Why So Many Christians Are Running on Empty |02.01.26|The Overflow Life pt.1

Welcome to February, which is also a good time to remind all the men listening that Valentines Day is coming up…so, here’s your heads up.

Walmart has had all the pink hearts and love-themed things in stock since New Years, but we’re going to start seeing a lot more hearts and notes and dinner specials around the community soon. Because “love is in the air.”

And, truly, love is a beautiful thing to celebrate. It’s a very Biblical thing to celebrate. Our passage today is even going to remind us that “God is love.”

And I haven’t talked to anyone who didn’t want to be loved and to love well.

We want to love God, love our families, love our neighbors. Ask anyone if they want to live a life that reflects the love of Jesus… they’ll say yes! Whether or not they even profess faith in Jesus! Everyone wants to love others well.

But if we’re honest, love often feels HEAVY. It feels like effort. Sometimes it feels like pressure. Sometimes it feels like something we SHOULD do more than something we actually want to do.

But we’re not going to just stiff-arm everyone in our lives, so we try harder. We serve more. We stay BUSY with church activities and family events and volunteer opportunities. We stay NICE.

And slowly, over time, we run dry. Forcing the smile gets harder. Running out of patience gets more frequent. Maybe we feel exhausted, burned out.

But then comes the GUILT that we aren’t loving enough, that we aren’t patient enough… that we aren’t kind enough. You know what it feels like to be torn between the things you know you “should” do and the very real numbness and tiredness that can feel like it’s taking over.

What if the problem isn’t that we don’t LOVE enough… but that we are trying to love others when we are running on empty? What if the problem is that we haven’t learned how deeply God loves us and wants to pour into us?

When Jesus was asked what the greatest command in all of Scripture was, he answered by saying, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength…AND love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

Many of us have shortened that to be easily remembered: “Love God and love others.” But that misses the final part that Jesus said, “love others as yourself.”

I think more of us need to learn this: you cannot fully love God, and you definitely can’t love others, until you understand how to RECEIVE love. Because you can’t give away what you don’t have.

So, if we are serious about growing as apprentices of Jesus so that we can become more and more like him, then we want to become people of love. We want to learn how to better love God with our whole selves. And we want to learn how to share his love with others. So…we’re going to need to continue to learn how to receive his love for us.

And while the rest of the world is spending this month focused on thin and trite expressions of love, we’re going to be spending this month slowing down and focusing on God’s love. And to do that, we’re turning to one of the most famous passages in the Bible about love: 1 John 4.

Here’s why we’re looking at this passage, and why we’re calling this series The Overflow Life: because we don’t show love in order to earn love back. According to God, we love BECAUSE we ARE loved.

Modern psychology and movies and influencers will tell you that self-love is important, but the Bible doesn’t describe self-love as self-admiration or self-absorption. Love for ourselves comes from agreeing with how God sees us and loves us as his beloved children, adopted into his family, and secure forever.

When we let God’s love take root in us, it transforms us from the inside out and produces and new kind of life: one that is joy-filled instead of heavy.

It produces a non-anxious presence that isn’t worried about performing.

It bubbles up a love that doesn’t run dry or burn out… it overflows.

The Overflow life is the life that God desires for his people. The Overflow life is the life John describes. So let’s open our Bibles to see how this passage can reshape how we see love from something we create into something we RECEIVE and live from.

[Scripture Ref] (p???)

1 John is written as a poetic sermon all about how Christians can base our whole lives and actions on the fact that God is Light and God is Love. It was written to believers who were in house churches around Ephesus dealing with people who were starting to doubt whether Jesus was actually God.

So John writes this letter to reinforce the fact that God came in the person of Jesus to demonstrate his love to us through his life and through his sacrifice on the cross. And now, as followers of Jesus, we don’t need to merely “copy” his example and try to love like him… we get to receive his love and let it overflow out of us in the ways that we share his love with others.

We’re going to be looking at different parts of this passage over the next few weeks, so let’s read the whole passage, and then dig in to the beginning together…

[1 John 4:7-21]

[1 John 4:7]

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God…” I want to point out this first word: “beloved.” My mentor pastor would always call us “beloved” when he was talking to the whole church. I picked up that habit, too.

This passage starts by calling us “beloved” because it’s our identity. It’s who we are. We are loved ones, beloved by God. And John addresses us by who we are before he talks about what we are to do. Identity comes first.

This isn’t flattery. He’s not trying to win points with us. He’s declaring our status as beloved children of God. It’s the same thing that God the Father spoke from heaven when Jesus was baptized. Jesus came up out of the water, and the heavens tore open and a voice declared, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

God spoke that identity over Jesus before Jesus DID anything in his ministry. And in our baptism, that belovedness is spoken over us. Any time we celebrate baptism, and any time you remember your own baptism, we are reminded that we begin as beloved children of God.

