses your heart and your soul and your very being, then you have no alternative.

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The overwhelming desire that is within you is to love like him because he so loved you. One last thought. The loyalty of love is very costly, but it is worth the price. In John chapter 21, we have recorded for us the first meeting of our Lord and Peter after Easter. Now you will remember how Peter, during the various trials of Jesus, three times denied that he even knew Jesus.

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Then came Good Friday, the burial, then Easter and resurrection, and now a little time after that, Jesus is standing on the shore of Galilee, and Peter comes to him with a broken heart and overwhelmed with the sense of his own guilt. And Jesus says, "Peter, do you love me more than these?"

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Now the "these" is indefinite there. We don't know whether he was pointing to the ships and the nets, "Do you love me more than the things of the world?" Or whether he was indicating all of the disciples who were gathered there. "Do you love me above and beyond any human loving relationship?" We're not sure.

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But in any case, he says to Peter three times, "Peter, do you love me more than these?" And Peter answers each time, and there are three times, one for each time that Peter denied Christ. He answers each time, "Lord, you know that I love you." And then Jesus says to him, "Yes, Peter.

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When you were young, you did what you pleased. But now, when you are older and my disciple, you will be stretched out, and you will suffer abuse because of your love of me." "Stretched out" means you will be crucified.

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And that's exactly what happened. For the Romans captured Peter, imprisoned him, and then crucified him. What Christ was saying to Peter, and what he is saying to us as those who have come after him, that the loyalty of love to the Savior is a very costly thing, but it is worth the price.

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And every generation of serious Christians that has lived from that day until this, knows how true that is. H. H. Farmer, the noted English theologian and preacher, has a book called "God and Man." And in that book, he tells about how, after the Second World War, he was preaching on the love of God. And following the service, an old gentleman came up, a Polish gentleman,

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a man who had been a Jew, but who had converted to Christianity. And he said to H. H. Farmer, "No one can really speak of the love of God until they go through a Holocaust." "And see the gutters run red with the blood of their loved ones." And Farmer was astonished with this remark, and he said, "How can you learn about the love of God in such a time?"

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And the old man said, "I saw the love of God on the blood-stained streets of our little town." You see, I remembered how you Christians have always said that Christ came as the expression of God sharing his ultimate love with humankind. And that Christ did not come just to some place of pleasure and delight, but instead came to a place called Calvary. There, God brought his life into full contact with the ugliest that one can see in the world.

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And when I recognized what the great God, the God of the Jew and the God of the Christian, what that great God did in Christ, I realized that I had to decide, and I had to decide once and for all. I was either going to stand with a God who will bring love into the hardest, most brutal and unrelenting agonies of life. I was going to have to stand with him in an undefeated faith in the ultimate victory of right over might.

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I was going to have to be one with him in confronting the most hideous hours that the world has to offer. Or, and this was my only other alternative, I would have to fall bitterly into a bottomless pit of hatred and unalterable despair. The Holocaust was God coming to hell. He did it in Jesus Christ.

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One either accepts that, or one is part of hell. And more than that, one is hell-possessed. God kept his promises, and remembering that, I was relieved of my hopelessness. When we see the crucified God, we must either accept that love, that absolute faithfulness to his promise and his word,

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in the face of our unfaithfulness, we must either accept it or reject it. And that makes all the difference, because we can only love in terms of the experience of his love, which has been ours. Love is not just a warm, fuzzy emotion. It is loyalty, promises kept.

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And God demonstrates that with his magnificent fulfillment of every promise he ever made. And when a Christian accepts those promises made good, then that Christian, too, will love. But as that Christian loves, she or he will discover that even as God's keeping his promises carried him to a cross, so the Christian, in fulfilling her or his promises, is going to have to climb many crosses.

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I read about a psychologist who looked out of his window one day, and he saw his next-door neighbor about to paddle his son, and he yelled out the window, "You should not punish the boy, you should love him!" Now, a few weeks later, this psychologist was putting in a new concrete driveway. Did it all himself.

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Smoothed it out. It was beautiful. It was a hot day. He had no help. He worked many hours to put it there. And it was something splendid to see. And he was standing back, admiring his work, when he saw a little boy putting his foot down into the cement. And he ran over and he grabbed the kid, and he began to shake him.

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And just then his next-door neighbor looked out the window and said, "You should love the boy and not punish him." To which the psychologist replied, "I do love him in the abstract, but I don't love him in the concrete." But you see, that's just the point.

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The gospel is that God loves us in the concrete realities of a life like this. He is loyal in the face of that. And we are called as his disciples to love as he did in the midst of the concrete realities of life. To be so loyal to our promises.

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Disciples must do this. For did not Jesus say, "By this will all men know that you are my disciples, that you have love one for the other." Pray with me. Our Father, were it not for the fact that we have to,

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we would not speak of your love because we know how utterly inadequate our every word and thought will be. But we must speak because thou hast invited us and called us to promise so to do. "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." And you, in loyalty to the disloyal and in perfect faithfulness to the unfaithful, have laid down your life.

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And as we contemplate that, our hearts are strangely warmed within us. And we begin to the degree that we are enabled by your spirit to love as you have loved. God grant, for Jesus' sake, that we might become better lovers, more loyal, ever faithful to the promises we have made in our commitment to thee.

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We pray our prayer in our Savior's name. Amen.