The Love of God

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Transcript:

Well, this morning we’re going to be in 1 John chapter 4 again. 1 John chapter 4. And I’ve learned over the years that the most important things that I want to do and need to do are not the things that come naturally, not the things that are second nature.

We want to talk about what our nature is. My nature is to be a sinner. But the things that are some of the most important pursuits in my life, whether it’s to try to be a good husband, whether it’s to try to be a good daddy, whether it’s to be a good pastor.

These are things that aren’t second nature. I wasn’t born knowing how to do them, and I don’t have them all figured out now. I think we all kind of instinctively know how to keep our children alive when they’re born.

But that’s not exactly the same thing as being the best parent that we can be. I find that what I know about parenting, I’ve learned by example. Some from looking at good examples and some from looking at bad examples and saying, well, I don’t want to do what that person did.

But when you get right down to it, I know how to be a daddy because I watched my daddy. And I have a good dad. And, you know, not a perfect dad.

But I watched what he did and watched what he still does and say, okay, I want to do that. Maybe I want to do better in that area. Maybe by the time we get to Benjamin, he’ll be a perfect dad.

but we’ll see when we get there. But I look at his example, and I try to follow those things, and there’s a lot of trial and error involved. It doesn’t come naturally.

It’s something I have to work at to be a good dad. And my kids, if they haven’t already forgotten because they’re all hopped up on suckers back there, they would tell you about a time this week when we were running errands after I picked them up from school, and I had just had enough of the chatter and the nonsense from the back seat, and I snapped at them. We happened to be stopping by here to grab something.

And as we’re leaving, I’m trying to set the alarm. No, I’d already snapped at him before that. I’m trying to set the alarm.

And I had to look at him and say, I’m sorry. I was wrong. I was wrong to have such an unloving response.

And yes, it was my natural response. But I have to work against that. I have to fight against that.

Some of the hardest words in the English language to say are, I’m sorry. And some of the hardest people to say them to are your children. or say, I was wrong to your own children.

I have to work against the natural inclination to snap and do all the other things that I would do, and I have to work to try to be a good dad, and I fail at that sometimes. But with God’s grace, I think I go on and try to do better the next day. Same thing with being a husband.

It’s not just human nature to say, I want to be the best husband I can be. Human nature goes into marriage and says it’s 50-50. Human nature says, I’m going to go into marriage and I’m going to meet your needs as long as you meet mine.

And we forget or we don’t understand that it’s not each person giving 50%. A good marriage is each person giving 100%. Because some days I’m not at 100%.

And some days she’s not at 100%. But it works because we each do our best according to what God has given us. And we work at it.

It’s not human nature. Human nature is that we’re selfish, that we work against human nature, and we learn by example, and we learn from experience, and we try to do the best that we can, knowing that they’re not always going to be able to give 100%, and fortunately, it seems like when I’m not at 100%, Charla is, and when she’s not, I am, and vice versa. But it’s not something that comes naturally.

Human nature is selfish, and we have to work against that. If I want to be the best husband I can be, I have to work against my human nature. To be a pastor.

I mean, I know I make it look effortless. Y’all don’t even think that’s funny because you know it’s not true. There’s work involved in it.

There’s not just the work of doing pastoral work, but just the work of being the pastor and trying to be better at it each week and trying to do a better job for you all. It’s not human nature. I had to learn.

And I didn’t learn, I didn’t have the luxury of going to seminary. I didn’t even start any kind of formal theological education until after I was ordained. I was at my second church, and I’d been preaching for almost a decade.

I learned by watching other pastors and following them around, probably irritating the living daylights out of them, following them around. But as a teenager, I wanted to learn because I knew this is where I was going. And I had to learn the skills.

And still, I try to learn each week, and I try to learn from my mistakes, and I still make mistakes. You all probably know that. And I will continue to make mistakes.

But my point to you in all of this, this is not just confession about Jared’s inadequacies this morning. My point in telling you all of this is that I’ve learned that the things that are most important in life, the things that I most want to do and most want to be, are things that don’t come naturally to me. There are things that I’ve had to work at and still have to work at, and I still fail at.

But I learn by example and learn by experience. And y’all are probably the same way. As a matter of fact, I’m almost certain you’re the same way, unless you’re just one of those people who seems to be good at everything without trying.

But if you want to go be a teacher, Kay, you have to go and learn, don’t you? Were you as good a teacher the first year as you were the last? Okay, good.

So I’m on the right track here. There’s some learning involved. Learning by experience, learning by example.

Were you as good a driver at 16, or maybe some of y’all started driving before they required licenses and you started earlier than that? Were you as good a driver the first day as you are now? Lavelle was just a natural. I sure wasn’t.

