Beloved: Sent

Love: The Foundation of Everything
There's something profound about lighting candles in the darkness. Joy, hope, peace—each one matters. Each one illuminates something beautiful. But without love, none of them can exist. Love isn't an addition to the Christian life. It isn't a nice bonus feature or an optional upgrade. Love is the entire foundation. Love is the message itself.
The Reality We Keep Missing
We live in a strange paradox. Our culture is obsessed with love—it saturates our music, our movies, our conversations. Yet if an outside observer watched how we actually treat one another, they might wonder if we understand what the word means at all. We're simultaneously desperate for love and terrible at it.
The church should be different. And sometimes it is. But not always. That's deeply troubling because love isn't negotiable in the kingdom of God. Without love, there is nothing.
The apostle John understood this better than most. He called himself "the disciple whom Jesus loved" and addressed his readers as "the beloved." For John, love wasn't just a nice sentiment—it was the fabric of reality itself. Twice in his first letter, he makes a stunning declaration: God is love.
This isn't poetry. It's ontological reality. The essence of who God is, is love. Everything God does flows from that reality. And if God is love, and God created everything, then love should define everything.
The Uncomfortable Truth
This is where things get challenging. John doesn't pull punches: "If anyone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar."
That's harsh. But it's necessary. We're not dealing with a minor issue here—we're dealing with the most fundamental reality of existence. To claim you know God while living in hatred is to fundamentally misrepresent reality. The Greek word for "liar" that John uses describes someone who consistently and intentionally distorts truth.
Think about what that means. If God is love, and you say you know this love but live out hatred, you're taking what is true and twisting it into something it was never meant to be. You're denying reality itself.
A Cosmic Conflict
The birth of Jesus is bigger than we typically acknowledge. We've reduced it to a warm, fuzzy moment of candlelight and carols. Those things are beautiful, but Christmas is so much more. The birth of Jesus is an invasion. A cosmic declaration. An act of war.
We have an enemy, and his fundamental flaw is that he denies reality. Jesus described him in stark terms: "He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies."
This enemy doesn't just oppose God—he's the enemy of life and love itself. He comes to steal, kill, and destroy. His primary weapon? Accusation. Day and night, he accuses us, twisting reality, distorting truth, wrapping us in webs of deception so we can't see what's real.
And what is real? That God is love. That you are loved. That you were made by love, for love.
Why Jesus Came
First John tells us plainly: "The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil."
That's a Christmas verse, though we rarely hear it in nativity sermons. The Greek word for "destroy" literally means "to unravel." Picture being wrapped in a spider's web, bound by lies, unable to see truth. Jesus came to unravel that web. To free us from deception. To restore us to reality.
And what is that reality? That God is love. That you are loved. That your neighbor is loved. That even your enemy is loved.
Jesus wasn't born just so we could avoid hell or have our sins forgiven—though those things are gloriously true. He came so we could live in the love of God, here and now, today and every day. Those other things—forgiveness, redemption, adoption—they're the means to the end. The end is love. The goal is life lived in the reality of God's love.
Love Perfected in Community
Here's something we often miss: we can't experience God's love in isolation. John writes, "If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us."
You can't love by yourself. Love, by definition, is relational. You might feel warm and fuzzy sitting alone with your morning coffee, but you know you're abiding in God's love when you experience it in the context of His family. Jesus said it plainly: "They will know you are my disciples by the way you love one another."
Not by your theology. Not by your morality or politics or ethnicity or economic status. By your love.
Where Are You Looking?
Motorcycle riders learn a crucial lesson: you steer where you look. If you fixate on the corner you're trying to avoid, that's exactly where you'll go. You have to look where you want to be.
We spend so much time looking at problems, at lies, at hatred—and then we're surprised when those things infect us. The message of Jesus appearing in flesh is God saying, "No, look here. Look at me. Look at love made visible."
Life is fragile. Tomorrow isn't promised. Death is real, and it's wrong—the ultimate wrongness that Jesus came to defeat. But because Jesus faced death and destroyed its power, we don't have to live in fear anymore.
The Invitation
Christmas begins with "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son." But that's just the beginning. Love doesn't just come to us. It doesn't simply comfort us. Love commissions us.
Just as the Father sent Jesus in love—in sacrificial service, to destroy the enemy's works, to invite people into God's heart—Jesus now sends us the same way.
You are loved. You are made from love, for love. That's the reality the enemy desperately wants to hide from you. But it's the truth that sets you free.
So live in love. Keep short accounts. Tell people you love them, and don't just say it—live it out. Because in a world wrapped in deception, love is how we unravel the lies and reveal reality.
Love isn't optional. Love is everything.