August 17, 2025
All Loves Excelling
1 John 4:7-21
Today we’re concluding our summer series called “How Can I Keep from Singing?”
This summer, we’ve reflected on some of our congregation’s most loved hymns, like: Be Thou My Vision, Will You Come and Follow Me, Here I Am Lord, All Creatures of our God and King, and the Lord of the Dance. As a musician, it’s been a lot of fun to do this (though I missed the dancing last week!) and I’m grateful that it’s been so meaningful to our congregation. So many of you have said to me that you had never thought about our hymns this way, and it’s been so helpful to see how faith is expressed in these songs.
I would suggest that, maybe more than anything else, the songs we sing in worship shape our faith. Sermons and prayers often feel like cut flowers; they shine for a moment, but then by the next morning, it’s hard to remember what it was about. Well-written songs, though, live for generations. We hold them in our hands, we sing over and around each other, they take up residence inside of us when we give them voice. You don’t have to be a great singer, or a good singer, you don’t have to hit the right notes… to give voice to the words in the company of a congregation. These songs of faith shape our faith.
Today, the title of this sermon is “All Loves Excelling” the song is “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.” And I want to think with you about the love of God, and the two great struggles of love.
Love Divine All Loves Excelling is beloved all over the world. According to the online authority hymnary.org it is included 1,903 hymnals.
The author of “Love Divine” is Charles Wesley, brother of John Wesley. He is one of those famous brothers whose family that led a revival within the Anglican church in the 18th century. That revival that eventually led to the Methodist movement and the Methodist church. Wesley himself wrote more than 9000 hymns – in an adult life, that’s almost 4 per week – and he often while on horseback going from one church or meeting to another.
Of his more than 9000 hymns, “Love Divine All Loves Excelling” is one of the greatest. It’s beloved by many, but for me, the song has a special resonance every time we sing it because the congregation sang this when Caitlin and I were married. In September, we’ll be married for 19 years. Every time we get to that last verse, “Finish then Thy new creation” I remember standing on the chancel with Caitlin preparing to say our vows, to love one another for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, for as long as we both shall live.
In a way a marriage is a new creation, a new life takes shape, a new community of love is formed. We are asking God to help create this new life together, and to sustain it and nurture across many years and many chapters, good times and hard times, and to bring this new creation to fulfillment and completion.
Like so many prayers in the New Testament, this hymn is a prayer for transformation, addressed to Jesus Christ, asking for the indwelling love of God to come down and fill our lives and transform us from the inside out.
“Love divine, all loves excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down.” The core theological claim of this hymn is that God’s love surpasses and excels all the other loves we know and experience.
It is a prayer for God’s surpassing love to come from heaven to earth and take root and grow in our hearts by faith; to fix in us a humble dwelling and change us into the likeness of our Savior Jesus Christ.
Even though love is often easy to say, when we get down to it, it is oh so very hard. The two great struggles of love are very simply, to receive love and to give love. It is oh so hard to believe that we are truly loved. And it is oh so hard to love others, especially when they disappoint us, or disagree with us, or push our buttons, or drive us crazy.
Our text from 1 John 4 takes us right into the struggles of love. The apostle John writes with confidence: “God is love.” Simple. Definitive. But then he has to work out what that means for how we live, how we relate to God, how we treat our neighbors.
Because knowing that God is love, and living as beloved and loving people – those are two different things.
I was listening, a couple of weeks ago, to an episode of the podcast Modern Love, which was featured on the NY Times Daily. They interviewed a psychotherapist named Meg Josephson who just wrote a book called “Are You Mad at Me?”
The book explores how growing up in a home where love feels conditional — where affection depends on good behavior, achievement, or meeting expectations – can create lasting anxiety about whether we’re truly accepted.
She shared her experience growing up in a family with a father who would often rage, and oscillate between anger and affection, and she would ask herself, “Are you mad me? Am I in trouble? Did I do something wrong?”
As I listened, I resonated in my own childhood with that experience, with a father who oscillated in that way and how it shaped me.
Many others know those feelings too and carry that anxiety into adulthood. We become adults who constantly wonder: Am I doing enough? Am I good enough? Am I worthy of love? We develop what the psychotherapist calls “anxious attachment” – always scanning for signs that we might be disappointing the people who matter to us.
This anxiety follows us into our relationship with God. We know intellectually that God loves us, but we live as if God’s love depends on our spiritual performance: on the quality of our prayers, or how often we volunteer, or how much we give, how well we keep promises, how frequently we worship.
John addresses this struggle directly in verse 18: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” The Greek word for fear here is phobos. That’s not just nervousness, but deep dread, terror about whether we’ll be rejected or punished. It’s the kind of fear that comes from uncertainty about where you stand.
There is no such fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. When John says “perfect love,” the Greek word is teleia. It doesn’t mean flawless love – like a perfect painting. Rather, it means complete love, mature love, love that has reached its intended purpose.