And I still remember my dad screaming at me and bringing me to tears. I had a good dad. I already said that, so I can tell you the story.

I remember him bringing me to tears driving down Western, because he said, you’ve got your blinker on already. The book says 500 feet, so you’re turning into Burger King. No, well, they don’t know that behind you, screaming at me.

I’ve gotten better at driving. Keeps them guessing. I like to keep the other drivers on their toes.

Whatever it is that you do in life that’s worth doing is usually something you have to work at. It doesn’t come by your nature. But guess what?

God is different. God is different. All of the most important things about God come from his nature.

See, anything good and important about me, anything worthwhile about me, is something that God has given me and by his grace I’ve had to work at, to practice. But God, all of the good things about him just come from his very nature. See, as we’ve been studying the book of John, or 1 John, I mean, As we’ve been studying the book of 1 John and the advice that the Apostle John gave to these next couple of generations of Christians who had come up after him, and he’s the last of Jesus’ apostles to survive and to be able to nourish and encourage the Christians who came after him.

As we’ve been studying this, we’ve talked quite a bit about love. And quite a bit has been said about love and the need for us to love and how love from us is evidence of God at work within us. But John sort of segues here in chapter 4 into a reminder about God’s love and it being his very nature.

See, nobody had to teach God how to love. I can’t imagine who that would even have been. Nobody had to teach God how to love.

It’s just who he is. It’s just his nature. It’s not my nature.

I’m not always loving. and wake me up at 3 a. m.

You’ll see. It’s not always my nature. God, however, it is his nature.

He doesn’t have to practice. He doesn’t have to learn. He doesn’t have to do trial and error.

God is just love. That’s who he is. You dig right down to the fiber of who he is, his DNA, not that God has literal DNA, but you dig right down to the essence of who God is and he’s love.

And the same goes for all of the good attributes about God. God doesn’t have to work at his good attributes. They are who he is.

So we talk about his mercy. It’s who he is. He is merciful, or he shows mercy because he is merciful.

He shows grace because he is gracious. He does right because he is righteous. You see, it all flows from God’s nature.

God is not limited in the same way we are. And specifically, John talks here about the love of God. And to those Christians and to us, he reminds us that God’s love comes from his nature.

God loves, if you’ll let me say it this way, God loves because he can’t help himself. It’s who he is. God loves us because love is his nature.

And we look at this passage this morning starting in verse 7. And we’re going to look through verses 7 through 21. And we’re going to see some things this morning about the love of God.

This love that comes, that flows from who he is. It says in verse 7, Beloved, let us love one another. Okay, so here’s another reminder.

We should love. But the reason is, he says, for love is of God, and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He said love comes from God.

Love originates with God. And everyone that loves is born of God and knows God. And I can hear the objection right now.

So we’re saying that non-believers don’t love their children, don’t love their spouses, love their love. That’s not what we’re saying. That’s not what the Bible’s saying.

There are different kinds of love used in the Greek. And the word agape is the word used for God’s kind of love, the self-sacrificial love that only God can give. The lost world loves its children just like we do.

They love their spouses. They love their children. But there’s another element to love that only God can give us.

And to love fully and completely is not something I’m capable of doing apart from God’s love in me. So this agape love, this self-sacrificial love, this God’s kind of love, comes from him because he is love. Verse 8 says, He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.

So there’s this, again, this reminder that loving the way God loves is evidence that we belong to Him, and not loving the way He loves is evidence that we don’t. Verse 9 says, In this was manifest the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. He said, Here’s the proof that God loves us.

He sent His Son. Here in His love, not that we love God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. We’ll come back and talk about some of these more in depth in just a minute.

Verse 11, beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. He says, because God loved us so much, because God loved us this way when we didn’t deserve it, we ought to turn around and love other people the same way. No man, verse 12, no man hath seen God at any time.

If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us, or made complete in us. Hereby know we that we dwell in him and he in us because he hath given us of his spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.

Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him and he in God. And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him.

And herein is our love made perfect or made complete, verse 17, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love cast without fear, because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.

We love him because he first loved us. It’s an important truth of scripture right there. God loved us first. If a man say, I love God, this is verse 20, 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? And this commandment hath we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also. So we learn some things, not just about the need for us to love, but about the origin of love, where it comes from, and it comes from God.

God loves because it’s his nature. God loves us because love is his nature. He loves us because that’s who he is.

That’s who he is. I sin because I’m a sinner. That’s who I am, so that’s what I do.

Everything in the world seems to follow its nature, naturally. That’s why those words are connected, nature and naturally. Fish swim because they’re fish.

Birds fly because they’re birds. Snakes creep me out because they’re snakes. I mean, they do what their nature indicates that they do.

I’m a sinner, so I sin. I am a selfish person, so I act selfishly. God is love, so he loves.

And again, as I said at the beginning of the message, any good attribute I have is something that God put there and I’ve had to work at. God doesn’t have to work at it. It just is who he is.

He loves by his very nature. And folks, something that I think we miss a lot of times in understanding this, this fact that God loves you because he is love. Something that we miss about that is that he loved you first. God loved us before we ever thought about loving Him.

You need to understand that. God loved you before you ever thought about loving Him. We think that God is just standing there waiting, and He’s sort of indifferent toward us, and yet we look at Him and we love Him, and so we run to Him and then He accepts us.

That’s not how it works. God created us because He loved us. He had the idea in mind and loved us, and desired and deserved somebody to worship Him, and desired that fellowship, and so he created us, even knowing that we were going to sin, but he created us with a plan in mind of sacrificing everything, of Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, God in human flesh, coming to earth and sacrificing his own life to redeem us.

Because we were so lovable? No, because he is love. We didn’t deserve it, and we weren’t all that lovable.

You look at the history of sin. Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, and I know sometimes in our society we think, what’s the big deal? They ate fruit.

The fruit was not the problem. It was the disobedience. It was the fact that God made them this perfect paradise and gave them everything in it, gave them everything they ever could have wanted, and said there’s just one rule.

Just stay away from this tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And man looked at God, and with the temptation that was provided by Satan, I won’t say the devil made them do it, they made a choice, with the temptation that Satan provided, they looked at all the blessings of God, and they were so ungrateful, and they were so willing to doubt God’s authority, that they looked at it, and even though God had said, don’t eat that or you’ll die, they said, ah, we’re not going to die. God’s just jealous because he knows we’ll be like him.

See, it was this attitude of incredible ungratefulness and rebellion toward God. It was an ugliness that took root in their hearts. And you know what?

It didn’t stop there. We know how that story ended. It didn’t stop there.

It got so bad that by Noah’s day, every thought of every person’s heart was only evil all the time, the Bible says. And I love when we get to talking about the good old days. The good old days are different depending on who you talk to.

But we get to talking about the good old days and how things have just gotten worse and worse since then. And if we could just go back to those good old days, things have never been as bad as they are now. I beg to differ.

And I think the Bible begs to differ. There was a time in Noah’s day where every person only thought evil thoughts all the time. We are not there.

I’m not saying that our world is the way God’s plan A looks for us. But we’re not there. sin got out of control and God decided to flood the world and put an end to it.

How could a loving God do that? The same people who would look at the story of Noah and say, how can a loving God destroy the world with a flood are the same people who look at things like wars and genocide and poverty today, all the things that man inflicts on other men, and say, how can a loving God let that go? Well, which is it?

You’re going to criticize God for putting a stop to it? You’re going to criticize God for letting it happen? I don’t know what you want.

See, God looked at man and said, look at the misery and the violence that they’re inflicting on each other. I can’t let that go. And a loving God stepped in to put a stop to the madness.

Now, in the Garden of Eden, God could have said, fine, if you want sin, I’m done with you. In Noah’s day, God could have looked at man and said, fine, if that’s how you’re going to act, I’m just going to wipe all of you out. I’m just going to cleanse this whole place with a flood.

Everybody dies. The Bible said Noah found grace in the eyes of God. God didn’t have to let anybody survive.

And quite honestly, knowing how vengeful I can be, when I feel like I’m wronged, if I was God, I’m not sure I would have let anybody survive. But then again, God is not selfish like me. God is, well, by his very nature.

God was not willing that we all should perish. God was willing to have grace to Noah. And by the way, we tend to think Noah was a righteous man when it started, when all this started.

Now, I could get to heaven and Noah could straighten me out and say, how dare you libel me all these years or slander me all these years. But I read the Bible and it says, again, every thought of every person, every person was only evil all the time. And it says in the New Testament, Noah became a preacher of righteousness.

But I don’t see that it says, except for Noah, everybody was just totally evil. It says Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Noah found the undeserved kindness of God.

So what that tells me, what my understanding of it is, that God looked at somebody even undeserving like Noah and said, I’m going to give you another chance. You haven’t earned it or deserved it, but because I love you, I’m going to give life a chance to go on. And so God has looked at humanity all throughout history and seen how we’ve rejected him and been hostile toward him.

