Real Love

Listen Online:

Watch Online:

Transcript:

Well, if television shows are to be believed, one of the most uncomfortable situations we can find ourselves in is when we tell somebody we love them and they don’t say it back. We’ve probably all seen this on TV shows where one character will say, I love you, and another will say, thank you, or I know. And it’s just, it’s cringe inducing.

through my dating years, not that I dated that much, but I lived in fear of that happening in real life. And I can tell you it has happened in real life. It has happened recently.

No, and it’s not Charla. And it’s not other women either. Okay, let me finish the story.

I hear whispering and gasps, mostly from my family over here. It’s a lot less uncomfortable and a lot more entertaining when it comes from a small child. because we have a three-year-old who has the attitude of a 30-year-old.

And just in the last week, I’ve told her, I love you, Jojo. And she’ll say, okay. I didn’t just tell you it’s time for your medicine.

There was one day this week, I told her, I love you, Jojo. And she said, no. Yeah, I do. Some of you have heard her with that voice.

Tell her she sounds like Squidward if you’ve ever watched Spongebob. No. Yeah, I do.

But see, I’ve figured out the problem is that expression, I love you, doesn’t mean a whole. . .

She does love me, and I think she understands that I love her. But the expression doesn’t mean a lot to her because she doesn’t really understand what that word means. Now, she has, from the constant stream of Dora the Explorer that’s on at our house, she has started walking around the house using words like deliciosa and arriba.

So maybe, I don’t know, maybe I’ll tell her te amo, tell her I love you in Spanish, and see if that makes more of an impact. But she doesn’t understand the word love. And so it doesn’t mean much to her.

In much the same way, the world does not understand the word love. And because of that, the world is very confused about what love means. Sometimes we fall into that trap of being confused about what love means, and so we just don’t take it the way God intends us to.

And when we read that God is love or that God loves us, it doesn’t have quite the right impact that it’s supposed to. I told you last week that I was going to spend a few weeks talking to you about some of the biblical words and concepts that our culture has redefined, has twisted, has taken those meanings and made them say something else. Last week I talked to you about the concept of truth.

That our society has tried to reshape and recast the idea of truth into something subjective. That it’s about my truth instead of the truth. And I explained to you how we walk away with a false impression of who God is when we do that.

we end up with a false impression of what salvation is when we get away from the idea of truth. Another one of these words that needs to be redefined is love. And I don’t mean redefined in the way the world is doing it as though we need a new definition.

When I say it needs to be redefined, I mean we need to go back and re-familiarize ourselves with the actual meaning, with the actual definition. And so this morning I want to talk to you about what love is because the world has so confused it. Is love just a nice greeting card sentiment?

Is it just something warm and fuzzy? When God says, I love you, does that mean He has warm, fuzzy feelings about us? Does it mean that when God says, I love you, that He affirms everything about who we are and everything we want to do?

Or is there something more to it than that? And the Bible presents us with a good understanding of how God means the word love when we look at 1 John chapter 4. so if you would turn with me in your bibles to first john chapter four if you’re using a device there’s a link in your bulletin that’ll get you right there if you don’t have a hard copy of the bible or it’ll be on the screen in front of you but when you find it if you would stand with me if you’re able to without too much difficulty and we’re going to look at a brief passage this morning from first john chapter four where he gives us a biblical idea of what god means by the word love.

Starting in verse 7, it says, Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. So up to this point, he’s explaining to us the importance of love, but here’s where he helps us understand what love is.

Verse 9, In this, the love of God was manifested toward us that God has sent His only begotten Son world that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

And you may be seated. So how is love supposed to be defined? If we go to the dictionary, I mean, it’ll give us a good working idea of a lot of these words.

but even the dictionary misses at least the ones I looked at this week. They missed the mark as far as what the Bible explains love to be, particularly God’s love. According to one dictionary I looked at, some of the meanings of the word love included a tender, passionate affection, a warm personal attachment, sexual passion or desire, affectionate concern for another person’s well-being.

These are some of the definitions. But the problem is that all of these definitions offered in the dictionary reduce love to nothing more than a feeling. And when we look at love as something that’s just a feeling, that helps explain why it has become so common in our society for people to just fall in love and fall out of love.

If it’s just a feeling, if that’s all there is to it, is the feeling, then love is not something that lasts. Now you may not want to answer this out loud if your spouse is sitting right next to you. But have you ever had a moment where you love your spouse, but have you ever had a moment where you did not feel warm and fuzzy toward them?