And even as we are encouraged to love one another, John reminds us that love has a source: “love is from God.” Love isn’t something we muster up in our own power and effort. Love isn’t something that originates in our personality, as if some people are just naturally more loving, like some people are just taller.

Love isn’t something that we’re supposed to develop with our own discipline or willpower. Love is FROM God. We don’t create it. We receive it.

Love comes from God, out of God, away from God toward us. And receiving love leads to sharing love.

We see this any time a child will kiss their mommy or daddy. They aren’t born knowing what that is or how to do it. It’s modelled for them before they reciprocate it. They receive it before they do it.

Right now, my youngest, Lucy, has started a really cute new habit with her stuffed animals. She’ll walk around cuddling her little bunny and kissing it gently on the head. The other day, one of her bottles dropped on the floor, and she rushed over, picked it up and kissed it. Kids share what they have seen and received.

The same is true for us. Receiving love always comes before sharing love.

But another thing that John is trying to show us is that love reveals who we are becoming. Right in the middle when it says “let us love one another,” the phrase “let us love” is a present, active, subjunctive verb. I know, I just lost everyone except English teachers in the room.

It just means that it’s not just showing love for a MOMENT. It’s an ongoing, active, invitation to having a lifestyle of love. Another way to word it is “let us commit ourselves to ongoing, active love.”

See, John isn’t telling us that “you should have a daily goal of showing love to someone,” as if it’s a box to check. Because then we would be more focused on whether we succeeded or failed each day. This passage isn’t about whether or not we “failed” to show love on any given day. It’s about what our lives are being formed into over time.

Because following Jesus, being an apprentice of Jesus, is a process of becoming people of love. Not perfect people. People whose lives are increasingly marked by love. And that starts with receiving God’s love to us.

[1 John 4:9-10]

Verses 9 and 10 are, to me, the gospel in a nutshell. God loved. We sinned. Jesus died so that we might live.

We didn’t love God first and win his affection back. God loved us first. God came in the person of the Son while we were yet sinners. I mean, it says it super plainly, “in THIS is love, not that we loved God [first], but that he loved us…”

Again, I think one of the clearest ways to understand this is to think of children. A child doesn’t have to show US love in order to earn our response, right?

Now, I love my friends, but that was built up over time when my friends have done things for me, or reached out to me in some way. Our friends earn our love over time as they demonstrate love for us, and as they reciprocate the ways we care for them. It’s a mutual earning and growing and developing.

Same thing with my wife. I mean, my relationship with my wife started with me being attracted to her (because, I mean… wowza). But then I grew to care about her. Then I truly and deeply loved and respected who she was as a person. And in our marriage, we committed to each other. It’s a development of love over time based on the ways that she reciprocated my pursuit of her.

But my kids? I have loved them since before they were born. Before they were even conceived, Megan and I would talk about the kids we hoped to have one day. They didn’t have to DO anything to earn love from me.

And even ever since they were born, they have TESTED my love. Little babies don’t do things to earn your love… they push the boundaries of your love. But God has deepened my love for them.

“In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us…” God’s love isn’t a reward for the ways that we show love to him. God’s love is a GIFT, given freely to us and demonstrated tangibly through the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus.

And because it’s a gift, we can’t earn God’s love… but because of Jesus, we can’t lose God’s love. Because of Jesus, we can’t lose God’s love for us.

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And I think that most of us would believe that God loves us, but too many of us live with this unspoken fear that we’ve got to keep acting a certain way in order to stay loved.

Too many of us would say, “I’m loved by God…but only if I keep it up.” And this leads us to walk through life with the anxiety that the other shoe is going to drop eventually.

Eventually, God is going to get sick and tired of the ways we keep falling into sin. Eventually, God is going to run out of patience with how we don’t share our faith because of fear.

“I’m loved by God… for now.” And we wonder if God will remove his blessing from our life because of something we do or don’t do.

We say that we’re Christian and God loves us and Jesus paid for our sins… but we know that we still are such sinners and have so much farther to go than anyone else knows. And we’re afraid we’re going to be found out as a fraud.

And maybe THAT has led to the exhausting overfunctioning that we mentioned at the beginning: we serve more, we try to stay nice… all to try and earn the love we hope to keep.

But please hear me clearly as your pastor, because I love you: Performance-based Christianity does not produce love. Doing more for Jesus isn’t how we grow to become people of love.