If we think, oh, we loved God first, no. Mankind has done everything we can possibly do to reject God and show hostility, to shake our fists in his face, and yet God has loved us anyway. It doesn’t mean that God has been unwilling to turn humanity collectively over his knee if necessary and paddle us when we really get out of line, but God has repeatedly shown love and grace when we didn’t deserve it and when we weren’t looking for it. God loved us enough.

God loved us before we ever thought about loving him. And that is so foreign to our way of thinking and should show us how amazing God’s love is. We look at people and usually we’re more than willing to love them if they love us.

Oh, you like me? You must be all right. We can get along.

But to look at somebody who hates your guts and love them anyway is not natural, at least for us. But it’s exactly who God is. It’s exactly who God is.

There was a time in each of our lives when we hated God’s guts. Maybe we wouldn’t have put it in those terms, but we looked at God and we demonstrated hatred toward him, keeping him at arm’s length, ignoring what he said and doing what we wanted anyway. And even when you were still sinning, God loved you.

Which is not to say that you’re not sinning today. The Bible said God commended his love toward us and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. God didn’t wait for us to get our act together and for us to get our lives cleaned up before he decided to love us.

Even while we were red-handed in the act of sinning, God looked at us and loved us enough to send Jesus Christ to die for us. Before you ever had a thought in your mind about loving God, he already loved you. That’s how incredible his love is.

That he could look at people who hate him, who despise him, who disobey him, and he loved you anyway. Verse 19 says, we love him because he first loved us. Second of all, this morning, God loved us enough to prove it at the cross.

I’ve said for years, the love of God begins at the cross, or the grace begins at the cross. That doesn’t mean that’s where it began chronologically. That means that’s where our understanding of God’s grace and God’s love has to begin.

We can’t really understand the love of God until we understand the cross. We can have the idea that God loves us, but to understand how he loves us, it’s got to start at the cross. because he says in verses 9 and 10 here, in this was manifested the love of God toward us because that God sent his only begotten son into the world that we might live through him.

Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. He said here’s the way God’s love was manifest or here’s the way it showed itself. He sent Jesus to the cross.

Jesus came into the world and that’s how God proved his love. And he says in verse 10 And really the amazing thing is, if you want to see love, it’s not all that amazing that we love God. After all that He’s done for us, it only makes sense to love Him.

The amazing thing is that God would love us in spite of our sin, and that He would send His Son to be the propitiation or the offering, the sacrifice for our sin. If you want to know how much God loves you, the cross is the proof. The cross shows you how much God loves you.

If you want to know for a fact, how can I know that God really loves you? the cross is the proof. We’ll get on to our kids sometimes.

Say, I just want you to behave. I just want you to listen. I just want you to be obedient, whatever it is.

And they’ll say, I will be. Okay, but you haven’t been for the last six hours, so why would now be any different? My answer to them is always, don’t tell me, show me.

Show me. At this point, I don’t believe you when you say, I will. Show me.

We like proof all the time. It’s one thing to say, I love you. It’s another thing to prove it.

The words don’t mean that much if they’re not backed up by evidence. And as I’ve said before, if I cut my wife down, put her down all the time, if I was mean to her, if I was dismissive of her all the time, but then I said, oh honey, I love you. Those words don’t mean much, do they?

I try to prove it by actions every day. Again, I’m woefully inadequate at that. Not a day goes by I don’t wish I was a better husband for her, but I try to prove by actions that I love her.

And the same thing is true. It’s one thing for God to say I love you, but he’s also given us proof. He gave us proof by sending Jesus Christ to the cross.

And the reason that’s proof of how much he loves us is because we were destined for hell apart from that. Now God didn’t create hell for us. God created the lake of fire for Satan and his angels.

But you know what? We cast our lot with them a long time ago. And in the garden we made the choice.

Adam and Eve made the choice of siding with Satan and we’ve been following their lead ever since. And because of our sin, we were destined for help. And there’s not a thing that we could do to save ourselves.

Not a thing that we could do to erase the wrong we’ve done. We could be good from here on out, but we don’t get extra credit for just doing what God requires. And all the good we do cannot erase the wrong that we’ve done.

And so our sin separated us from a holy God, a sinless, again, His nature, sinless perfection, absolute holiness. It’s who he is. And in his justice, he has to punish sin.

It’s who he is. So our only option was to be separated from God for eternity in hell because of our sins. And yet he loved us enough.

We didn’t deserve his love. We didn’t earn his love. But because he is loving, he sent Jesus to pay the price for our sins.

He sent Jesus to take the penalty, to take the responsibility for our sins and be punished in our place. God proved his love for you in sacrificing his own son so that you could be forgiven and you could have eternal life with him. Well, I don’t really feel like God loves me.

I don’t feel like God cares. Tell you what, you understand the cross, and you understand what you deserved, and understand what God did for you at the cross, it would be a lot harder to doubt ever again that God cares for you and that God loves you. God loves us because it’s who he is.

And I know humanity likes to question, How do you square this idea of the love of God with the God of the Old Testament? How do you, you know, the God who told King Saul to go and wipe out the Amalekites and commit what we call today genocide. How do you put those two together?

And then when Saul spared King Agag of the Amalekites, God sent Samuel to hack him to pieces. How does that God conform to what you’re saying about the God of love? It’s easy to look at a few incidents in the Old Testament and say, well, that’s who God is, bloodthirsty.

Well, look at what God, look at what was going on. Not genocide, he was protecting his people. See, God already had a plan where he was using the Jews to bring Jesus into the world and bring salvation to anyone who would believe.

That was already God’s plan. It was already in the works, it had already been prophesied. And then you had countries like the Amalekites who wanted to wipe out all the Jews.

Well, doesn’t that sound familiar? And they were prepared to do it. And they could have said, well, we’re going to battle the Amalekites and we’re going to beat them back and we’ll be fine.

No, the Amalekites just kept coming back. These countries just kept coming back who wanted to wipe out the Jews, who wanted to commit genocide themselves, and also, if the Jews are gone, Jesus doesn’t come from them. So all of God’s promises are broken then.

And so God ordered this to stop the bloodshed, to stop the destruction of the Jews so that the Messiah could come into the world and bring salvation to everybody. That’s how a God of love could do something like that. Again, Noah, how could God flood the earth?

Look at the violence that was going on. God put a stop to it. I truly believe that God hates it when he looks at it and sees how a man treats one another.

I truly believe he hates the violence and the bloodshed. And sometimes what a loving God has to do is step in and stop the bleeding. All throughout the Bible, if you really look at it and you understand the cross, what we see as a loving God.

That God has moved heaven and earth. God has rearranged the nations of the world to bring salvation to anyone who would believe even though we so clearly didn’t deserve it. God proved his love for you at the cross.

And finally this morning, God loves us enough that his love changes us. God’s love is strong enough that it’s capable of changing us. Just give you a few examples as we read down through here.

We’re almost finished this morning. But I see this all over this passage. Verse 7, love is of God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God.

God gives us a capacity to love like he does. Verses 11 through 13, if God loved us, we ought to love one another. God gives us the ability, again, to love like he does.

He dwells within us and gives us a capacity to love like he does. I don’t think I have it in me. Well, I know I don’t have it in me to love the way I’m supposed to.

But God gives us a capacity to love that we wouldn’t otherwise have. And we’ve known and believed, verses 16 through 18, we’ve known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and he in him.

And our love is made perfect that we may have boldness in the day of judgment. Because he is, so are we in the world. There’s no fear in love.

It changes our entire perspective. It can change your entire perspective in the world. Talks here about perfect love casting out fear.

There is no fear in love. And when we fully understand the love of God, the love that he has for us, there’s not really anything left to fear. What can the world do to us with a God who loves us like that?

They can kill us. It’s sort of like Paul’s attitude. I love this.

I hope I’m never in a position to have to think this way, but I love his attitude. So what? If they throw me in prison, I get to tell people about Jesus.

If they kill me, I get to go be with Jesus. If they let me loose, I get to go tell more people about Jesus. Paul understood the love of God.

Paul knew he was loved by God and he wanted to share that message of love from Jesus Christ with everybody he could. Perfect love casts out fear. I shared this verse with an atheist just a couple weeks ago, with an atheist friend of mine, starting in verse 20.

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? And this commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God loveth his brother also.

God enables us to love those around us even when they are difficult. The reason I got to share this with somebody is because it’s a friend of mine I’ve known for 15 years or more, and always have gotten along with pretty well in spite of the fact that my understanding is she’s an atheist, I’m a pastor, and let’s face it, I was kind of like the pastor of our middle school. She’s practically a communist in her political leanings, and y’all know I don’t lean that way.

But we still get along. But she posted something on Facebook about these Christians and how hateful they are. It was a story.

Something had been a news story posted about a homosexual, and supposedly these Christians have gotten on there. God says kill them. God says stone them.

These people shouldn’t be breathing air in our country, and blah, blah, blah. And she took that as representative of Christians because these people said they were Christians. And I’m sitting there wanting to tear my hair out.

That’s not what we think. And I just got on there and I said, my Bible tells me this. My Bible tells me this.

That if you can’t even love people that you can see, you don’t love God who