Loving God Like We Should

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Transcript:

Even as Christians, it’s hard for us to love the way we’re supposed to. And the only reason we’re able to do it is because of Christ loving through us. We, human beings, we are selfish by nature.

And it’s difficult if not impossible for us to love the way we’re supposed to. And that’s why the Bible talks about training the next generation, the young women and the young men to be able to love their spouses, to be able to be the kind of godly husband and wife that they’re supposed to be able to because love is difficult. Folks, I’m not just talking about the subject of the message tonight is not on marital love but love for God.

Folks, love, no matter who it’s directed at, for us as human beings is difficult. And we need training. We need instruction on how to love the way that we’re supposed to.

And even then, we need God giving us the ability to love that we would not have otherwise. But this was important even in the early days of Christianity. We think of those first people.

We think of the apostles and the ones that were there in the church at Jerusalem. and the church at Antioch. And we think of these people as being so spiritual, we put them on a pedestal. But they had some of the same difficulties that we have.

They have some of the same struggles and the same human nature that we have that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to love the way we’re supposed to. And that even includes loving God. Now, I know we’re here in church, we’d all say we love God, and we may have a feeling of love toward God.

But it was so important that John wrote down some instructions given to him by God about what it means to love God way we’re supposed to. Gave some instruction on this. And that’s what we’re going to talk about tonight because we need instruction in how to be able to love God because otherwise we in our society have confused love with a feeling.

And I’m not denying that there’s feeling involved with love, but the biblical idea of love, whether it’s human relationships, whether it’s our relationship to God, is very different than what we think of in our Western culture today. I found out as I was studying about the marriage and betrothal relationship between Mary and Joseph this that I guess I knew that they did arrange marriages a lot in that culture, but I’d never really thought about it. They expected love was something that would come after marriage, that love is a commitment and feeling grows out of that.

Folks, we could confuse love with feeling and say, well, I don’t feel like I love God. I don’t feel like loving God. I don’t feel like loving other people.

When love is actually a commitment, it’s a choice to do something or not to do something, and he gives us instructions about what it means to love God the way we’re supposed to. We’re going to start in 1 John 4, start in verse 19. And it says, We love Him because He first loved us.

Now that sounds selfish on its face, doesn’t it? Sounds selfish of us, but it’s the truth. We love Him because He first loved us.

In our natural state, folks, we don’t love God, certainly not in the way that the Bible talks about. We may have a feeling of affection or endearment toward God, but as far as what the Bible talks about being loved, we don’t love God and we prove it by breaking His law and rebelling against Him. But the Bible says we love him.

And John’s writing to Christians here. He says we love him because he first loved us. And yes, that’s selfish.

But that’s the way it is. And God understands and points out that that’s the way it is. And God knows that we love him because he loved us first. If a man say, I love God and hateth his brother, he is a liar.

For he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? In this commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also. So he says, not only do we love God because God loved us first, and you know what, God’s okay with that.

If a man says he loves God and hates his brother, then that man is a liar, John says. Because if you’re claiming to love someone you have never seen before, and yet you can’t even love what’s right in front of you, he says it’s impossible. And God gives this commandment, that those who love God love their brothers also.

Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of him. He says, whosoever believes that Jesus is the Christ, not just that that’s his name. I grew up with kids in school that thought that Christ was his last name.

You know, I might have until I was four. I’m not bragging, but I had parents who taught me the Bible, and so I figured out that that was not the case. But apparently people use his name as a swear word and add other things to it that people actually, I knew some kids who actually thought Jesus had a middle name.

It was whatever invective their parents chose to insert between Jesus and Christ. They thought that was his middle name. Ask me, why would God give him a middle name like that? What are you even talking about?

I’ve never heard that before. But we’re not talking about Jesus being the Christ in the sense that it’s his last name. We’re talking about the fact, as I’ve told you before, Christ is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word Messiah, that he’s the anointed, chosen, promised one of God.

