Devotional Study: 1 John 4

Welcome to the this week's Virtual Bible Study! This week we're discussing 1 John 2.
Let's get started!

First Step: Read the Text. (This doesn't take too long).

This Week’s Reading is 1 John 4. You can read it here.

Second Step: Lesson/Focus Text

Listen to our theme verse sung here.

Beloved let us love one another. For love is of God and anyone who loves is born of God and knows God. They that do not love, do not know God. For God is love. 1 John 4:7-8

Being a Care-Bearer

Twenty years or so ago, a line of stuffed bears came out with their own television show. The bears of all different colors, all had a white stomach, but each had a different symbol stitched on its belly. On tv they could be seen riding in cloud cars and staring down at people through star glasses. They were called...the Care Bears And their mission was to help people care. Their biggest enemies were the things that stopped people from caring for each other. In fact, the weather in their world changed based on how people cared for one another. When people were caring, their weather was great. When people stopped caring, dark clouds would fill their skies.

We might have grown past the Care Bears, but their message and mission remain with us today. We are told to care! To care about people and how they are doing. To care about what is happening in their lives. To be present for them in good times and in bad. To care!

But our mission doesn’t stop there. It’s not enough to just care mentally about other people. We are called to extend ourselves to them in physical ways too and show them what is in our hearts, what the Bible calls, compassion.

Most of us have heard of compassion but few of us practice it. Compassion is a composite word made up of com= together and passion = suffering In other words, to be compassionate is to suffer with someone else. To bear their suffering within our own selves. To be present for them physically, emotionally, and spiritually. To be there for people when they have no where else to turn to.

This can be a daunting task. It’s one thing to say that we love and care for our neighbor, it’s quite another to actually suffer with them. We’re use to saying we love our neighbor. That is the polite and politically correct thing to do after all. But to actually DO something for them? To share their suffering ? Most of us flinch away from that.

Why? Because it inconviences us! It barges in on us. It takes us away from our cabin in the woods or the camping trip we’ve planned and places us smack center in people’s lives! It moves us from centering ourselves on ourselves and our own agenda and pushes us into the lives of other people. It makes us care and hurt and love and suffer as our neighbors in Christ are suffering.

It might seem difficult...even impossible...but it’s what the Bible calls us to do. In fact, the Bible says that if we AREN’T really caring about them UNLESS we do so materially. John writes in the last chapter: “Dear children, let us not love with words and tongue but in action and truth.” (1 John 3:18).

Compassion is shown to us best in how God loves us. John repeats this over and over again in our chapter today.

1) This is how God showed his love for us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.
2) This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
3) We love because he first loved us.

We are called to show compassion to others even as Christ has shown compassion to us! And that is hard! It’s hard...but simple! It’s hard to break out of our own selfish shells and go next door with a bowl of fruit to show our neighbor some compassion! But it’s such a simple gesture. It’s hard to reach out to the sick and needy and even to those coming home from surgery, and offer up a meal to them! It’s hard...but so simple. It’s hard to send a card to someone suffering, or to pick up the phone and ask if everything is okay. It’s incredibly hard to sit with someone as they wait or help them with daily tasks and suffer with them...but it’s also so simple.

Compassion is hard...but simple. And it’s all around us! One woman who never even goes to church brought a couple bowls of food to another woman at the death of her sister! A couple families teamed up together to help another family move into town. Still another group of families helped an elderly woman put her roof on her home. A team of people help out the poor through a project they call Hope. And still others assist at a home for the mentally disabled.

What are you doing to show compassion to your friends? Your family? Your church community? Your co-workers? Your boss? What are you doing to extend yourself to suffer with them? Anything? How does your love take on physical form to serve the neighbor God has placed at your doorstep?

Third Step: Questions to Ponder...

1. List three things you have done to suffer with someone else this week? This month? Today?

2. What times in your life do you feel the love of God most strongly? Are you alone in these times? Or with other people?

3. Who has been Christ to you in your life? How have they suffered with you and bore your burdans?

Fourth Step: Email(if you like) your responses. You can just reply to this email or email it here.

Fifth Step: Close with prayer...
Compassionate God, you came down to suffer with us without us even asking. Help us reach out in love and compassion to our neighbors to suffer with them and bear their burdans, in Christ our Lord. Amen.

See you next week! :)