Trying to keep up appearances and act in a certain way to “stay loving” and “stay nice” just produces anxiety, hiding, and exhaustion.

Have you been feeling that? Anxious? Hiding the things you think can’t come out? Exhausted? I know that feeling, and it’s so heavy. I’m so sorry you’ve been carrying that.

That’s not the life God wants for you. His heart for you is one of LOVE. Because you are his beloved child, without having to do ANYTHING to earn it, he gives his love to you.

[Because of Jesus]

And because of Jesus, we cannot lose God’s love. I want you to hear that clearly. Because of Jesus, you cannot lose God’s love.

God IS love. It’s the very nature of God. And so we begin as beloved children of God because that’s who he is. He loved us first, and then chose to bestow that love onto us through the sacrificial love of Jesus, paying our debts, forgiving our trespasses, and cancelling our penalties. And the resurrected life of Jesus is given to us to experience full, abundant life… now and in eternity.

And so if God’s love is given as a gift, and it can’t be earned by us, then it can’t be lost by us. If our standing as beloved children of God rests on Jesus, then we stand on the solid rock that will not move. We are secure.

You don’t earn God’s love. And because of Jesus, you cannot lose it.

You see, being people of love and showing love to others isn’t how we prove we belong in the family of God. Our love for others is an OVERFLOW from already belonging in God’s family, because he is constantly pouring his love into us and filling us up.

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And I can say it over and over, and you can hear it over and over, but because of the way the rest of the world treats love and earning, we forget. Because of how the love we’ve received from people is incomplete and imperfect, we forget what God’s true, perfect love is like.

We need to be reminded every day. We need to receive his love every day. And our Lutheran sacraments help us with that.

I already mentioned it, but our baptism is one way that we are reminded of God’s love for us. And every time you remember your baptism… every time we celebrate the baptism of someone else… we are reminded that through baptism, God says “this is my beloved child, with whom I am well pleased.”

That’s a promise and a truth that is delivered to you through ordinary water and the Word of God.

And every single week when we celebrate Communion, we hear the words “Christ for you.” This is the body of Christ… for you. This is his blood shed… for you!

Through everyday elements like food and drink and the work of the Spirit, God delivers us his love and forgiveness each and every time. That’s why we NEED communion as often as we gather. We need to be reminded!

Because God knows how forgetful we are. God knows that we worry and are anxious and aren’t sure how secure we are in his love. And he doesn’t shame us for that! Like the loving Father that he is, he gently re-tells us his love for us again and again.

“You are my beloved child. Here is my very self… for you.”

And every morning that starts with a sunrise is another reminder that he is giving us a new day as a gift. Every breath we inhale into our lungs is a reminder that he is giving us the gift of life. Every time we return to his Word, every time we are beckoned to his Table, we’re reminded that God keeps choosing us.

[Begin each day]

But in order to allow his transformation to work in us, we have to receive his love for us. We have to daily dwell upon God sending himself as the Son to be a sacrifice on our behalf.

The good news of the Gospel gives us LIFE because it roots our identity not in what WE do, but in what God has done for us.

That’s why our takeaway is a simple reminder to begin each day by RECEIVING God’s love for us before trying to DO anything for God.

This week, we need to practice receiving. We need to start each day grounded in who we are as beloved children. Before we do anything at all, we need to let God fill us with his love.

[Prayer]

One simple tool for this is prayer. Prayer is just talking to God. Maybe you want to use your own words. Maybe a prayer like this one would be helpful to you. Maybe you simply start the day by saying, “God thank you for loving me before I ever even knew you.”

Thank you for pursuing me and searching for me when I was far from you.

Thank you for Jesus, for securing my place in your family through his sacrifice. Thank you for fully adopting me as your beloved child through my baptism.

Help me to receive your love again today. Fill me up so that I can overflow.

This isn’t about saying the right words, or having the perfect focus during prayer. This is an invitation to CONSISTENTLY turn to God to receive his love that he is constantly pouring out to you. This is an invitation to turn to him in prayer as often as you can, instead of trying to run around and live life on your own power, trying to earn your place.

This is a reminder that we are able to love, “because God first loved us.”

[END]

When we realize that God’s love for us is secured because of Jesus, it overflows. And our love becomes joy-filled instead of forced. Our love rests in the presence of God, instead of trying to perform for him.

This is how our love for others is able to overflow from fullness, and not from striving or fear.

This is how we’re able to cultivate the kind of heart that can join Jesus on his mission to reach others and help them grow as disciples.

This is how we become people of love: by experiencing the God who IS love.

And this is how we display his love to a world that desperately needs him.

Isn’t that good news?