The Messiah, all those things that we talked about over the last several, I don’t even know how many weeks, but 12 messages about Him being the Messiah, the promised one of God. The Bible says that whosoever believeth that Jesus is who God said He was, that He was the Messiah, the Christ, is born of God. Everybody who believes that is born of God.

Folks, there are a lot of people, there are a lot of even unsaved people here in the Bible Belt who because of their upbringing believe in Jesus, believe that He exists, even believe that He’s the Son of God. but as far as Him being the Messiah, the anointed one who was sent by God to make the payment, to make peace between them and Him, they have no concept of that. Don’t understand it.

I don’t understand that. And that’s my fault. I grew up in a Christian home.

The idea of somebody never having heard the gospel is foreign to me. I heard on the radio this morning on the way here, a man from Scotland was preaching, and I’d never heard him or heard of him before, but I was enthralled by what he was talking about that he didn’t get saved until his 20s because he knew who Jesus was. He knew that Jesus existed.

He believed God existed, but he was in his 20s before he’d actually heard the gospel. And there are people around us who believe God exists. There are people around us who believe Jesus exists and that Jesus is the Son of God.

And they may think that that actually makes him less than God. But there are people all around us who believe Jesus exists, but they don’t believe in him as the Messiah. They’ve never been born again.

Some of them have never heard the gospel. Some of them have never, they’ve heard the gospel, but they’ve never heard the gospel. They’ve never heard it.

And there are all kinds of people, and you can attest to this as well as I can, I’m sure, that there are all kinds of people who believe in God, but have never been born again. You believe in God doesn’t automatically make you born again. The Bible says even the demons believe and tremble.

There’s more to it. There’s believing that Jesus is the Christ, that He is the Messiah, that He was sent to make the payment for you, and trusting in that fact. And John says that whosoever believes that is born of God.

And he says, everyone that loveth him that begat, loveth him also that is begotten of him. From our standpoint, that’s kind of an awkward way to phrase that. It’s 17th century English there.

But everyone who loves him, the one who begot. Everyone who loves the one who sent him, loves the one also that he sent. And the one who sent was the Father, and the one who he sent was the Son.

So what John is saying here is that everyone who loves the Father will also love the Son. In the book of 1 John, as a couple others of the New Testament, it was written to combat what they called Gnostic heresy. And Gnostic heresy taught that Jesus Christ, well, it basically taught two principles.

One was that matter was evil and spirit was good. Anything that was tangible, that was touchable, that you could see and observe was evil. The physical existence of the world was evil.

but the spirit was good. And so that also taught that within every human being, our physical body was evil, but we had a good spirit within us, which is contrary to what the Bible teaches. And it also taught, on the other hand, that sin is ignorance, and ignorance of this fact and ignorance of the spirit, and that there was special secret knowledge that could help them overcome the problem of sin.

And he wrote this to combat this because there were people who, because of this, believed that God the Father, God being spirit, was good, but they didn’t have the same view of Jesus Christ. They didn’t believe that he could be God in the flesh because he came in a body of flesh and that meant he had an evil nature to him. And so they gave lip service to the fact that they loved God but they rejected Jesus Christ as being the Christ because they said he can’t possibly be God in human form because spirit and flesh working together just doesn’t work the right way. And John says, everyone that loves him that begat, everyone that loves the Father, loves him also that has begotten of him, loves the Son.

Everyone who loves the Father will love the Son. And the reverse of that is that if you don’t love the Son, you don’t love the Father. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep His commandments.

He’s already talked at the end of chapter 4 about loving one another, and he says, if you claim to love God and hate your brother, then you’re a liar. John’s words, not mine. And to be honest, a very convicting verse for me.

And he goes on to say, by this we know that we love the children of God. He’s told them it’s important to love your brother, to love God’s children. And he says, we know that we love God’s children when we love God and keep His commandments.