When God’s love reaches its complete work in us – when we deeply receive it, when it takes up residence in our hearts – our anxious fear gets evicted. There’s simply no room for both.
“Fix in us thy humble dwelling, all thy faithful mercies crown.” When God’s love is completed in us, the fear of not being enough has to move out.
This is what Wesley meant by “joy of heaven to earth come down.” God’s love doesn’t stay in a distant heaven watching to see if we deserve it. It comes down to us, moves into the anxious spaces of our hearts, and makes its home there.
Now even when we begin to grasp this truth about God’s unconditional love for us, we face another challenge. This is the second struggle, to give love.
It’s one thing to receive love from God, who sees us at our best and knows our hearts. It’s another thing entirely to love our neighbors, especially when we see them at their worst and know their faults.
We live in a time when it feels particularly difficult to love people who disagree with us. The political divisions in our country – divisions that are so reinforced by our media culture and what we see and how stories are framed – have made it easy to demonize anyone who votes differently, thinks differently, or prioritizes different values.
The stakes feel so high because the issues over which we disagree are so important: the environment, immigration, support for the poor, economic growth, healthy democracy, the rule of law. We find ourselves – wherever you are politically – frustrated and puzzled and incensed daily by “them” – whoever “they” are in our particular definition. It’s hard to love.
And that’s before we even get to the more personal challenges: the difficult boss who takes credit for your work, the family member who always knows exactly which buttons to push, the close friend who let you down when you needed them most. We see their flaws so clearly, their selfishness, their capacity to hurt us.
John doesn’t let us off the hook here. In verse 20, he writes: “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”
That’s a hard word to hear. What does John mean?
The word John uses for love here is agapao – the same word used throughout this passage for God’s love for us. This is deliberate, decisive love of action and will. John isn’t asking us to like our difficult neighbors or have warm feelings about people who disagree with us politically. He’s calling us to love them with agape – the same kind of love God shows us.
Agape means choosing to seek someone’s good regardless of whether they deserve it. It means acting with kindness even when they annoy you. It means protecting their dignity even when you see their failures clearly. It means treating them as people God loves, even when you struggle to like them yourself.
This feels impossible some days. How can we love the person whose politics seems dangerous to us? How do we show agape to the family member who keeps making the same destructive choices? How do we seek the good of the colleague who seems determined to step on us to get ahead?
Here’s where John’s theology becomes practical. God’s love doesn’t just comfort us in our insecurities – it transforms our capacity to love others.
When we’re truly secure in being beloved by God, we become less threatened by other people’s differences. We can love from abundance rather than scarcity. We don’t need others to agree with us or affirm us that they are not mad at us, because our identity is already settled.
John puts it simply in verse 19: “We love because he first loved us.” Our agape flows from received agape. This isn’t obligation or guilt. It’s overflow.
Think about how this can changes things. When someone disagrees with you politically, you don’t have to see them first as a threat to your worldview – you can see them first as someone God loves who also thinks differently. When a family member disappoints you, you don’t have to write them off – you can choose to seek their good while protecting good boundaries. When a person at work treats you poorly, you don’t have to respond in kind – you can act with dignity because your worth isn’t determined by their opinion.
This doesn’t mean becoming a doormat or pretending that harmful behavior is acceptable. Agape love sometimes requires confrontation, boundaries, even separation. But it always seeks the other person’s ultimate good, even when that’s difficult.
Our small acts of decisive love are part of something much larger than our personal relationships. John writes in verse 17 that “love has been perfected among us.” The verb there is teleioo – the same root as the “perfect love” that casts out fear.
God is completing something, bringing love to its intended purpose in the world. Bringing the world to its intended purpose through love.
When we choose agape toward our difficult neighbors, we’re joining in God’s great work of healing all the divisions that separate us. Every act of chosen love, every decision to seek someone’s good despite their flaws, every moment we protect someone’s dignity despite our disagreements – these are glimpses of the new creation God is bringing about.
Wesley wrote: “Finish then thy new creation, pure and spotless let us be.”
We’re part of a larger story than simply what we love, or don’t love, or how we struggled to love. God is remaking the world, healing relationships, reconciling what’s been divided.
“Love divine, all loves excelling.” God’s agape surpasses, excels, transforms all our limited human attempts at love.
It excels our love by being complete rather than conditional. Where our love says “I’ll accept you if you meet my expectations,” God’s love says “You are beloved, period.”
It excels our love by being transformative rather than transactional. Where our love asks “What have you done for me lately?” God’s love creates new possibilities for who we can become.
It excels our love by being decisive rather than dependent on feelings. Where our love wavers based on how others treat us, God’s love chooses our good consistently, relentlessly, without regard to our response.
God’s divine love doesn’t stay distant from us. It comes down from heaven to earth, is made flesh in Jesus, takes up residence in our anxious hearts, casts out our fears, and then flows through us toward others who need to know that they are beloved too.
May the love of God, all loves excelling, be at work in us and through us. Amen.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina