The Alameda County Study was headed by a Harvard social scientist, lasted over nine years, and involved 7,000 people. It was discovered that people who were very isolated from other people were three times as likely to die than those who had strong relationships with other people. (Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them, John Ortberg, p.33) Referring to this finding, John Ortberg wrote, “It is better to eat Twinkies with good friends than to eat broccoli alone.”
God has designed us to be connected to other people, and we can’t thrive without such connections. That’s the subject of our current six-part sermon series titled “Moving Beyond Loneliness.”
What should we do when we don’t feel like reaching out to people? What do we do when we know we should be more outgoing, but we’re afraid that people might reject our overtures of friendship? What do we do when someone we care about has really hurt us and we feel too hurt to reestablish the relationship? What do we do when we know it’s up to us to take the first step, but we’re not up to it?
There’s an old saying that you can’t pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, and it’s true! Our problem is how to love other people the right way when we don’t have it in us to do that. However, there’s a great truth that can help us: we have to start with God!
Let me illustrate it this way: Picture people going in and out of a gas station, filling their cars with gas. Where does that gas come from? An underground tank. Where does the gas in the underground tank come from? A tanker truck fills the underground tank. However, all of that gas wouldn’t be distributed to thousands of cars and trucks if it weren’t for a much smaller gas tank on the tanker truck itself. The tanker truck needs gas in order to deliver gas to everyone else.
We need love in order to be able to give love to everyone else. After all, you can’t give what you don’t have. That’s why our theme for today is that we must start with God. This isn’t something that I’m making up! God’s Word says — and this is our key verse today — “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19)
There are two directions meaningful connections can take: horizontal and vertical. Jesus mentioned both when He said that the two greatest commands were to love God and to love each other. Loving God is the vertical relationship, and loving others is the horizontal relationship. We can’t do a great job of connecting with each other unless we connect with God first. His love for us and our response to that love enable us to connect in the right ways with others.
I’ve chosen a small part of the apostle John’s first letter (which we have in our New Testaments) for our focus today because it’s full of insights about how we can move beyond loneliness by having the right connection with God and with the people He’s put around us. I believe that the verses found in 1 John 4:7-21 fall under four main categories. They tell us how God inspires us to love, commands us to love, warns us to love, and empowers us to love.

Inspired to Love
Sometimes we hear amazing stories about how someone has done a supremely loving deed for someone else — like donating a kidney to someone he didn’t even know. The most inspiring story of someone’s loving someone is God loving us.
“This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1 John 4:9-10)
This is why Christians have to lovingly but firmly insist in the uniqueness of Jesus: He’s not just one among many religious leaders whom people can choose to follow. He is, has been, and always will be part of God. It’s amazing that God became one of us in the form of Jesus! He did this for the principal purpose of dying on a cross to take care of our sinfulness so that we can be right with Him. He didn’t have to do this; God is complete in and of Himself. He had no “need” to have people have a relationship with Him, but He chose to have that connection anyway, at the great cost of coming as one of us and dying for us.
God doesn’t love us because we’re lovely. He loves us just because He decided to! He doesn’t have to love us, and we don’t deserve for Him to love us, but He does anyway!
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a great pastor/theologian who died in a Nazi concentration camp because he resisted Hitler, wrote about Jesus’ great statement “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30) Bonhoeffer wrote about those words of Jesus, “. . . There should be no person on earth who feels so abandoned that they could say of themselves: ‘No one has asked about me. No one has wanted me. No one has ever offered me help.’ Whoever have once heard these words in their life and speak like this are lying. Indeed, such persons despise and mock Jesus Christ and the seriousness of his words.” (A Testament to Freedom, p.234)
We can be inspired by the love God has for us. That love can give us the inspiration to act toward others the way God has acted toward us.

Commanded to Love
It’s not always easy to connect with people who are far from perfect — even those we hold dear and love most. Frankly, we don’t always want to do that. We don’t always feel like doing the loving thing, even with our closest friends, our mates, or our nearest relatives. We sometimes have to fall back on the fact that loving them really isn’t an option if we want to be followers of Jesus. It’s a command, and sometimes we need a command! We sometimes need to be told what to do, whether we want to do it or not.
John wrote, “Dear friends, let us love one another . . .” (1 John 4:7) [emphasis mine] “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” (1 John 4:11) [emphasis mine] “And he has given us this command: whoever loves God must also love his brother.” (1 John 4:21) [again, emphasis mine]
I feel a sense of relief when I understand that God sometimes commands us to love, because that means He knows that I don’t always have a burning desire to love someone. It’s natural not to want to always do the loving thing; that’s why love is so costly. This is why we’re showing true love when we help a friend even though we have a hundred other things we’d rather do. We’re showing true love when a teenager does what his mom or dad says even though it’s “stupid.” We’re showing true love when a husband listens to his wife even though he thinks she’s going on and on and he wants to get to the sports page. We’re showing true love when a wife spends time in marital intimacy with her husband even though she has no burning desire to do so. Jesus showed true love when He went to the cross even though He really didn’t want to. He prayed to the Father, “. . . yet not my will, but yours be done.” (Luke 22:42)
Sometimes we have to do what we don’t really feel like doing in order to connect in the right way with people and move beyond loneliness — whether it’s making a friend or keeping one, repairing a relationship, or building a better marriage. Sometimes we just have to obey God and do what’s right.

Warned to Love
It’s not easy to connect with people as God intends. That’s why He not only commands us to do it, He warns us about NOT doing so!
“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:8) “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.” (1 John 4:20)
The bottom line is that if you’re going to call yourself a Christian, claiming to be a forgiven follower of Jesus Christ, you’d better love the people God has put around you. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it!

Empowered to Love
Thankfully, we don’t have depend on our own strength and willpower in order to connect with people the way God wants us to. Our passage for today says “God is love.” (1 John 4:8) When we get close to God His nature rubs off onto us, and we have His helpful presence to help us make those connections. “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.” (1 John 4:7) “And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.” (1 John 4:16)
I’ve learned that when it’s hard to do the loving thing, I should let that difficulty drive me to God. When I find myself being more impatient with people and less concerned about someone else’s needs, my main problem is that I’ve drifted from God. The closer you are to God, the better able you are to be close to people.
My experience every Sunday morning is an example of this. Every Sunday morning I take a prayer walk, and I often walk along the fields behind our house. When I get out there, I sometimes think about the fact that I’m a quarter of a mile or so away from any human being. It’s interesting that within two hours of my walk I’ll begin a time of relating to about 300 people at church, and during the sermon at least, I’ll be the human center of people’s attention (though I hope that the real focus of everyone’s thoughts is God). I firmly believe that my time alone with God is essential before I spend time among God’s people and seek to minister on His behalf. A person needs to be alone with God in order to have his time with people be effective. I believe that’s not just true for pastors, but for everyone.
Human relationships are very important, and we need to work to have them succeed. That happens when we put first things first: getting our relationship with the Lord in line and seeing it grow.
Our human relationships will never be all they can be until we have the right, growing relationship with God. Do you have that personal relationship with the Lord? If not, invite Him to the inner core of who you are: into your heart and soul. Ask Him to forgive you and take leadership in your life. Depend on Him to help you treat the people around you the way He wants them to be treated. He’ll help you do that!
Those of us who already have that kind of relationship with God should take today’s message as a reminder that we need to be close to Him to make our relationships with other people work well. Author Henry Blackaby wrote, “Nothing of eternal significance happens apart from God.” (Spiritual Leadership, p.148) Let’s affirm what John wrote in our text for today: “We know that we live in him and he in us.” (1 John 4:13)