He says, for this is the love of God. Here’s the love of God that we keep His commandments and His commandments are not grievous. In the next little bit that we’ve got here tonight, I want to point out three things to you tonight that we’re instructed on about what it means to love God like we should, what it means to love God like we should.

Because loving God is not just a feeling. I feel affection toward God or that I love God when He’s doing something for me. Loving God is so much deeper than that, and it’s a commitment that we’re going to look at here.

Three things. The first is, he points out, we cannot separate our love for the Son from our love for the Father. We cannot separate our love for the Son from our love for the Father.

He tells them that whoever loves the Father will love the Son. In that day, as I said, they had the problem of people who paid lip service to the fact that they loved God. They claimed to be followers of God.

The Gnostics did. Yes, we love God. We serve God.

We seek God’s wisdom, but we don’t know about this Jesus Christ. We can’t possibly see Him as God in the flesh. And John points out that if you love the Father, you’ll love the Son. Folks, we have the same problem just in reverse a lot of times today.

We have a lot of people. You’d be surprised we have a lot of people who, maybe not a majority, but we have more than there should be. People who claim to love Jesus Christ and don’t care that much for God the Father.

We have entire groups of people, and it’s not a new problem either. It was going on close to this day as well. We have entire groups of people that consider that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament must be different people.

One of the first organized challenges to Christianity, and I’m not talking about from an outside religion, I’m talking about from within the group of people that claim to be Christians, that claim to follow Christ. One of the first organized challenges came in the second century, less than a hundred years after the death of John, after the death of the last of the apostles, from a man named Marcion of Sinope. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right, but he wouldn’t pronounce mine right either. So this man named Marcion hated the Jews.

He hated the Old Testament and he hated the God of the Old Testament. He decided that the God of the Old Testament was a completely different God than the God of the New Testament. And he said, this Old Testament God, I don’t like him.

He’s evil. And he said he hated the Jews. And from what I understand, from my standpoint, he was kind of like Hitler ascribing all of these evil motives to the Jews saying, they’re the bad people.

They’re the wicked ones. They’re the cruel ones. And he said, and they’re that way because the God of the Old Testament has encouraged them to be that way.

He said, the God of the New Testament is a God of love. Well, this is just a God of cruelty and a God of hatred. And look what the God of the Old Testament did to Jesus Christ. Incredible statements, incredible theology that Marcion had, but he collected a big following.

They had to have councils and get together and argue this and brand him as a heretic, which a lot of the guys who branded him as a heretic were heretics themselves for other reasons. But he had even come up with his own Bible, his own canon of Scripture where he had taken out the Gospel of Matthew. He’d taken out, I think, everything but an edited version of the Gospel of Luke, I believe it was.

He’d taken out most of Paul’s letters and some of Peter’s. He had a very small canon of Scripture because he took out anything that he thought was too Jewish and said, these are two different gods. He said, not his exact words, but the implication was, I love Jesus Christ, but I can’t stand that God of the Bible.

Folks, we have the same thing today in so-called Christian churches. I don’t know if he’s a pastor or was a pastor, but there’s a man who is a well-known writer, especially among younger Christians, that they read his blog and read his books and follow him and watch his videos, go to his conferences, that has called God the Father a cosmic child abuser because he sent Jesus Christ to the cross. Never mind the fact that the Son of God went willingly.

I’ve beaten that horse to death. I’ve because he sent Christ to the cross. Jesus went willingly, folks.

Look at it in the garden. Yes, he asked God if there’s any other way, let this cup pass from me. But he said, nevertheless, not my will, but thy will be done.

He was willing to submit to what the Father said. But this man and his echo chamber around him have called God the Father a cosmic child abuser. And that just gets my dander up when I hear it.

Then there’s the editor of Christianity Today who wrote the article that called God a drama queen, called God the Father a drama queen. I even preach about that. I preached a message about that from the book of Amos, I think when I came in view of a call, or it may have been the next week, and talked about that.

And that’s not even the worst thing he said about God in the article. But stuff like that just drives me crazy, coming from Christians who will claim that they love Jesus Christ, and at the same time blaspheme and blame and slander the Father that he loved that sent him, that loved him as well. We’ve got Christians today who claim, yeah, I love Jesus, but I can’t stand God the Father.

They may not say it in those exact words. Some of you may have read the book, The Shack, and I haven’t read it, I’ll admit it. I’ve read bits and pieces of it.

So maybe I shouldn’t criticize something I’ve not read the whole of, but I’ve never criticized anything. The God mentioned in The Shack, if you read the book, is not the same God of the Bible. And I’ve read an article just recently talking about the book and talking about people’s response to the book.

And one of the ladies that read it, writing to her pastor, or maybe it was the pastor writing, and writing about his conversation with this lady, and her asking, can I divorce the old God and marry the new one? Folks, we are surrounded by people who say, yeah, I love Jesus Christ, but God the Father, I don’t care that much about. And the Bible says that we cannot separate our love for the Son from our love for the Father.

He says, every one that loveth him that begot, loveth him also that is begotten of him. I’m probably too, well, I don’t know that I’m too hard on those people. Sometimes I think that I’m too hard on some of the people I’ve just mentioned.

I would like to believe they don’t, they’re not purposely deceiving people. I’d like to think they’re just confused themselves. But they still shouldn’t be saying the things they say.

But I’d like to believe they’re just confused and don’t understand how the Father and Son and the Holy Spirit all work together for the same purpose. And I say that knowing full well I don’t completely understand how the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit all work for the same purpose. But I see place after place after place in the Scripture where they are of the same mind and will and essence.

We see stories. The one that always comes to mind is Jesus’ baptism. Jesus submits to baptism.

The Spirit descends like a dove and lights upon Him. And the Father’s voice is heard saying, This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. I’d like to think they just don’t understand that the cross was an act of mercy as well as an act of judgment.

I assume they don’t understand when they look at some of the things that happened in the Old Testament. And yes, if you’re just reading through and not paying a lot of attention to what’s going on, it can look like the God of the Old Testament is ruthless. But I also think about the mercy of the God of the Old Testament because how many chances did He give the people to repent?

And how much did the people, just as in our world today, deserve God’s condemnation and destruction and yet He withheld it? At any point, God would be totally justified in getting rid of us. God didn’t owe us mercy in any form.

And yet through the Old Testament as well as the New Testament, God offers mercy. And I’d like to think that maybe they’re just misinformed. I don’t know.

But folks, we can’t separate our love for the Son from our love for the Father. Because they’re one. He said, I and my Father are one.

So if we’re going to love God, we’ve got to love God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. We don’t get to pick and choose which person of the Godhead we play favorites with. Because even in mercy, even in redemption, even in the cross, they were all involved.

They were all involved in the work. The Father sent him. The Son paid the price.

And the Spirit convicts men of sin and draws them to the cross. We can’t separate our love for the Son from our love for the Father. Second, we cannot separate our love for God from our love for His people.

We cannot separate our love for God from our love for His people. I’m not saying that we elevate other human beings to the position of an idol. I’m not saying that we love them exactly the same as we love God.

Folks, I can’t love you the way I love God, and I should not. And you can’t love me the way you love God. If we put each other, if we put other people, even with God, that’s idolatry.

The Bible’s clear that’s a bad idea. But at the same time, we can’t say, I love God, but I hate you. We can’t say, I love God, but I hate those people.

I hate that person over there. I hate that church over there. I hate so-and-so in my church.

We can’t say we love God with the same mouth we used to hate other people. He says that if we claim to love God but hate His people, but we don’t love the brethren, then we are a liar. Folks, again, that’s not.

. . Don’t be mad at me.

That’s not my terminology. That’s what John said under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. As convicted as you might be by that statement, I’m just as convicted.

Because there are people I don’t like. Not in this room. Just in case anybody’s wondering.

Not in this room. But there are people I don’t like. And I wouldn’t say I hate them, but actually he doesn’t even use the word.

Well, yeah, he does. He uses the word hate. If a man says I love God and hates his brother, he’s a liar.

For he who loves not his brother. That second part, he doesn’t even say you have to hate them. He says you don’t love them.

I can’t think of anybody I hate. There are a lot of people I don’t feel like loving. That’s the operative word, feel like, or operative phrase, feel like.

Love is not based on my feelings or should not be based on my feelings. I have a responsibility as a Christian, if I’m going to say that I love God and be truthful about it, I have a responsibility to love my fellow believers. I have a responsibility to love each and every one of you.

I have a responsibility to love people even in other churches. Now, I’d love for them all to go here. But if they don’t, I still have a responsibility to love them.

That doesn’t mean we go around hating non-Christians. Non-Christians aren’t mentioned here. It’s not saying by implication that we get to hate them.

But folks, we are supposed to love the world and we are supposed to take the gospel to the world. And I think the point here is that if we can’t even love our brothers and sisters in Christ, how are we supposed to love the world outside? How are we supposed to love them as God loves?

But the responsibility here is clear. We cannot separate our love for God from our love for His people. Another one of my.

. . Y’all get tired of hearing about my pet peeves, but here we go.

Another one of them is the phrase, Love God, but hate church. I see that. I haven’t seen it here, but I used to see it on billboards all the time.

at home. Sometimes when new churches would start in Norman or Moore or Oklahoma City, they would put up billboards or they would send out mailers or they would do radio advertisements and say things like, do you love God but hate church? And then they would talk about how they’re different.

They’re not the traditional church, so maybe you won’t hate them. There are places that even build themselves as this is the church for people who hate church. And in somebody’s mind, somewhere that made sense.

It doesn’t make sense in my mind. The statement seems contradictory to me. But there’s also the fact that the church in the Bible is called the bride of Christ. It would not matter to me how much I liked someone, how much we had in common, how good a friend they had the potential to be.

But if somebody came to me and said, you know, I want to be your best friend, I love you, but I can’t stand that woman you married. My guess is it usually works the other way around. They like her and can’t stand that man she married.

But if somebody came to me and said, I want to be your friend, but I don’t want everyone to have to see Christian, cannot stand her. I’m not going to want to be their friend and hang around them because that’s my wife. That’s my bride.

I love her. And I think about how much sense that makes to say, I love Jesus Christ, but I hate his bride. I’m not going to hate somebody necessarily that hates Christian.

I don’t think she hates somebody that hated her. It’s too good to hate somebody, I think. But I’m not saying Jesus would hate them.

What I’m saying is that does not make sense. It does not make sense. The church is the bride of Christ. The local church is the bride of Christ. Eastside, we are the bride of Christ. And for somebody to say, yeah, I love Jesus Christ, but I can’t stand that church, makes as much sense as somebody telling me, I want to be your friend as long as I don’t ever have to set eyes on that woman you married.

That would not. That would not work out the way they would think it would. And I suspect that you men in here are the same way.

On top of that, it says that it doesn’t just say in here that, let me look at the verse, it doesn’t say in here just by this we know that we love the bride of Christ or that we love the church. It says the children of God. And I believe, I believe the, in Ephesians, I believe it’s called the family of God, all the redeemed of all the ages.

I don’t believe that’s the church, that’s just me. But the family of God, the children of God, the people that He died for, the people that He redeemed. Think about that.

We say, Jesus, I love you, but the people that you went through all of that on the cross of Calvary for can’t stand them. That doesn’t make sense either. We have a responsibility to love one another.

We have a responsibility to love our brothers and sisters in Christ. I’m not saying we’ll always agree about everything. Even in the local church, we won’t always agree with everything or agree with one another about everything. And I’m not saying we need to forget our differences and just say, oh, you can be right.