Maybe your husband put the tea pitcher back in the fridge with that much in the bottom of it for the 15th time. Not that that would ever happen. But you didn’t have warm, fuzzy feelings toward him at the moment.

Does that mean you didn’t love him? What about your kids? Are there times that you’ve just wanted to wring their necks?

No, just mine? Okay. All right.

No, I’m sure you’ve all experienced that. You still love your kids. That love doesn’t go away just because of a temporary feeling.

See, love cannot be defined as just a feeling or it’s something that goes away. And I’ve counseled with couples who’ve said, well, we’re splitting up because we just fell out of love. Fall back in.

Love is a commitment. That’s part of it. It can’t just be.

. . Don’t get me wrong.

The way we feel about our spouses, our family, That’s all important, but that can’t be all that love is. There was a time in our civilization when love was defined as willing good things for the other person. I was reading a book recently called Mama Bear Apologetics that talks about how to teach your children to defend the Christian faith.

And one of the things that the lady writes about in there is this definition. That used to, we would say, love meant willing good things for the other person. That it is my desire.

It’s more than just a feeling. It’s my desire for that person that I love, that good things would happen to them. But they explain in the book that there’s a problem there because we as a society can’t even agree anymore on what good is.

When I will good things for my children, I mean, I want them to grow up to be decent, productive members of society. I want them to know how to feed themselves, how to clean themselves, how to take care of their bank account. I want them to be able to function in the world.

And so sometimes, you know, sometimes willing their good means I make them eat their vegetables or I make them go to bed. I make them brush their teeth. You know, all these things that you’re supposed to do.

But I know other people that think that they are willing the good of their children by just letting them run amok. Now, from their standpoint, they’re going to say I’m an ogre. And from my standpoint, I say you’re letting your children run wild.

If you really cared about them, You’d step in and do something about that. But as a society, we can’t even agree on what it means to will the good of somebody anymore. So I think that definition falls short.

The Bible, though, tells us what love is. And the Bible tells us that real love is sacrificial. We have to understand love from God’s perspective through the lens of sacrifice. Being willing to sacrifice for someone.

And yes, we do come back with that with the concept of somebody’s good. It’s not just sacrificing for any particular reason, but sacrificing on their behalf for good things for them. Because when John wants us to understand what God’s love is and how it’s shown, he tells us the importance of love, he refers us back to God’s love, and then when he wants us to see what God’s love looks like, he points us to the cross and this idea of sacrifice.

He says in verses 9 and 10, in this the love of God was manifested, it was shown, it was put on full display in front of us that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him. God put His love on full display when God the Son came to earth and lived among us and sacrificed for us so that you and I could live. And not just live this life, but so that we could have eternal life with Him.

And then verse 10 says, In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. just to be very clear on what he’s talking about here. This idea of propitiation is the idea of sacrifice.

It’s the idea of a blood sacrifice, an offering. And that’s important because I shared with you last week that there are churches out there that want to redefine the atonement. They want to redefine the cross.

And say that the whole point of the cross was Jesus providing us a good example because He loved us even through what He went through on the cross. And the cross, it wasn’t God’s plan. It was just something that happened.

And Jesus showed us what it meant to love somebody through that. That’s become a very intellectual point of view in some churches today. And it fits right in line with the lady that I knew once upon a time who said, I don’t think it was God’s plan for Jesus to be crucified.

I think it just happened. And God said, kind of like life handed God lemons and He made lemonade out of it. Folks, the cross wasn’t just an example of being loving and being nice and going through things for other people.

The reason why the cross is an example is because Jesus came to pay in His own blood for the sins that you and I had committed. He paid for our sins when we were sinful and wicked. He loved us even when we were at our least lovable.

He came and He sacrificed Himself. That word propitiation is a word that was applied in the Old Testament to blood sacrifices when the animals were slaughtered on the altar and their blood was offered as an offering to the righteousness of God because of the sins of the people. The love of God was not on display just because Jesus came and was nice to us.

The love of God was on display because Jesus put Himself in our place and was punished for us. He was punished for me and He was punished for you. And by the way, I’ll point out too because there are churches that part of the reason why they are wanting to redefine the atonement is because they don’t like what it says about God.

there’s a there’s a book that I shared on the uh on facebook a week or two ago called another gospel by elisa childers where she wrote about the differences between biblical christianity and progressive christianity incredible book I think it would be worth your time to read but she writes in there about how some churches including one that she came out of we’re teaching the idea that if you believe jesus died for our sins instead of just being a nice lovely example if you believe that Jesus paid for our sins, then that makes the Father a cosmic child abuser. Folks, Jesus knew what He was stepping into. The Father didn’t twist His arm.

The Father didn’t march Jesus down here at Bayonet Point and put Him on the cross. Jesus came willingly. If you understand the Trinity from a biblical perspective, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are united in will and in purpose.

Jesus not only knew the plan from eternity past, Jesus was part of the planning from eternity past. Jesus came here because He said, I will go for them. And even in His humanity, when He said, if there’s any other way, when He prayed in the garden the night before the trial and crucifixion, even when He prayed, if there’s any other way, Father, if there’s any other means by which they can be saved, by which Your plan can be accomplished, then please let this cup pass from Me. If there is a plan B out there, Please don’t make me go through the cross.

But then he came back to, Nevertheless, not my will, but thy will be done. Jesus volunteered. Jesus was willing.

Don’t let anybody ever tell you that the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf makes God a monster who brutalized his own son. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross happened because the son volunteered and came willingly. He sacrificed himself.

And so John giving us this picture of love, pointing to the cross, pointing to everything that Jesus went through and the sacrifice that He made on our behalf. John says, that is love. Not just a warm, fuzzy feeling toward us.

It’s not the desire that we would never experience difficulty or trouble. I understand when you love somebody, from our perspective, you really don’t want them to go through anything difficult or tragic. There’s a part of me that wishes I could wrap my children up and make sure they never have to experience any of the ugliness of the world.

But I also know that’s not realistic. So I have to remind myself, I could try to shelter them from that and I could lose, or I could shepherd them through that and train them and teach them with the goal of them being able to walk with Jesus Christ and overcome the ugliness of the world. God’s love toward us is not just a desire that we’d never experience difficulty or discomfort, as some people think.

Some people, when it says God is love, they think that that means God just wants everybody to be happy all the time. I had a woman tell me that a few years back. A lady who professed to be a Christian came and told me that she’d been caught having an affair and she decided she didn’t want to give it up.

She was going to leave her husband. Brought a friend with her to have that conversation. And as I pled with her, Come on, you know this is not right.

You know this goes against God’s Word. You know you’re going to destroy your life. You know you’re going to destroy your family.

Not to say that God can’t forgive you, but this is damage you cannot undo. And you cannot expect that God is just going to be okay with this and let you get by with this. And as I’m pleading with this woman to reconsider the choice she’s about to make, the friend comes and puts her hand on my arm and says, It’s okay.

You don’t understand. God just wants us all to be happy. Folks, if I had rolled my eyes any harder, I would have knocked myself out.

And I know that sounds un-pastoral that I’m rolling my eyes when talking to somebody, but that was the most spiritual response I could commit to at that point because it was either that or ask her if she had lost every last shred of her ever-loving mind. But we do convince ourselves of that from time to time. God’s love.

He just wants us to be happy. He wants everything to be. And then we feel like maybe God doesn’t love us when we go through difficult circumstances because again, if God is love and He loves us and our definition of love is that He just wants us to be happy and my circumstances are not making me happy and I can’t extract myself from those circumstances, then maybe God doesn’t love me after all.

No, it’s not the love of God that’s in question. It’s that we’re operating from a faulty definition of love. It’s not just a warm, fuzzy feeling.

It’s not just a desire that will never experience difficulty. It’s a willingness to sacrifice so that we can be reconciled to Him. It’s a willingness to step in and pay all of the cost that He did not owe that we owed so that we could be right with Him.

And He was willing to pay the ultimate price. Jesus Christ laid down His life to do for us what we could not do for ourselves. All so that we could be forgiven.

And so that we could experience eternal life with Him. And our world talks so much about love. But folks, if we’re not willing to sacrifice anything for the other person, and if we’re not motivated by a desire for that person to be reconciled with God or grow closer to Him, then it’s not God’s kind of love, no matter how strong the feelings are.

And I want to be very clear on this, because it’s easy to be misunderstood in something like this. And I don’t want to get angry responses from people who aren’t believers. And you’re saying, I can’t love.

You’re saying, I don’t love my children. There are four different Greek words for love. Part of the problem here is that we, in English, we lump all the ideas of love together in one word.

I love my wife. I love Whataburger. I don’t love Whataburger the same way I love my wife.

That would be problematic for so many reasons. In the Bible, they use different words. There’s agape, which is God’s kind of love.

There’s phileo, which is a brotherly love or a kind of camaraderie. There’s eros, which is a romantic affection. And then there’s storge, which is a natural affection like what a parent feels for a child.

I am not saying that a non-believer cannot experience storge, the parental love, that they cannot experience marital love, that they cannot experience brotherly love. I’m saying that it is not God’s kind of love. It is not agape.

It is not what we have been called to commit to if we are not willing to sacrifice something for the good of the other person. And if we are not motivated somewhere in there by a desire for them to grow closer to God. because that’s how Jesus exhibited agape, was sacrificing himself for us.

And that’s what his motivation was in agape, was for us to be reconciled to God. Now, if we misunderstand love to be a warm, fuzzy, affectionate feeling, then we end up with that God who just wants everybody to be happy. And he never objects to anything we do, no matter how disobedient it is toward him, no matter how destructive it is toward other people or toward ourselves.

that’s the kind of God we end up with. Just kind of a benevolent, senile, Santa Claus figure. But that’s not who He is.

It says in verse 8, God is love, but His love doesn’t mean that He just approves of whatever we want to do. I love my children, but it doesn’t mean that I approve of every choice they make. They hear this so often they may inscribe it on my tombstone one day.

I love you, but I love you too much to let you get by with that. You’ve heard this? Yes, okay, I’m seeing eye rolls along with the head shakes.

God is love, but it doesn’t mean He approves of our sin. And verse 10 points us to this fact that instead of approving of our sin, God loves us in spite of our sin. We need to understand that.

God doesn’t look at us and say, oh, everything you do is lovely. It’s just wonderful. God looks at us and says, you are capable of some really awful things, but I’m going to love you in spite of the way I feel about what you’ve done and what you’re doing.

It says in verse 10, In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. The example of love here is not that we loved God. He said that’s not what love is.

That’s not an example here because it’s not that incredible. The amazing thing is that He loved us. John’s basically looking at it and saying, okay, you love God, no wonder.

The amazing thing, the incredible thing, the earth-shaking thing is that God would love us. And that’s the example that John wants us to see. Because when you look at our sin, sin is anything that we think, say, do, or don’t do that displeases God.

And when we look at that and we see how offensive it is to God, because it is not just this action over here and God said no. All of those sins are a rejection of something about who God is. We are turning our backs on Him and not just saying we don’t want to do what you want. We don’t want anything to do with the way you do things because of who you are.

And when we realize our sin, when we realize how offensive it is to God, there is no earthly reason why He should ever love us. If somebody came along who not only did things you didn’t approve of, but went out of their way to tell you, I hate you and everything about who you are. Would you want anything to do with that person?

No. I know as Christians we’re supposed to give the spiritual answer and say, yes, we’re supposed to love them anyway. From just a natural standpoint, somebody comes and makes it clear that they hate me and everything I am and everything I stand for, probably not going to want to have a lot to do with that person.

That’s what we in our sin do to God. That’s our approach toward God. There is no earthly reason why God should love us when we are in that state of rebellion, and yet He does.

And so it can’t be because we’re so lovable. It has to be because it’s in His nature to love us, where it says in verse 8, God is love. Now, He still calls our sin, sin, because it says in verse 10 that Jesus came to be the propitiation for our sins.

He came to be the payment. He came to bear the punishment. The reason He had to do that is because sin is still a problem for God.

God doesn’t just look at us and say, I love you, so whatever you want to do is fine with me. You just go crazy. Don’t ever think that God’s love means He’s just okay with our sin.

The good news, though, is that despite our sin, He loves us enough to take care of the payment for it Himself. And so once we grasp that idea of biblical love, once we grasp the fact that we had rebelled against a holy God, that He offered us everything and we turned around and basically spit in His face, rejected everything about Him, turned our backs on Him, and He loved us anyway and provided the payment. At the cost of Jesus Christ in His life, God provided the payment so that we could be forgiven of those very sins that separated us from Him.

God did everything that was necessary to win us back in spite of what we deserved. When we grasp that idea, when we understand what He did for us, then we begin to understand the beauty of what He did for us and not just what He felt for us. See, His love was on display in actions.

Not just warm, fuzzy feelings, but in the way He sacrificed for us in spite of our sin. It had nothing to do with how lovable we were or what we had earned. It had everything to do with who He is by His very nature.

And my hope for each person hearing this this morning is that we will understand that’s what love is. And if you’re thinking, well, that’s a tall order, you’re absolutely right. We’re being called to love people in a way that only God can love.

Now the only way we can do that is for God to love them through us. But when we understand what it means that He loves us, in spite of what we’ve done, in spite of who we are, He was willing to sacrifice so much so that we could be reconciled. When we understand that, we understand love in a whole new way.

And there are churches across this country, across the Western world, that are teaching a view of the love of God that just says you can do whatever you want. And I know they’re out there because I saw one of them on Facebook this morning. Oh, the Bible doesn’t mean that.

God’s love means you can do whatever you want. No. Not only is it wrong, not only is that incorrect, but I feel bad for them because they’re missing out on the beauty of what God’s love really is.

That’s just a weak, hand-wringing, warm, fuzzy thing that doesn’t change anybody’s life. The love of God demonstrated at the cross transform sinners into sons and daughters of God. When we understand it, when we understand it, it’ll change our lives and it’ll change the way we relate to others.

Because the challenge here is that God calls us to love in the same way. As I said, we can’t do that on our own. He has to do it through us.

But it’s something He puts in us as His children, the capacity to do. Loving like God demonstrates that we belong to Him is what it teaches in verses 7 and 8. It says, Beloved, let us love one another in verse 7, for love is of God and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.

The only way that you and I can live agape, that we can live this unconditional, self-sacrificial love, the only way that we can love like that is if we’ve been born again through Him, if we’re walking in Him and we’re letting Him love others through us. Everyone who is born of God, everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. It’s not saying we go out and try to be loving and that’s how we’re born of God.

He says that’s the evidence. That’s how it’ll show up. Sort of like when somebody’s adopted nowadays, part of the evidence they’ve been adopted is that their name changes in a great many cases.

They take on the person’s last name. There’s some kind of change there. They come into that home, they eat the food that person eats, that family eats, they do things that family’s way.

Part of the evidence that we’ve been adopted into God’s family, that we are reborn into Him, is that we’ll start to love the way He loves. And that doesn’t mean we’re going to do it perfectly all the time. You’ve heard enough stories to know I still wrestle with this, especially in traffic.

I live in fear of the day that I run across one of you on the turnpike, and I end up just gritting my teeth and gripping the steering wheel and mouthing, and then I realize it’s one of y’all, and I have to apologize for that. It doesn’t mean we’re going to do this perfectly all the time, but it means God puts in us a capacity to do this that we wouldn’t have otherwise. And people who do not love this way at all, they demonstrate that they don’t know Him.

Verse 8 says, He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. And again, I don’t think that, as with so many things in 1 John, I think this is talking about the overall pattern of somebody’s life. Not that they do it perfectly every time.

This is not saying that if you had an incident where you weren’t loving like God, it means you don’t belong to Him. I tend to think this is talking about some of the people I’ve met in church that I’ve heard older Christians describe as that lady is meaner than a snake. Some of the most wonderful loving people I’ve met in my life have been in church and some of the meanest, most miserable people I’ve ever met in my life have been in church.

Not this church, but we don’t have that problem. Just because you’re in church doesn’t mean you truly belong to the Lord. And I can look back over my life and see some people that I think, I never once saw them act like they loved anybody.

He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. And so he tells us that loving like God should be our goal. As believers, as children of God, loving like Him should be our goal. Not to go out there and be warm and fuzzy toward everybody. Not to go out and approve of what everybody’s doing.

But to be willing to sacrifice. To be willing to invest our time, our resources, whatever it is. To be willing to sacrifice those things for people.

with the ultimate goal of them knowing the same reconciliation with God that we know, so that they can move closer to the God who created them and loves them and gave His only Son for them. If God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. We ought to be willing to sacrifice for others so that they can know Jesus, so that they can know the love of God, so that they can understand.

Part of that means being willing to sacrifice our time and our embarrassment to be willing to open our mouths and lovingly share the truth with people of what Jesus has done for them. Part of it means being willing to give to support missions. We sacrifice in those ways so people can go and tell.

Sometimes it means our time. Put aside what you’re doing for just a moment. This is hard for me.

I feel like I’ve got more things to do than hours in the day. A lot of you are the same way. But sometimes God calls us to sacrifice what we’re doing and what we think we need to get done to go and demonstrate His love to other people.

But love involves sacrifice. And the goal here is for everybody to know that Jesus Christ sacrificed the highest possible amount for them. That while we were sinners, Jesus Christ came to earth, suffered, bled, and died on the cross to pay for our sins in full, and rose again to prove it three days later so that we could be forgiven.

And now God offers forgiveness and salvation that He doesn’t owe us, but that He offers because He is loving, because He is love. He offers it if we’ll simply believe, if we’ll put our trust in Jesus Christ. If we’ll stop trusting in our goodness to get us to heaven, we’ll stop trusting in our church attendance, our church affiliation, we’ll stop trusting in anything else and simply trust in what Jesus Christ did and ask God’s forgiveness because of what Jesus did. Then we’ll have that salvation He promised.