Truth doesn’t matter. But what I’m saying is if somebody is a child of God, and not everybody who claims to be is, but if somebody is a child of God, we have a responsibility to love them because we cannot separate that love from our love for God. If we say, I love God, but I hate you, we’re liars.

And that tells me that as a church, a church, even this one, a good church, this is a good church, but a church made up of flawed human beings, of imperfect human beings, sometimes selfish human beings. And I’m including myself in that, probably more so than anybody. I like my way.

We are going to have friction. We’re going to have disagreements. But what this tells me is that we have to work on loving each other.

We have to work on making sure those relationships are intact. When we disagree, when we fight, we get reconciled to one another. We don’t let the body get divided.

We have a responsibility to love one another. And as the local church, as the body of Christ, We’re stuck together. I mean, we can leave if God leads us somewhere else, but God has put us here, and God has put us together for a reason.

And that means sometimes the close proximity that we should be in, sometimes we’re going to have to work a little harder at loving one another. But we cannot separate our love for God from our love for one another. We have disagreements.

We have fights. We have hard feelings. That should bother us.

We should fix it instead of just letting it go and saying, I don’t have to love them. I’m not around them that much anyway. We can’t separate our love for God from our love for His people.

And third and finally tonight, we cannot separate our love for God from our obedience toward Him. We cannot separate our love for God from our obedience toward Him. Verses 2 and 3 say, By this we know that we love the children of God when we love God and keep His commandments, for this is the love of God that we keep His commandments, and His commandments are not grievous.

Folks, I’m not talking about being good enough. Anytime we talk about good works or being good or keeping commandments, I want to be so clear that I am not talking about keeping God’s commandments and being good enough to earn God’s favor. Being good enough that God will accept us.

Being good enough that it makes up for our sins. Being good enough that we get into heaven. That’s not what I’m talking about because that’s not what the Bible teaches.

When John is here writing, he’s writing to people who have already believed. He’s writing to people who have already trusted Christ, who have already accepted God’s free offer of grace by faith. realizing that there’s nothing we can do to earn God’s forgiveness for our sins, that Jesus was the Christ who paid for it.

But as people who have trusted, as people who have believed that He is the Christ, as people who have trusted in Him and Him alone for salvation, we then have the responsibility, not out of fear that we’re not going to be saved, not out of fear that we’re going to lose our salvation, but out of, what’s the topic of this message? Love for God. Out of love for God, we then have a responsibility to live differently.

We have a responsibility to keep His commandments. You say, oh, that’s so hard. Yeah, it’s hard.

It is impossible to completely live up to God’s standards all the time. That’s the point. That was the point of Christ’s coming.

It’s impossible to live up to God’s standards. If we could, He would have had to die for us. God knows and understands that we will not live up to His standards all the time.

We may not live up to His standards ever. I’d be surprised if I went a second or two and completely lived up to God’s standards within that second or two. but it doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility of trying.

I assume most of us in here bathe on a daily basis, or at least a regular basis. Christian told me some women don’t wash their hair about once every month. But I’m assuming most of us, not her, not her, but there’s something, nobody’s going to want to stand close to her when she gets back.

She’s told me there are some women who only wash their hair on about a monthly basis, something to do with the styling of it, and when it’s clean you can’t style it, and I think, well, then you need to get a different hairstyle, That’s not doctrine. That’s just me. But I’m assuming most of us in here bathe on a regular basis, keep ourselves clean.

You take that bath or you take that shower, what’s the point? You know you’re just going to get dirty again, so why not just let it go and ignore it? Yeah, I saw some of your faces.

That doesn’t make sense. Just because we’re going to get dirty again doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to stay clean. Doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t clean up every now and then.

Same thing is true with this. Just because we’re not going to be completely able to live up to God’s standard doesn’t mean that we just go and wallow in the filth of the world. It would be like saying, I’m just going to get dirty again, so I’m going to stop bathing.

If any of you decide to do that, please sit in the back. I’m sorry. Is that mean?

Probably. I’m sorry. I still love you, even if you decide to do